Gabry Ponte, Achille Lauro, and who knows who else will be at the final act of the third Winter Olympics made in Italy. How the curtain will fall on an event that brought the Azzurri to within a whisker of Norway, a true superpower on snow and ice. So many memories, between opera, shows by world-class music stars, and the pyrotechnic conclusions of the Giro d'Italia...
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With athletes from an Italy so impressive—thanks to the Ladies of the Whites led by Federica Brignone and Arianna Fontana—that they're tied with Norway in the medal table and even ahead of the United States at the halfway point, the 2026 Winter Games are inexorably moving toward the Closing Ceremony on Sunday, February 22nd.
The event is scheduled for the Verona Arena, which has been labeled Olympic, where the world's most famous Italian DJ and producer (Gabry Ponte) will get everyone dancing... and absolutely everyone! Paolo Petrecca's sloppy commentary of the Opening Ceremony has displaced Marco Balich's show from the highest levels of viewers' collective imagination compared to events of that kind. However, there is objectively room for improvement in terms of national broadcasting, as Petrecca has been temporarily suspended by RAI management, and former reservist and ousted Auro Bulbarelli has been recalled for this exciting opportunity.
The only bridge that everyone shares—Gabry, to be precise: despite the much-discussed and shaky idea of (finally!) physically uniting Calabria and Sicily—will not be discussed and will be up to the task: his precedents and track record represent the most clear-cut certainties.
Gabry Ponte and the Ceremony as a whole cannot fail and will add another link to the prestigious series that has been alive within the Athena since August 1913, when Giuseppe Verdi's first Aida took shape in the Historical Edition, with scenes inspired by Ettore Bozzetti's sketches and a libretto by Antonio Ghislanzoni. The opera's concept is based on the experiences of French archaeologists, and this could be the bridge from Milan Cortina 2026 to Haute-Savoie 2030. And who knows if this time Emmanuel Macron will find his way back to Italy, considering that the politicians deemed so forward-thinking as to keep him away from Milan on February 6th have long since left the Olympics.
Here it is: the Verona Arena doesn't allow bluffing. We've always known this... or at least since that September 1, 1977, when, stationed with the FTASE (Allied Land Forces Southern Europe), we wandered between the NATO offices on Via Roma in Castelvecchio, the barracks dormitory in Piazza Pozza, the mess hall of another barracks in the area, and the famous Piazza Bra. Unable to enter Arera, that evening we listened to the entire Carlos Santana concert, so much so that even Guerin Sportivo—which in theory should have been exclusively focused on other things—devoted pages of unforgettable photos to that performance by the guitarist and composer, then thirty years old, adopted by the States despite being originally from Mexico: would the same thing happen now under the Donald J. Trump regime? Hmm...
The son of a violinist and an avid fan of rock radio in the US, Santana had impressed the entire world in 1969 at Woodstock when, completely high on LSD, so much so that his guitar squirmed like a snake, the twenty-one-year-old Santana sang the notes of Soul Sacrifice, the cornerstone of his existence and of rock, at the most outlandish music festival in history.
Take a break, go to YouTube, and download that song! Whatever the cost: it's the piece that Carlos sang to the skies of Verona in 1977, somewhat outraging opera lovers. We, on the steps of the building between the Gran Guardia and the Arena, now the City Hall—we're talking about Palazzo Barbieri—were able to enjoy it in ecstasy, even though we're not used to LSD.
Memories linked to the Arena also include the performances of Sugar Fornaciari, aka Zucchero, and Bruce Springsteen when, both in the early 1990s and in October 2006, when he was not yet sixty, he always delivered top-notch performances, both alone and accompanied by his artist friends from the Seeger Session Band.
What tenor Giovanni Zenatello inaugurated in 1913, both the Arena Foundation and the Arena Opera Festival have evolved over time into a range of concerts that have made Verona the capital of mosaics. Gianmarco Mazzi, who rose to the position of Undersecretary of the Ministry of Culture, also dabbled there, in the stronghold of Piazza Bra. He left behind extraordinary experiences with Adriano Celentano, at RAI, and at the Sanremo Festival, which will take over television from the Milan-Cortina Games in 2026.
Francesco Moser also set a high note on the Arena's pentagram in 1984, when he thrashed Laurent Fignon in the final time trial of that Giro, designed by Vincenzo Torriani from Soave at the amphitheater erected in the first century AD, thirty years before the Colosseum. The new Radames from Palù di Giovo made use of intuitions such as the lenticular wheels borrowed from the disc wheels of sixty years earlier, and the ox-horn handlebars, later banned, along with the frame bent forward to improve aerodynamics.
The mix of sport and music—an absolute first!—set the Arena ablaze as a corollary to the conclusion of the 2010 Giro d'Italia, the year of Ivan Basso's rebirth as an athlete. However, Basso couldn't escape the shadow of Operation Puerto, which had seen him among the most controversial figures in a period marked by the (according to them) essential practice of doping in the Madrid hub for the distribution of therapies and banned substances.
That day, Sunday, May 30, 2010, at the end of the race, which started in Amsterdam and was decided in Basso's favor thanks to a mid-event attack on the Zoncolan, the competition ended in Piazza Bra, where the runners arrived by skirting the Listone after climbing the Torricelle. The race should have ended there, given that the Arena had never been granted permission by the Superintendent of Cultural Heritage to host sporting events such as volleyball, basketball, wrestling, athletics, and cycling. The ploy was adopted of recording the final times of the time trial a stone's throw from the entrance to the Amphitheater, and then guiding the runners, who arrived one at a time, toward the red carpet of the parade and the stage where the awards ceremony would later take place. And the final meters of the parade were greeted by the singers and bands who had been featured in the Wind Music Award contest the previous evenings. In short: an exhilarating picture despite the constraints imposed (and circumvented) by the Superintendency.
Question: What sacrilege would the cyclists have committed as they entered the Temple of Musical and Theatrical Opera one at a time on the same sand that nine hundred years earlier had seen wrestlers duel and defend themselves from lions? The question remains unanswered more than fifteen years later.
We envy those who will attend the athletes' final performances and parades, as well as the performances of Gabry Ponte and Achille Lauro. Another Balich-style show has been announced, sure to amaze the world once again. Those in Class A will shell out €2.900. We'll "make do" with the television commentary of the "resurrected" Bulbarelli, confident he won't make us miss Petracca. And who could?
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