Tennis's Holy Week. The Finals in Turin are a showcase for the entire Italian movement.

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The week about to begin in Turin is the Holy Week of Italian tennis, one that unlike others doesn't just put one man, our number 1 , at the center of the world, but the entire tennis system. If throughout the year the Italian tennis scene is Jannik Sinner, during the week of the Nitto ATP Finals in Turin, our entire movement takes to the court, demonstrating our ability to organize an event around our champion. The Finals have become a huge business for those who began investing in tennis before almost all of Italy became dependent on Sinner. It has had significant repercussions for the region, for sponsors, even for scientific research, as you have read. Bringing the Finals to Italy, beating out competition that was no easy feat, was a stroke of genius that even President Binaghi's greatest enemies cannot deny.

But having held the finals for five years wouldn't have been enough if everything hadn't been built around it, as it was in Turin, where an entire city understood the importance of the event and the opportunity to showcase itself, making up, at least for a week, for what was lost by watching Milan and Cortina host the Winter Games. Angelo Binaghi has been president of the Italian Tennis Federation since 2001, the year a beautiful red-haired boy was born in San Candido. If that boy had decided to continue skiing, today we probably wouldn't have only Federica Brignone and Sofia Goggia to dream of an Olympic skiing gold medal. But that boy, at a certain point in his life, chose tennis and found in Italy someone to support him as he grew, preventing him from squandering the talent God had given him. First at home, then with Riccardo Piatti, he found the conditions to begin the journey that led him to become world number one, a position no Italian had ever held before. And while Jannik was growing up, Italian tennis was also reviving around him, and today it boasts a pair of Olympic doubles champions in Errani and Paolini, as well as more players in the top rankings than it has ever had before.

There's so much more behind Sinner. Tathiana Garbin's girls, who won the Billie Jean Cup for the second year in a row, and Volandri's boys, who, even without Sinner, can dream of winning the Davis Cup for the third consecutive year. Italian tennis was ready: when the most beautiful flower bloomed, there was a garden ready to welcome it, not a mass of weeds. Now we must continue to tend to the garden and that flower that the world envies us. He, for his part, has chased away the parasites that were swirling around him after he declined to wear the Italian national team for the Davis Cup final: "I am proud to be Italian, I am very happy to have been born in Italy and not in Austria or elsewhere," he told Federico Ferri, who interviewed him for Sky, "because I have always said, and I repeat it with great honesty, that this country deserves much more, even than what I am doing." The Finals are once again yet another starting point and not a point of arrival.

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