The jacket sewn over the parka
“There are songs and songs, of course. I could have looked through the lyrics of Bob Dylan or John Lennon, perhaps (why not) of Nomadi or Banco del Mutuo Soccorso, but instead at a certain point I remembered that cassette tape by Enzo Ghinazzi, now dusty, locked inside the drawer of a terrible piece of kitchen furniture that ended up in the usual oblivion of condominium garages together with other useless stuff that would make even the most hardened second-hand dealer frown. This is what Simone Galeotti writes in the article “In the name of Dino”. “Ghinazzi who?, most of you might say, and how can you not understand. The Ghinazzi in question is Pupo, yes, Pupo, and even I who grew up with Led Zeppelin tend to jump a little. The fact is that the title and the first verse of a song by this miniature Tuscan native of Ponticino fall perfectly on the incipit of this story, because his Firenze Santa Maria Novella starts like this: ‘The lights off at 2 in the morning, a homeless man with broken shoes passes by” adds Galeotti.
1973-’74-Maceratese-Ancona 1-0 The goal scored with a great header by Dino Pagliari
Pagliari at the time of Ternana
Now, in our case the homeless person was not the classic homeless person understood in a generic sense, that is, the poor homeless destitute forced to live day by day under makeshift shelters by scraping together coins from passers-by. What the French, more refined than us, call homeless, hooking up to the semantic extension of the term deriving from Latinism “clacking”, that is, limping, a condition to which in past centuries the majority of vagabonds were forced, almost always crippled and accompanied by the little dog on duty, the mignon of cognac in the still good pocket of the jacket and the accordion on the shoulders, ready for its brief and melancholy waltz full of sadness. The “our” he was a bum only by foolish bourgeois induction, determined by banal visual association.
Some images of Pagliari in Fiorentina
Of course, those in favor of the stereotype furiously appealed to his whim to present himself with a rich mane of flowing blond curls, united by a thick ascetic fluff, which brought him quite close to those Christs, licked by the dim light of some candles, painted in polyptychs of the old Romanesque basilicas. It is said that he wandered around the slabs at the most unlikely and unusual hours Old Bridge and the polychrome marbles of Giotto’s bell towerwearing a slightly rumpled parka and carrying a gentle hen on a leash. Beard and hair, by his own admission, represented a certain going against the grain but also a hint of aesthetic vanity. The shapeless jacket instead testified without ambivalence to a very specific political struggle, so much so that within the student movement of the time those who wore it generally refused the vote of the academic senate regardless, attending economics lessons in university classrooms. just to avoid finding yourself unable to understand the third book of Capital by Karl Marx. The hen remained a truly eccentric oddity. Let’s be clear, no one has ever had proof of the veracity of this bizarreness, but in the end the image came out as a cursed poet’s rhyme that stuck well to him. In fact they were rumours, rumours; a popular fresco in the wake of an emulative parallelism with the unfortunate Luigi Meroni. Because our homeless man also played football. He played it in the seventies, he years of leadthose of Red Brigades and of the never realized historical compromise between the Communist Party of Enrico Berlinguer and the Christian Democracy of Aldo Moro.
Fiorentina, Pagliari and the stickers
Dino Pagliari was born in Macerata, in the Marche region. Outspoken, loyal, stubborn and sanguine like many men from his homeland, he was a left winger on the pitch and it couldn’t have been any other way. A worker’s winger with few frills, always ready to sacrifice himself for the team, generous when needed, and in that case you could see him return to midfield or even in defense, to lend a hand to his teammates by humbly carrying the bucket everywhere of the wingman. Looking at him closely he was fascinating. With little imagination you could even move him onto the stage of a rock concert in place of Dave Brock of the Hawkwind or the more swampy and progressive ones The Trip by keyboardist Joe Vescovi.
Pagliari and Sella
The public loved Dino Pagliari and “praise be to you…” it became a habitual chorus of the lily curve. Pagliari arrived at Fiorentina in the summer of 1978. It would be more correct to say he returned, since after the Viola club bought him from Maceratese he was sent to Ferrara for a year and a year to Terni to gain experience in the academy, wearing the shirts of Spal respectively and Ternana. And to be honest, he was almost forced to join Serie B with Fiorentina, who managed to avoid relegation with reasonable difficulty in Carletto Mazzone’s last unfortunate championship on the bench. In place of the coach from Trastevere, president Rodolfo Melloni had the former Lazio star Paolo Carosi arrive in Florence, an equally rigid and old-fashioned coach who, at the departure of the bus for the sunny retreat in Massa Marittima, saw Pagliari arrive on board of a broken-down moped Ciao. Yes, precisely the iconic fifty for which you didn’t need a license and which, if properly modified and sprayed with the right amount of mixture, allowed you to reach the astonishing speed of 50 km per hour, not to mention the stories of the usual notable, enthusiastically predisposed daredevils to affirm that, if you aerodynamically squeezed yourself downhill, it was possible to even touch the thrill of 60. And if the chicken on a leash remained a legend, the “Ciaino” by Dino Pagliari it wasn’t at all. Indeed, everyone could see him arriving at the weekly training sessions carried out at the so-called “campini” of Viale Manfredo Fanti aboard the branded scooter Piaggioto then go back up and return to his attic apartment in Piazza Mino in Fiesole, where he lived with his teammate Ezio Sella, a quick and rather shrewd player in front of goal, an extract from the disappointing Fiorentina branded ’77-’78 who arrived thirteenth out of sixteen participants, one step away from break Tarpea marked by the cursed consonant. One day the company forced Pagliari to wear the official jacket to attend office ceremonies and he, as a perfect nonconformist, irreverent and goliardic, had it sewn onto his parka amidst the amused laughter of the people and the nervous muttering of the management. Not just isolated folklore: in Pisa, in recent times, they remember him fondly for the battle undertaken against the sentence of preventive seizure of a social center located in the former city paint factory, making it not a solely ideological issue, but one of civic utility.
Pagliari against Juventus
In Carosi’s new Fiorentina, together with Pagliari and Sella, there was really something good going on, observed from a future perspective: Roberto Galbiati in defence, Giancarlo Antognoni in the middle together with the very young Antonio Di Gennaro and the just twenty-year-old Giovanni Galli between the posts. The season of “Pagliariscatto”, from a journalistic quote, he saw the team come to terms with ups and downs in a quiet mid-table area.
Dino Pagliari coach, at the time of Pisa
Dino Pagliari showed himself to be recalcitrant both in interviews and in appearances in television studios, things in the period objectively small compared to current standards, remaining faithful to his shy style and absolutely refractory to a whole series of statements that contrasted with his ideas. Naturally, he gave the best gift to the Viola fans by scoring against Juve, that Juve that did not yet reveal itself as the much-hated rival of the eighties but still remained the Agnelli family’s club; too successful and with too many likes in the Grand Duchymoreover, so that it remained a good thing to try to make her happy or compromise her path on any occasion. It happened on April 29, 1979, away at Municipal of Turin, when three days before the end of the tournament the big blond head from Pagliari broke away in the Juventus aerial going to put the totem Zoff, equalizing the goal scored by Vinicio Verza and thus taking away from Juventus any residual hope of remaining attached to an already problematic hope of the scudetto. They are satisfactions.
“Praise be to you, Dino Pagliari”.
