You say Gianluigi Buffon and you can’t think of the mythical Parma capable of hoarding trophies in Europe and in Italy, conquering an entire city whose team even came close to winning the scudetto. The former goalkeeper, in a long interview with 12 TVParmaretraced his years in gialloblù.
Buffon: “The Tardini was a special theater in my life and career”
“My first memory of Tardini is from the summer of ’91, when I came to sign the first contract for the Giovanissimi Provinciali. The stadium for me is like a sacred temple and when I saw it I thought that even just two minutes in this at the Tardini would have been a dream. Then I spent many minutes, we gained several satisfactions – he said -. Beyond the stadium and the sporting aspect, the beautiful thing about Parma and the relationship with the city is the ancestral thing that has been created, this gut bond with the people of Parma. It’s the most beautiful thing I carry inside me. The Tardini was a special theater in my life and career, in which there were incredible stages. Thinking about where Parma started with Ceresini in Serie C and seeing where they have arrived in just a few years, it is a journey that no one has done. Like all things, people get used to it, inevitably that beauty and that healthy fervor when I was a boy in the first two years I played, then faded a bit. One gets used to it and takes things for granted and then when we didn’t win the scudetto it was a failure. This is a shame, you are experiencing something special and should be experienced to its fullest depth. I’m not the one who should define myself as an adopted Parmesan, but I think that, I don’t know why, when I entered the pitch people perceived that, in addition to doing my duty, I was putting something different into the match, which was my soul. I put this soul into it because I felt like an integral part of this city. For me it was really exciting to be able to play for Parma and be able to make these people happy, giving them dreams and hopes, even though we were not a metropolitan city. We played against the bigger ones, like David against Goliath“.
