Let’s reflect for a moment on a hypothesis, as fascinating as it is poignant: What if that tragic episode had never happened? What if that group of promising young footballers hadn’t taken the flight to Lisbon? What if the airplane had never met the Superga hill on May 4th 75 years ago? What if the famous Invincibles team hadn’t vanished in an instant? This is the theme at the center of the story of Guglielmo Gabetto, the acrobatic striker of the Great Turinthe creator of unimaginable goals, who offers us an intense reflection on our life choices, representing this alternative perspective with “vivid words”.
It is precisely the voice of Guglielmo Gabetto, the Turin hero, that immerses the reader in an atmosphere of extraordinary eventuality. This is what comes from the acute thoughts of two Granata authors, among whom it stands out the figure of the son of the great Gabetto. Citing with profound emotion and irony the impossible and the probable, reality and imagination, they construct pages of daring imagination that invite us to reflect on the unpredictable intersections of our existences, on the random decisions that each of us takes and which could lead to a turning point our lives in one direction or another.
The story of “If an angel in Lisbon” (Neos, 15 euros) stands as a tribute to the memory “of men who were not only champions, but embodied for the entire nation the hope of rebirth, the desire for recovery after the material and spiritual ruins sown by the Second World War which had reduced our country to knee. In a time when the victories of Valentino Mazzola, Guglielmo Gabetto, Franco Ossola and his companions were celebrated throughout Italy, which is why today we still daydream. If only they hadn’t taken that plane” as journalist Beppe Gandolfo says in the preface.
Two authors also come to the fore, Orazio Di Mauro, born in Turin in 1949, graduated in Engineering and teacher of physics in high schools, who in addition to his commitment to scientific dissemination and teaching, has spent part of his life for the ecological movement, writing scientific and theatrical texts and collaborating to magazines, already author of “Red Direct”, again for Neos. Next to him, there is Sergio Gabetto, born in Turin in 1947 and son of Guglielmo, a Grande Torino footballer who died in the Superga tragedy. Alongside his teaching activity as a teacher and university assistant at the Faculty of Physics of Turin, he combined a career in amateur football, founding the Gabetto Football School together with his brother Gigi, an incubator of footballing talents. He spent more than twenty years in Cuba and Central and South America looking for promising young footballers.
