“Do you have any idea what scoring six goals to Avvocato Agnelli means for a South Italy soccer team?”
This is what Diego Armando Maradona asked the filmmaker Emir Kusturica in his famous documentary about the life of the Argentinian. It means that almost thirty years after his last season in Naples, where in seven years everything wins, (two national championships, an Italian Cup, a UEFA Cup and an Italian Super Cup), the iconic image of Pibe de oro is still alive, above all in the heart of that old city which placed him on the altars alongside San Gennaro and consecrated Maradona prophet of himself.
“The Naples public loves me. I want to be Naples poor children’s idol because they are what I was in Buenos Aires”, said Maradona on 5th of July 1984 during his introduction at San Paolo Stadium welcomed by eighty thousand people who marked the beginning of a very long love story and of his election as a pop icon of the twentieth century.
I_mago Maradona aims to be the photographic telling of a never broken bond (from Latin imago, word used by Jung to mean a maternal as well as paternal and brotherly figure loved in the childhood which projected into adulthood unconsciously becomes an example to follow). Maradona, “the wizard of the dribble” who “did with oranges what we footballers seemed impossible to do with the ball” as stated by Franco Baresi, left but his image still lives because in that image still lives, crystallized, the dream and the redemption of a southern football team as well as of a whole city.
About the author:
Antonella Cappuccio was born in Avellino in 1980. She graduated in Naples with a thesis in History of Art Criticism and obtained in Milan the Diploma of Specialization in History of Medieval and Modern Art. In 2013 she was qualified as a teacher of art history in secondary schools and since 2018 she has been a lecturer. In 2017 she realized with Filippo Cristallo the photographic project Memorie di palazzo (Memories of a Palace), exhibited as part of the European Photography Festival in Reggio Emilia, at the Anthropological and Visual Museum of Lacedonia and in 2018 at PAN (Palazzo delle Arti in Naples).
