(ANSA) – NAPLES, JUNE 27 – “Maradona remains for me and for the Neapolitans a very beautiful memory of 40 years ago. We experienced it in Naples and Diego remains one of the best memories of my life”. This is how Corrado Ferlaino remembers the beginning of Diego Maradona’s adventure in Naples 40 years ago. The former president, now 93 years old, boarded the MSC cruise ship docked at the port of Naples, to participate in the event “Maradona at Napoli 40 years later. 5 July 1984, the day that changed history”. Ferlaino managed to buy Maradona from Barcelona, starting the construction of a great Napoli, which in the following years won two championships, the UEFA Cup, the Italian Cup and the Italian Super Cup. “With Maradona – recalls Ferlaino – we went through a period of great effort to get him but we also know that we had some important moments of luck. The club and I had the courage to fight to bring him to Naples but we were also helped by luck in incredible way for a series of events that led him to say goodbye to Barcelona and choose to come to Naples”. Years which, together with Ferlaino, remembered the organizer of the match, the journalist Marcello Altamura, and a series of protagonists of the time, such as the Napoli masseur and friend of Maradona Salvatore Carmando, the sports journalists who followed Napoli in those years, but also the mayor of Naples at the time of Maradona’s arrival, Vincenzo Scotti, as well as the current mayor Gaetano Manfredi.
Ferlaino also talks about today’s Napoli, which he follows with affection: “We’ll see from the field – he said – whether the new coach Antonio Conte will have the same verve as Diego. I was very surprised that last year’s Napoli, which had won the championship by a landslide, then played badly and found himself at the end of the season in tenth place in the standings. It was a season I had never seen with the same team that had won the championship, only without Kim but with a transfer market that had brought in very strong players Napoli finishing tenth in the league was incredible.” The Neapolitan engineer thought of today’s Maradona: “The little square in Naples – he said – is very beautiful, the Neapolitans love it and many tourists go to visit it. I have gone there ten times, I am now a frequent visitor of that place. What would I say to Diego today? I don’t know, I wouldn’t say anything, I know that now he wants to stay calm, that he doesn’t want to talk about football, maybe today he talks to the little angels but not about football anymore.” (HANDLE).