Sei chiodi storti

Adriano Panatta, Corrado Barazzutti, Paolo Bertolucci, Antonio Zugarelli and non-playing captain Nicola Pietrangeli: the story of the five musketeers who won the only Davis Cup of Italian tennis.

Santiago was under Pinochet’s dictatorship and nobody wanted to play the Davis Cup there. Everybody thought about it as “the bloody cup”. No images survived to record what happened. The Italian public TV (RAI) refused to send its operators and the Chilean TV recordings were destroyed by fire. Twenty minutes and forty-two seconds of a flickering film is all that we have.
Yet the 1976 Davis Cup is the only Italian success in the most ancient of tournaments for national teams. Now, after forty years, literature accounts what the reports avoided at the time. Things such as the overshadowed triumph of the national Italian tennis team: the story of a handful of men who acquired glory and lost it afterwards.