It's a sport that is prevalent in Italy, especially when one holds a public office. Olympic specialty? Not yet, there would be too many medals won by Italians in the sport of "jumping on the winner's bandwagon".

It happens everywhere and for everything, including cycling and the Giro d'Italia. Many are today applauding and claiming the passage of the sixth stage of the Giro d'Italia through Caivano during the sixth stage. It will happen at km 189.7 of the stage, less than 40 km from the conclusion.

That passage through Caivano - loaded with great social, historical, and sporting meanings - however has a certain, certified, undisputable father. The idea was launched by our Gian Paolo Porreca in September 2023: he did so with an article written in Il Mattino and republished by tuttobiciweb with the title HEARTBEATS. A TOUR FOR CAIVANO. An article full of cycling passion and social sensitivity, a thought that is a breath to the heart.

di Gian Paolo Porreca

Gaetano Manfredi, the mayor of Metropolitan Naples, publicly declared last May, following the success of the Naples - Naples stage of the 2023 Giro d'Italia, that an agreement had been ratified with RCS Sport for Naples to host the pink race in 2024. If this were to happen, we propose from the columns of this newspaper, an authoritative voice of the South, that the most important sporting event in Italy, a paradigm of youth and spring, dedicate a space to Caivano, and to its childhood so mercilessly vilified by a prevailing reality, without a future.

It would be emblematic to have a non-competitive start, a walk through its streets, before the launched start, or perhaps an intermediate flying finish, of a stage designed in the Neapolitan territory.

Here in Caivano, not just by chance or for media comfort, but also to reinvigorate a never-dormant sporting vocation, and cycling first and foremost, in a habitat that a century before the Green Park saw the birth of the ancient Coppa Caivano, the most glorious cycling classic of the South. 1910, founded by merit of Boys Caivanese, still on the calendar, and for some years dedicated precisely to women's cycling, a 'pink' Caivano.

It was the classic of Learco Guerra, the champion loved by the pre-war Neapolitans, who would even - it was said - move the time of a funeral, when in '30 he conquered it as the Italian champion.

Today, we're not asking for this, other times run for other devastated worlds, but if the dazzling May festival and the radiant bicycles of the Giro would inspire just one more budding cyclist in Caivano, we would have one less baby pusher rapist, good for wrong fiction. Not much, but perhaps already something.

from Il Mattino, 3 September 2023