Maradona è amico mio

«My grandfather had Di Stéfano, my father Sívori, I ended up with Maradona. On an Argentine scale, it went wrong on a social basis and very well in the measure of idols. They had a safe job and no hesitation in life choices, I had the greatest footballer of all time».

For what he did on the field the sentence has already been issued by the court of the gods, the only competent one: he was the greatest of all, able to enter even the heart of those who wanted and had to hate him. The verdict of mortals is far more severe, never inclined to evaluate with the right detachment the contradictions of a man who, before anything else, was an extraordinary multiplier of dreams and existences, so much so that those who wanted to tell his ghosts sooner or later had to deal with their own. It happened to Marco Ciriello, who traces the life of Diego Armando Maradona with the intent to restore the pop imagery and gives us a portrait of the «Pibe de oro» for what, after all, he has always been: a more or less aware subversive, «a cheerful Lenin and above all a daft who, skimming all the boring part, comes to the point in just one touch or sentence».
Using his hero as a Borgesian mirror, in a play of narrative references that, following the lesson of Cortázar and Tarantino, undermines every space-time coordinate, Ciriello also relives his own story as a teenager waiting to cross the shadow line, in a Naples suspended between the sack of the Eighties and the spring of the Nineties, which welcomed Maradona as an unexpected child, venerated him as a capricious lover and protected him as a faded father. Obtaining in return a still unknown and never felt happiness.