On the occasion of the 17th European Football Championship 2024 taking place in Germany, the Italian Cultural Institute in Cologne is organizing the exhibition "Italy-Germany: The Match of the Century" in collaboration with the Società Italiana di Storia dello Sport (SISS) from 7 June to 6 September 2024.
Curated by Nicola Sbetti and Daniele Serapiglia, the exhibition "Italy-Germany: The Match of the Century" features 14 panels and texts by eleven experts in Italian sports history, taking the public on a short journey through the history of the most important matches between the two men's national teams.
On behalf of the Società Italiana di Storia dello Sport, the following people helped to write the texts for the exhibition: Fabien Archambault (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), Eleonora Belloni (University of Siena), Riccardo Brizzi (University of Bologna), Erminio Fonzo (University of Salerno), Deborah Guazzoni (Italian Society for the History of Sport), Enrico Landoni (e-Campus University), Matteo Monaco (Italian Society for the History of Sport), Nicola Sbetti (University of Bologna), Daniele Serapiglia (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Francesca Tacchi (University of Florence), Lorenzo Venuti (University of Bologna).
We would like to thank the ANSA agency, La Gazzetta dello Sport, Rcs Mediagroup and Olympia-Verlag GmbH for their kind permission to use the images provided for this exhibition.
Nicola Sbetti is a lecturer at the University of Bologna. He specializes in sports history. His most important publications include: Giochi diplomatici. Sport e politica estera nell'Italia del secondo dopoguerra (Fbsr/Viella, 2020). He is currently a member of the board of the Italian Society for the History of Sport.
Daniele Serapiglia is a Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Universidad Complutense Madrid. Specializing in the history of European fascism in relation to sport, he is the author of the volume Uno sport per tutti: storia sociale della pallavolo italiana (Clueb, 2018). In 2019 he was a visiting scholar at the Remarque Institute at New York University. He is treasurer of the European Committee for the History of Sport.
The Società Italiana di Storia dello Sport is a non-profit cultural association founded in 2004 on the initiative of the Centro di Studi per l'Educazione Fisica e l'Attività Sportiva in Florence and the Italian group of the European Committee for the History of Sport. Its members include academics, journalists and experts in the field of sports history in general.
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Opening hours:
Monday - Thursday 9.00 - 13.00 and 13.30 - 17.00
Friday 9.00 - 14.00
Opening on June 6 at 7 pm
in the presence of the curators and some of the SISS authors
Afterwards you are invited to a small reception.
Free admission.
To mark the opening of the exhibition, we will be showing Il calcio ai tempi di Gigi Riva, an edition of the RAI TV special "Sfide" from 2010, on June 6 at 8 pm.
Running time 54 minutes, in Italian.
There are timeless champions who remain in everyone's memory because they were not only skilled sportsmen, but above all great people. Gigi Riva is one of them. "Sfide" traces the career of this great athlete with a shy, reserved character. From a difficult childhood, marked by the early loss of both parents, to his arrival in Sardinia, where he found the family that fate had previously denied him and made his fortune as a footballer with Cagliari Calcio. But Riva is also an Italian hero: he is still the national team's record goalscorer with 35 goals and, thanks in part to his efforts, Azzurri fans witnessed one of the most legendary matches in soccer history, the 4:3 between Italy and Germany at the 1970 World Cup in Mexico.
