TURIN. The heroes are all young and beautiful, but also incredibly strong when it comes to Gigi Meroni. Tomorrow are 54 years since the last flight of the Farfalla Granata, one of the greatest talents in Italian football torn from life and from a career that promised to be full of satisfactions from a tragic fate. On the evening of 15 October, after the match against Sampdoria, won 4-2 by Turin, he was hit by a Fiat 124 driven by a young grenade fan (that Attilio Romero who later became president of Turin in 2000) while he was crossing the road with his teammate Fabrizio Poletti at street number 46 of corso Re Umberto. Transported to the nearby Mauritian hospital, Meroni died a few hours later. A blow to the Bull and his people who still had in their eyes the squadron of the Invincibles who disappeared in Superga and 15 years later they found themselves crying for another sudden mourning.
Meroni was only 24 years old, but he had already become a star of the Turin of the patron Orfeo Pianelli who three years earlier bought him from Genoa, on the recommendation of Nereo Rocco, for 300 million lire, at that time a record figure for such a young player. . As unpredictable and elusive on the pitch, thanks to powerful legs that designed perfect dribbling, as unconventional in everyday life. Meroni, originally from Como, wore long hair and mustache and dressed in clothes that he himself designed in the attic of Piazza Vittorio, his small atelier also for painting, another great passion of his. Interests viewed with distrust by a society that is still too traditional, and above all a look too eccentric even for Edmondo Fabbri’s national team, in which the number 7 grenade did not have much luck. At the 1966 World Cup, those of the historic defeat against North Korea, only the match against the Soviet Union played. Al Toro, on the other hand, played 120 games and scored 25 goals. His last signing against Brescia on October 1st, scored the 1-0 penalty, then Giorgio Ferrini doubled it.