The hand of Aurelius

On the evening of August 21, 2004, after a friendly with the amateurs of Monte Amiata, the man who felt like Achille Lauro ordered the team to move to the castle of Torre Alfina to celebrate. He still had in his ears the chants of the fans cheering him: “Let us dream, Luciano let us dream” and in his eyes the photo of the flag with the scudetto on a blue background published by the newspapers that portrayed him behind the balustrades of the San Paolo involuntarily slimmed down his figure. An illusion, like everything else. Having sweated through the summer between a visit to Gianni Letta, a crowd bath and an intervention by President Ciampi: “Let's do everything to help Napoli, respecting the rules” Mr. Gaucci, convinced that he had taken over a technically failed Napoli at a reasonable price, felt he could take a break. He wanted to toast with Aldo Adorno, a Paraguayan meteor who later emigrated to Cyprus, with the coach Angelo Gregucci, with the midfielder Gerardo Schettino from Vico Equense and with his other ragtag Valmy. He wanted to relax while admiring the spires of his mansion between Umbria and Tuscany while waiting to be able to add another property to Catania, Sambenedettese and Perugia. Pending the infernal interlocking of attributions and powers, fratricidal struggles, embarrassments and brawls between the government, courts and the Football Federation, persuaded with some reason that fiction, in a country inclined to theatrical gestures, was worth more than reality, Gaucci the situationist, the patriotic president who had declared the South Korean Ahn, "guilty" of having thrown us out of the World Cup, persona non grata live on TV by Biscardi: "I will not re-bought him! He is not a person who behaved well having seen white bread for the first time in Italy", had occupied the scene and sent a bunch of unknown boys to a grotesque retreat in Tarvisio and then, at the end of July, cobbled together a barely more presentable formation and placed it in a three-star hotel in Abbadia San Salvatore while waiting for someone to decide at which station Napoli should stop.

Lucianone seemed able to control the situation. Confused, because the team was dancing between restarting in the third division, thanks to the Petrucci ruling that in the event of financial failure allowed the team to retain the sports title by moving down a category, the demand to retain the B series, the street protests and the definitive disappearance. Agitated because the north wind of the northern newspapers was blowing impetuously: "Napoli has cost the inhabitants of the peninsula, including infants and octogenarians, a thousand lire each. It has not paid 60 billion lire in taxes. That's enough for the state to seize even the last blade of grass of the San Paolo". Florida, in short, because in the traffic of life and chaos, the former bus driver Gaucci Luciano knew how to drive like no one else. He sought the press like a thirsty man craves water: "I want Napoli in B to take it to A, this great force cannot disappear because its love for football is immense". He publicly evoked pre-insurrectional scenarios: “I am not asking you to march on Rome, but we will defend our rights.” He titillated megalomania and identity metaphors: “I am like Vesuvius.” He promised exotic purchases: “I will bring a Brazilian and why not, even an Argentine.”

He gave bouquets of flowers to the mayor Rosa Russo Iervolino. Committed to the historic compromise: "I am not a fool, I have excellent relations with Capitalia and with Cesare Geronzi", exactly halfway between bread and roses, he did not see the leading actor arrive, the star who would have prepared the banquet, the rival who would not have left him even the leftovers of the last supper.

Aurelio De Laurentiis had never looked at football . As a boy he played basketball, thought about girls and cars: “I was born in '49, the year Ponti-De Laurentiis was founded at Vasca Navale. I grew up there, I was passionate about engines and when I arrived everyone hid the keys because I would get in and start the engine. Once I destroyed Lizzani's car” and he did his apprenticeship on the sets of Nanni Loy, getting up at 4 in the morning. More or less the same time Dino, his father Luigi's brother, was born. A lover of casinos, a fine esotericist, an entrepreneur in the paper mills, passionate about philosophy, inventor of magazines for poets, a highly cultured polyglot and a film producer in adulthood, Professor Luigi De Laurentiis, initiated into the profession by Dino, had in turn passed on his knowledge to Aurelio. Because that's how dynasties are made and because the true talent that the De Laurentiis have never lacked is determination. If you can imagine it, you can do it.

After September 8, Dino fled south with Mario Soldati: “A mule track to Rocca Pia. Scattered rocks and low bushes. We climb in silence. I look at these boys who come with us and who will go like this, on foot, and in silence, to Calabria and Sicily. In their hearts they have the destination, the home, and the unreasoned, inarticulate sadness of those who have been deceived and betrayed.” The Napoli fans who went to war with the police, filled the door of Franco Carraro’s car with eggs, opposed the “system” and threatened to besiege Palazzo Chigi harbored the same sentiment. Frightened, they had clung to Gaucci, filling the San Paolo with forty thousand people in the night that with relative fantasy they had christened “of Neapolitan pride”, they had watched the shadows of Paolo De Luca and Giampaolo Pozzo, the virtual competitors, evaporate in the heat and just when the tiredness for the quarrel seemed to have clogged the courts, made the mess a Gordian knot and definitively taken over by declaring Gauccione the winner by consumption, from Capri, Aurelio De Laurentiis had made his voice heard, with a statesmanlike attitude, clarity of purpose and inevitable rhetoric: “I am firmly convinced that the recovery of Italy also passes through huge investments in the South which has unexpressed and gigantic potential. There is no doubt that the city of Naples deserves care and represents the maximum expression of the South. We must work in a modern way and with perseverance. Calcio Napoli could happily promote the best side of this corner of Italy so ignored and mistreated”.

On the same island, inspired by the Faraglioni, Soldati and Dino resold ginger ales filled with salt water to American soldiers for a dollar. Aurelio deceived no one. In ten days in which he repeatedly threatened to blow up the deal, watched disinterestedly at some demonstrations of dissent, silenced his lawyers who wanted him to withdraw the offer, he took over Napoli. Despite bankers like Alessandro Profumo trying to dissuade him, despite his wife Jacqueline Baudit, 43 years of marriage, Swiss passport, Agnellian R, now vice president of the team, derogating elegance and extemporaneously calling him crazy if not worse, despite the risk and indeed, perhaps, precisely because of it. The idea came to him while he was convalescing. He had problems with his meniscus, as often happens to boys in underwear that he was about to pay, and he moved his leg to take the first step of a twenty-one year journey. It's not so much surviving. And not even by winning. It is resisting, in an unlikely circus inhabited by fake sheiks, charlatans and mythomaniacs, giving the kind audience a notable lesson in entrepreneurship and a constant, tireless and never-tamed spectacle of varied art. Aurelio who tells his fellow presidents to go fuck themselves and jumps on the scooter of the first centaur who passes by, leaving in front of the camera, on the Lombard soil of a Milanese reunion, fragments that Carmelo Bene would have liked: “You are dickheads, okay? I want to go back to making movies, you are shit”. Aurelio who calls Higuain a big-ass: “He has a kilo and a half more that works like a brick”. Aurelio who disagrees with Philip Roth's “we did what we could with what we had” and shows that he wants to go further: “The San Paolo is a dump”. Aurelio who, stern but fair, tells the pure truth to a journalist who asks him if he feels like promising the championship. A soft and conciliatory start with persuasive tones: “As for the promise, I can say that we will work hard to get the most”, a theatrical pause and a crescendo finale. A classic of Delaurentisian dialectics: “I’ll tell you the truth, you’ve already won because twelve years ago you were in shit. You were swimming in shit twelve years ago, I’ll tell you that”.

Maybe we should really thank him, as the fans actually hoped they would one day many years ago, Aurelio De Laurentiis. The bad guy in the saloon, the one who ruins the party, Aurelio the pain in the ass: “I’m actually a romantic. A director once asked my father: ‘But why is Aurelio always pissed off, unpleasant, tough?’. ‘You see, you don’t understand that when Aurelio tells someone to go fuck themselves, they come true’. I was eavesdropping behind the door. I went in, hugged dad and kissed him”. With Naples and the Neapolitans, historically unruly, it happened often. Kissing and telling each other to go fuck themselves. They called him a pimp. They chanted against him: “Only you win”. It was the most defamatory of lies, but time is a gentleman. Protesters are no longer found even at a high price, even if in a game where if you win you are a prophet and if you lose they regularly call you incompetent if not downright idiot, in a spin of the wheel where glory lasts only a moment, it is always possible that they will reappear. Aurelio De Laurentiis will still be there. He grew up in the cinema. The place of waiting. When Marcello Mastroianni hears strange noises coming from one of the campers leaning on the edge of a set set in Morocco he opens the door and finds himself in front of little Andrea Rizzoli. They scrutinize each other in silence. Then Marcello traces the furrow: "Kid, cinema is waiting". Aurelio knew how to do it. He was president of Naples for more than a quarter of his life. Looking at numbers and percentages, trifles in which he is a master, he has spent twenty-seven point sixty-three percent of his existence between League meetings, agents, treacherous footballers, eternal oaths, sudden betrayals, bureaucratic immobility and cameras. His team has just won its second championship in just three seasons. In the last seven decades only Inter, Milan and Juventus had managed to do so. Roma, between purchases and investments, cost Dan Friedkin just under a billion euros, Redbird showered Milan with 825 million, Mr. Krause, in Parma, paid out more than 440. Aurelio De Laurentiis spent less than Saverio Sticchi Damiani of Lecce. Sixteen million in twenty-one years. Cashing in three and a half billion in revenues with monstrous capital gains born from an undeniable instinct in finding, even in Georgia, champions like Kvaratskhelia who have escaped the radar of magnates who are certainly richer than Dela, but lazy, inattentive and fallacious in electing collaborators. Aurelio knows how to do it. He delegates little, he decides and when he makes a mistake he also knows why. In the complex alchemy between nature and feeling, rationality and instinct, every now and then Aurelio loses his coordinates. The Napolista, a place full of intelligence applied to football, in these years with the happy pen of Massimiliano Gallo has painted without discounts its changing character, asperities and contradictions. But he praised him, when his qualities were deserved, highlighting a quality that in the superficial reading of the tightrope walker, in the concession to color rather than substance, underestimates that to get on the trapeze you need preparation. Aurelio did not know the rules of the game and got into character.

Aurelio practices his moves and never jumps by chance. Aurelio can be unbearable, but he is anything but foolish. He has argued with many coaches because the emotional cost is intense, the stage is narrow, egos challenge each other in single combat and the wear and tear is inherent in the risk of the enterprise. But he knows how to change his mind and, if necessary, also towards destiny. He doesn't like the word. Man, it wouldn't even be useful to underline, is always the architect of his own. And Aurelio also reminds those he loves.

When they find Costanzo's name on the P2 lists, Maurizio suddenly contracts leprosy. His associates disappear. Those who have been miraculously cured turn their backs. People run away. De Laurentiis looks for him, consoles him and supports him: "Who helped me resurface? A great friend of mine, Aurelio De Laurentiis, who suggested I take a television trip with love as its theme. I left with a small crew. The experience comforted me. I went to the squares of the deep province and no one reproached me for anything. No one said a damn thing to me. I understood that they had understood and that they were telling me: 'Let's move forward'". Aurelio has always done this. In Naples, when he arrives for the first time, there aren't even shirts and balls. Aurelio not only buys them and faces his rearguard championships facing Massese and Gela: "I walked around fields where they spat on my head and I had to barricade myself in the locker room for hours at the end of the game. It was fun and it represented a school of life to understand football and territoriality", but he builds his citadel starting to cut bridges, even culturally, with the encrusted perks of the past. The free tickets, the favors owed, the greasy representations of power that takes its hat off to another power on the main street so that everything remains leopard-like still. Aurelio doesn't care about the microcosm in which, as Paolo Sorrentino writes, "as you move, you always bump into the same people you've known since you were born". A little bit he doesn't know it. A little bit it horrifies him. He may have ancestors in the region, but he comes from Rome and of what has been there before, he makes a clean sweep. At the cinema, he was used to it like that. A set is assembled and then dismantled, but a boss, a director of works, someone who indicates the line, is needed. And if the line deviates from the path, kicks are also needed. Jerry Calà remembers that Aurelio experimented with the material firsthand: “We were young, reckless. In the evening we had dinner together and in the morning after partying it was hard to be on time. They came looking for us and it didn’t always end with a pat on the back. One night in a club I fell asleep after drinking the Grolla dell’amicizia, an eighty-degree poison, and I slipped under the table. The owner had locked me in. Early in the morning the first thing I heard were De Laurentiis’s insults: he lifted me off the ground and carried me to the set by my ears”.

In the end, in all conscience, how much can you really change? The De Laurentiis that fans knew at the dawn of his Neapolitan adventure is not that different from the one he is today. He was convinced, even then, that there is no area that cannot be improved: "My first goal is to bring joy back to the San Paolo: I promise fun football, like my films at the cinema. Enough talk, it's time for seriousness and facts. My model will be Della Valle. I want to create an organized company. Haste is for the stupid. We have all the time we need: it's time for concreteness, the hubbub is over". If, as Giorgio Manganelli writes, the novel is nothing more than "an extended anecdote", the story of De Laurentiis in Naples resembles a book that it would be a shame to read from the last page. If you open it from the beginning, you discover that Aurelio wrote it exactly as he wanted. To see where you're arriving, it's not idle to ask yourself where you want to go. By the time he had placed the whip in the expert hands of the Vanzina brothers to force Italians to mirror themselves in their voluptuous wickedness, Aurelio had already understood everything. Carlo remembered that at the Roman premiere of “Sapore di mare” Aurelio had almost yanked him out of enthusiasm: “He was sitting in the theater. He jumped up and came over to us: 'It's a masterpiece, come to lunch with me tomorrow because I want you to shoot a film about snow'. We signed the contract for “Vacanze di Natale” on a napkin”. The Vanzina brothers' father, Steno, had also used the expedient when, meeting Alberto Sordi to hire him in Piazza del Popolo, he had asked him how much he wanted to act in “An American in Rome”. Sordi had written a figure on the tablecloth, Steno had nodded and they had shaken hands. Years later, on another convivial occasion, Steno approached Sordi and confessed: “Do you know that that day, if you had asked me five times as much, I would have obliged?”. Sordi smiled half-heartedly. De Laurentiis, in his place, would have turned the story to his advantage or, in the worst case scenario, denied the circumstance first and foremost to himself.

Aurelio's first rule is to forget the ugly, the joke or the missed opportunity to give space to a vision that highlights its opposite. The second is to consider the good manners that ratify the status quo a synonym of hypocrisy. If he has to say what he doesn't think, Aurelio prefers to remain silent. This almost never happens, because Aurelio doesn't mind desacralizing. When a boy from Rete 8, the main television station in Abruzzo, arrives to ask him and the regional president Marco Marsilio to comment on the partnership that in August showcases the Italian champions in Castel di Sangro, the first to speak is Marsilio. They ask him about Rita De Crescenzo. De Laurentiis is a little nervous and a little bored. He knows where this is going and has no intention of tolerating it. He has big dark glasses like a Chilean gendarme, struggles not to yawn, and looks around slyly in search of an escape route. Then, just like a memorable Verdonian character: “I'm not a saint either”, convinced that he has atoned enough, he transforms into that genius Max Giusti. His voice breaks out, his hand takes hold of the microphone and Aurelio unleashes the counterattack that from his point of view embodies the ideal tennis trinity: game, match, encounter. “Can I ask you a question? How old are you?”. The other, cautious: “Twenty-five”. He has just raised the ball to him and Aurelio has chosen the smash: “There and you, at twenty-five, why do you belong to those stale and old televisions that only want to break our balls and always have to talk about things that don't work instead of those things that can work in Italy?”. Aurelio's soliloquy is like Lucio Dalla's ocean: you can't stop it and you can't fence it in: "If Italy is doing badly, it's also your fault. When I have dinner in the evening and watch the news about the disaster, I touch my balls. But you can't piss off Italians by making news programs full of bad news, you have to be the optimists, if you're not, you who are young, who the fuck is supposed to be?" The unfortunate guy chirps: "We bring news, then whether it's good or bad depends on what happens", but Aurelio is already far away, on the chariot: "No, by doing that you bring bad luck and one touches his balls". Of the adopted press release from the Abruzzo Journalists' Union: "In the face of an act of dialectical bullying aimed at an information worker there is nothing to laugh about" he only hears the distant echo. Enrico Lucherini had nicknamed him "Moments of arrogance". A certain way of not appearing has never created a problem for De Laurentiis, but even though he was born on May 24, he only went to war if he was convinced he was right. Before criticizing international institutions: “FIFA and UEFA operate in a dominant position and no one tells them anything” and placing Napoli among the top thirty teams in the world, he tried to guess whether passion could transform into a project. “65,000 people came to the first match against Cittadella at the San Paolo”. Sixty-five thousand hearts orphaned by Maradona who, if Aurelio had had at his disposal, perhaps would have written a different parable from the one Diego was worrying about with Kusturica: “Emir, do you know what kind of player I would have been if I hadn’t done cocaine? What a footballer we’ve lost”. Aurelio would have defended the man and the investment because, even though he rewrote Lotito's delicate distinction between "entrepreneurs and magnagers" in his own way, he was in full agreement with his colleague: "There are entrepreneurs who want to start a business and there are takers who want to gain traction". And he would have defended him, El pibe, because love, when it's there, can't be explained. Diego was loved and Aurelio would have taken the fact into due consideration: "I've always known how to interpret the public's tastes". In Naples, the paying one, he wanted Antonio Conte's confirmation. No one would have bet a cent on it and instead, Conte is still there. On the seat that in previous times belonged to Bianchi and that with Aurelio went to names like Reja, Benitez, Gattuso, Sarri and Ancelotti. Enzo Biagi swore that if Berlusconi had had tits he would have been an announcer. De Laurentiis, who does not disdain self-esteem and as Neri Parenti had the opportunity to testify, does not always embrace with conviction the sense of limit – “We had already shot more than half of 'Christmas in New York' and we were about to embark from Fiumicino towards the United States. It was September 11th. The day of the attack on the Twin Towers. We did not leave, but Aurelio did not want to give up. 'In a few days everything will be fine, I assure you'. The actors were doubtful. 'What do you know? Have you spoken to Bin Laden?'. 'Not yet. Renata, look for Mr. Bin Laden right away', he ordered the secretary who did not bat an eyelid. 'Of course, doctor, I'll leave a message in case'” – he has never suggested a formation in his life. He fired coaches and sports directors, fined the entire squad, and showed legends who were considered untouchable the door: “If Callejon and Mertens want to go and sell out in China because they are overpaid and are willing to spend two or three years of shit, the problem is theirs”. He did this and much more, but despite flooding during a storm, he managed to keep the river within its banks and the boat on course. Now he is enjoying the plebiscite and apotheosis, vowing that the wedding, no matter what happens, will be without a date. “As long as I am breathing, I will try to keep Napoli alive. Then, when I am no longer here, if my children want to sell it, they will. I have already turned down 900 million. I wouldn’t sell Napoli even for two and a half billion euros. Football is identified with the city, with a people, with an idea”.

Aurelio the superstitious, the president who hates purple and believes in evil eyes and envy, who keeps a meter-long horn behind his desk and wanted to shoot the interiors of “Christmas on the Nile” in Madrid only because the previous film had done well in Spain, has also put superstition in the undifferentiated waste. He keeps it like a knick-knack, essential for remembering how one was and what one has become. At a certain point in life, maturing means stripping away one’s habits and coming to terms with what is on the table. Aurelio, who had his lawyers include seemingly bizarre clauses in film contracts – “The work is to be considered valid if at least three roars occur in the theater during the screening” – knows that Napoli’s film has received more applause than even the most optimistic of optimists, Aurelio himself, could have ever predicted.

At ninety, Dino De Laurentiis, after having made cinema history, had no desire to leave: “If I abandoned myself to retirement and stayed in an armchair I would die immediately. For me the rule of the three Cs always applies. You need brains, heart and balls. If they are there, you can go on”. It seems like reading Patrizia Cavalli: “It's all so simple / it's such evidence / that I almost don't believe it. That's what the body is for / you touch me or you don't touch me / you hug me or you push me away / the rest is for crazy people”. Aurelio, all brilliantine and courage, is made of the same stuff as Dino. Only the nephew knows the uncle and there is no need to say it.

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