#100volteCONI
Mille cinguettii per 100 anni di CONI
Gianni Bondini
Absolutely Free Editore, 2014, 175p.
The Italian Olympic Committee (CONI) celebrated this year 100 years and Gianni Bondini wanted to retrace this period with a current style. “To flash” writes himself like Twitter but without respecting the rule of 140 characters, too few to make himself understood. But the purpose was this: to attract young people, the people of social networks to our sport history. The first two chapters cover the 400 years prior to the CONI foundation and we discover, for example, that football in 1400 was a combat sport with two teams of 27 players and 6 referees for a game that could have a duration of a day. That the challenge of Barletta in 1503 can be considered as a team competition. Or that in 1423, Vittorino da Feltre organized a university campus where the rich young men studied and practiced sport, because “the mind develops in harmony with the body.” While in 1519, is published in Venice the “Encyclopedia of exercise” and the United States to cancel the traditional British rugby turns it in American football and cricket in baseball. But these are just some of the valuable information that we find in the 11 chapters, presented more in a few lines, never more than 10/12. Bondini produces a repetition knowledge probably known only by sports historians and ignored by the multitude of coaches and managers. Who knows for example that the newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport was published initially on Mondays and Fridays on green paper and yellow to stand out, while from January 2, 1899 comes in pink. Anyone complains today that athletes are often left alone, he’s right if you think with the mind of today, but we may find out that it was much worse before. At first Olympic Games in Athens , officially did not attend any Italian. It is not true. Carlo Airoldi came on foot from Milan, 1338 km, but he did not compete in the marathon because in a race won 2 Italian Lire and for this reason he could not be called as amateur. Of doping it was spoken in 1904 for the Games in Saint Louis, derived from the English word “dope,” which describes a stimulating drink for the horses. I could go on with many other news, the book is full of them, that we can read with great pleasure, because tweets are written with a great sense of humor. I want to conclude by saying that it’s a book of culture, it tells what was and what is now the sport organized by CONI. It ‘s a book stimulating curiosity and more knowledge as tweets do not allow in-depth and not surprisingly, the first Twitter of the book is entitled: #Buy sports books. These are the words that Giulio Onesti said the March 8, 1948 offering of his own pocket 80,000 Lire to the National Sporting Library.
