A few moments before the last penalty at Wembley, Matteo Berrettini, who was in the stands next to President Mattarella, made a video with his mobile phone and sent it on Whatsapp to Gigio Donnarumma, who at that moment could not receive it because with his big hands he was about to parry, and not he knew, the last English hope.
And then it was all a film, photograph, chat, share. It wasn’t the first social final of course, but the leap forward was powerful: when we won the last European, in 1968 in Rome, there was only Rai and it was still in black and white, and to see the images of the public celebrating in the stands I had to wait for a documentary by Federico Buffa fifty years later. When we won the Mundial in 1982 in Spain the TV was in color, but there was always only Rai and I went to celebrate, but I don’t have a photo of that night because there were no smartphones and you weren’t walking around with your camera around your neck in those moments.
In 2006, World Cup in Germany, there were smartphones, but social networks were not yet so widespread. And so on the night of Wembley there are not only the images of the official TV, but an infinite amount of personal and now collective memories destined to last forever. When a historian will try to reconstruct what exactly happened on July 11, 2021, will have to scour Twitter and TikTok, Instagram and Facebook and see how a country could suddenly feel redeemed and united.
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