Home » Irma Testa: boxing was only half – Angelo Carotenuto

Irma Testa: boxing was only half – Angelo Carotenuto

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Irma Testa: boxing was only half – Angelo Carotenuto
Illustration by Alice Iuri

The hands that Irma Testa wraps before putting them in boxing gloves are placed on the menu of a restaurant in the center of Naples. “My mother is the queen of pasta, potatoes and provola. She is a cook in a restaurant in front of the Pompeii excavations, owned by the president of the gym where I started. She was looking for a job, she had been fired. He was looking for a person. I introduced it to him. Every time she comes back, she prepares me the gateau, the lasagna, the dishes that I can’t find outside. In retreat I go ahead with chicken breast, salad, fish. I also learned to prepare it myself “.

Five years ago Irma Testa, 24, was the first in the history of Italian women’s boxing to go to the Olympics and in the summer of 2021 the first to win a medal, in a year without men among the qualifiers. This too had never happened. In retreat it means in Assisi, and the Church has nothing to do with it, which Irma struggles to understand: “I don’t see why I have to need another person, a priest, if I want to repent of a sin,” she says.

Testa has lived in the center of the Italian boxing federation in Umbria since he left Torre Annunziata, Provolera district, one of the market squares in the Neapolitan hinterland, where he lived, at the age of fifteen. There she could happen to see ‘O Niro and’ O Russo settle scores with a gun, as she told in her autobiography. Boxer heart.

She left to save herself, even if she would never tell it that way. She left to look for a father, because her father was absent even when he was there. You have traveled longer than the 400 kilometers that separate these two points on the map. It was a journey into awareness. She has a geisha tattooed on her left arm, they call her Butterfly, and she dances in prejudice as she makes her in her style of her elegant her in the ring.

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“I was a little girl who could not speak Italian. My mother gave me the education, she kept me out of trouble, but she was out all day to pay off the debts we had. Whether or not I went to school, she didn’t know. I grew up with my grandparents who are illiterate. I grew up and I was still small. I suddenly found myself in contexts where I felt the need to have my own opinion on what they were saying. I learned how to sit at the table in order to go out for dinner ”.

“I have been to places I never imagined I would go to, three times in China, in India, I saw what the world is like and I had to study. I read all of Dostoevsky because I heard about him and didn’t want to remain silent. It is this change that makes me proud of myself, not the medals. For my childhood friends I am still the gypsy today, I was always on the street playing with marbles or strummolo, the wooden top, the guns with yellow dots. Boxing was a means ”.

He learned by listening and he learned to listen to himself. At the beginning of her career she lived in a body that had to stay within the limit of 51 kilos to be able to fight. “A week before the match I would stop drinking even the water to lose weight. For women it is a disaster, they skip the period, hormonal problems arrive, it is dangerous. When you take a hit and run out of fluids, it stuns you. Now that the 57 kg category exists, it is much better ”.

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On TV at Verissimo and then at Vanity Fair magazine he said he no longer wants to hide his sexual orientation. “Those around me have always known. The first person to whom I told that I had fallen in love with a girl was Emanuele Renzini, the teacher of the national team. She reciprocated. At home I had never heard of two women being together. I confided in him and he told me that there was nothing strange ”.

“I’ve never felt wrong, now I’m talking about it because no one has to feel imperfect anymore. I just waited a while to tell my mom, I was 16. I think to my grandmother that she can avoid explaining it, but I have always introduced her to my girlfriends. I’ve had two important ones. Grandma is blind, she always made me realize she knew. To my cousins ​​she asks: when will you find a boyfriend? Not to me, to me every now and then she asked: how is that friend of yours, when you make peace? “.

Testa can’t stand the prejudice of those who think that being a boxer automatically means being a lesbian. “In my case it is true, but it is not a rule. Homosexuals also exist in football. Are so many. They are afraid to say it. Yet it is time to talk about it naturally. If the speech started with one of them, in two years it would no longer be a taboo ”.

Boxing is female, Testa says every now and then. The first teacher to whom he owes everything is called Lucio Zurlo, today he is 83 years old, his wife was after school for her. “I have never seen RockyI know, it sounds strange, but Million dollar baby yes: he is my Clint
Eastwood. Our relationship is like the one in the movie. I hadn’t been able to play sports seriously before. I only liked skating, but we couldn’t afford it. The skates cost 300 euros and the tuition was high. My sister was a very good dancer, some sacrifices were made for her ”.

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But there was no money for both of them. Her head remembers as a trauma the day her father dragged her in tears to a man. “She told him: ‘A criatura is chiagnenno, he wants to go skating, lend me more money’. And I begged him: please, give it to him, please. I must have been 10 years old, I have never forgotten it. I refused the sport until boxing came ”.

“Now when I go back to Torre I resist three days, I’m used to the silence of my room, to the fixed times for lunch and dinner. It is not a cloister and it is not a sacrifice: the strength to go dancing is lacking. After the Olympics there were some proposals to be a professional, but boxing is not for me. If I accept one day, it will be for a boatload of money. A boat of money for me is 500 thousand euros, maybe a million. I don’t know what people think in front of a million ”.

Ancient trattoria and pizzeria Da Donato
Via Spaventa 37/43, Naples

1 pasta with potatoes and provolone € 9,00
1 Genoese mezzanine € 9,00
1 fried fish € 12,00
1 water € 2,00
1 glass of wine € 4,00
2 coffees € 2,00
2 place settings € 3,00

Total € 41.00

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