Salvator Gotta was a footballer of the Ivrea football club

In the summer of 1905 the Ivrea team played a friendly match in Agliè. On that occasion there was the meeting between the young Gotta and the poet Guido Gozzano

IVREA. Eclectic personality, in addition to being one of the most famous writers of the last century, Salvator Gotta was also a footballer for about ten years, counted among the pioneers, being the game of football (coming from England). as it was called at the beginning of the twentieth century in its infancy. The days when the city would have had the Littorio sports field (today named after Gino Pistoni), the boys devoted themselves to football in the large lawn of the Piazza d’Armi, where military exercises took place, beyond the church of San Lorenzo, on the road to Vercelli.

At the beginning, in 1901, it was the football section of the Ivrea Sporting Club, which in 1905 became Football Club Ivrea: “About thirty students played there – remembered the writer in his Il progress is amusing”. In the book, Gotta is told in the personal story of the protagonist, Giannetto D’Ora, around which the illustrious friends and families of an Ivrea that confidently opens up to the new century revolve. Some of them appear with him and his brother Arturo also in the training of 1905: Giuseppe Aluffi, Francesco Anselmo, Giuseppe Baratono, Ugo and Piero De la Pierre, Pierluigi Gabriel, Corrado Lesca and Tonino Scamoni. Craveri and Scamoni, among other things, later became Juventus managers and remained so until the mid-1950s. «Giannetto, thin as a woodpecker, long and long, was very agile and resistant to running. Less sporty, however, than his brother Arturo who is so passionate about football that he neglects his studies to the regret of the family ».

The writer recalled that, in the summer of 1905, the Ivrea team was invited by the Agliè team to play a friendly match in Agliè, whose football field was a meadow at the entrance to the town, on the Ivrea side. On that occasion, an unexpected meeting took place with the poet and writer Guido Gozzano, whom Gotta described as follows: “After the game, Giannetto had a black eye, his shirt and shorts were soiled with mud, his hair was untidy and his breath was heavy, when Guido Silva introduced him to the Gozzano; Silva was the son of the steward of the castle; he often teased Giannetto calling him “poet”. There is another poet here, he said, you will understand each other. ” From 1910 to 1912, Gotta, a recent graduate in law, was vice president of the Ivrea Football Club (president was the poet and literary critic Francesco Pastonchi) and, from 1912 to 1914, president. He was still a councilor, in 1918, in the aftermath of the Great War, then he was completely absorbed in his literary activity. franco farnè