Il ferroviere e il golden gol

A delicate and intense novel of a great Italian writer.

«When you dream something at all costs, when you do nothing but think about it from morning to night – well, do not fool yourself that you have really understood something of what you are, and perhaps not even what you want. The only thing we can learn from what we want is that we hate what we have».
To let go. Hope and fall, hope again and fall again, and so on again. Fairy tale and realism come together in the narration of D’Amicis: on one side football as ambition, desire to escape from reality; on the other, through the wandering of the main character from a ball game to a train journey, a precise and refined description of the social composition of Italy emerges at the end of the twentieth century.
A young Apulian railroad worker is laid off. Without a permanent job to keep him even mentally busy, distracted from reality, he spends his time on sunny provincial pitches, looking at unlikely hopes of Italian football and dreaming of becoming a scout for Juventus. His passion is so strong that, against all the odds, he can turn desire into reality, or into a lie that’s truer than truth…