Superga 75 years since the Grande Torino tragedy

Journalist

May 4, 2024 (changed at 07:45) – MILAN

The silence, the sky becoming dark, the crowd. Immense. Five hundred thousand people, maybe more. It was May 6, 1949, a Friday. Turin stopped, Italy stopped. The funerals of the victims of the Superga tragedy took place in the late afternoon. In the crash two days earlier, against the embankment of the Basilica on the hill overlooking the city, one of the strongest teams ever seen on a football field, the Granata, lost their lives, together with their companions, three journalists and members of the crew of the G-212 three-engined aircraft of the Avio Linee Italiane. Thirty-one dead. In order to be followed by as many people as possible, the funeral procession had made a very long circuit. The coffins had left Palazzo Madama and, once loaded onto some trucks, had taken Via Roma, crossed Piazza San Carlo, reached Piazza Carlo Felice, turned onto Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, taken Corso Re Umberto, Via Alfieri, Piazza San Giovanni and finally they arrived in front of the Cathedral. A million eyes planted on that route, and all the other streets deserted. At the moment of the blessing the façade of the cathedral had lost all its light, it was pale, and so was the entire square. It was hard to see. Like two days before, in the air.

Turin, a team of champions

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The heroes are all young and beautiful, Guccini sang. Anyone who has exalted the crowds and dies, suddenly and so tragically, automatically turns into a legend. The disappearance crystallizes the beauty of the gestures, the cleanliness of the behaviors, avoids the downward parable and the inevitable aging, which does not always turn out to be happy. But sometimes the transformation is not necessary, because the legend has already been underway for a while. That Turin had practically won its fifth consecutive scudetto, they played wonderful football and nothing like it had been seen in Italy before then. It was a team born a long time ago, since Ferruccio Novo became president in the summer of 1939 and began to build the group, piece by piece. He had done it together with Roberto Copernico, owner of a clothing store in the city and trusted advisor. The pieces had fallen into place as planned, and at a certain point the unbeatables emerged. Bacigalupo was a gentleman goalkeeper, who had quickly digested the bitterness of an Italy-Hungary match in 1947 in which 10 players from Toro took the field wearing the blue shirt and, between the posts, Sentimenti IV from Juve.

The full-backs were Ballarin, physically strong, and Maroso, with class like few others. The Granata played with the “system”, i.e. the WM (where W and M represent the way in which the players were placed on the pitch), and therefore in front of the full-backs there were the classic Grezar on one side and the effective Castigliano on the other , with Rigamonti in the middle who, going from exuberant to tidy, solved the problem of the centre-half. In attack, from right to left, Menti (winger with a great shot), Loik (what was then called a struggling midfielder), Gabetto (centre forward who moved a lot but scored just as much), Valentino Mazzola (the absolute champion, captain and phenomenon across the board) and finally Ossola, the most technical and perhaps the one who would have best adapted to today’s football, rich in tactics and schemes. The reserves were also special: Tomà (the deputy Maroso), Martelli (in the role of Grezar), Fadini (class midfielder) and then up front the Frenchman Bongiorni, Grava and Schubert, a Romanian born in Budapest. Over the years, several people coached them: Antonio Janni, Luigi Ferrero, Mario Sperone and then the Englishman Leslie Lievesley supported as technical director by the Hungarian Egri Erbstein, who had held that role since 1943.

the sleeves of mazzola

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They won a lot but without any particular secrets. They relied on the strength of simplicity, they were tough on the pitch and they got along well off it. The city loved and respected them but without idolizing them: Ossola and Gabetto owned a bar in the center and when they weren’t training they spent the hours with the customers. At that time, the aristocratic and somewhat tightrope walking team remained Juventus, while Toro represented the concrete and winning solidity. So much so that during the War, to avoid deportation to the war industries in Germany, the Granatas were classified as employees of Fiat – which produced small cars – while the Bianconeri ended up with Cisitalia, which created design models. There are all those stories – true by the way – about the ten minutes in which they decided to win the matches, about the railway worker Bolmida who played the trumpet and then Mazzola rolled up his sleeves and the fate of the match changed. But there is no need to exaggerate with the rhetoric, talent and athletic skills were recognized by everyone. Boniperti, the most Juventus man ever, said: “What was Mazzola? He was the man who materialized, during a derby, on the line of his goal to stop with his heel a ball that I had kicked without fail and had now made me shout for the goal, and a few seconds later, while disappointed I returned to midfield and raised his head bowed in disappointment, he scored a goal in the other goal”. It was a group of great athletes who became champions, but they remained good people who had emerged from the War. Admired in Italy because that team, with its exploits, made everyone live again. And instead she, suddenly, died.

the faulty altimeter

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At 5.02pm on Wednesday 4 May the crew called the control tower in Turin for the last time. The pilot – whose surname was Meroni, to show how the history of the Granata is full of recurrences of destiny – was planning to turn the bow 290 degrees to align himself on the landing strip. But the strong southwest wind had shifted the plane’s route and the broken altimeter read 2000 meters when the G-212 was actually traveling at 600. Suddenly, from the fog mixed with rain, the basilica emerged. At 5.05pm the control tower called the crew. There was no response.