Inside the celebrations for Palermo's 125th anniversary Two days of unconditional love
"At first this song didn't seem interesting to me, because I felt it was very simple. Then, over time, I understood that if you can express a concept with few words and few notes the result is much more effective than a long ballad." The words are by Sergio Endrigo and come from the eponymous biography written together with Vincenzo Mollica published in 1982. The song he refers to is Io che amo solo te, the most famous track of his career released in 1962 in which Endrigo hovers over a melancholic musical arrangement confessing all his love for the person with whom he has chosen to spend the rest of his life. A concept — that of eternal love — that finds a natural application in the world of football where the choice of your team is made as a child and stays glued to you for the rest of your life without fully understanding why, especially when things go wrong. In Palermo sporting successes and corporate failures have alternated constantly but what has never been missing is the fans' love and so it is not surprising that for some years now the rosanero supporters have decided to adopt Endrigo's song as the official anthem.
One of the most important lines of the song reads: "I had only you and I will not lose you, I will not leave you to chase new illusions." A nontrivial phrase, especially for the 17,000 people who on September 8th 2019 were in the stands of the Renzo Barbera Stadium to support the team in the first home match in Serie D (fourth division) after the club's bankruptcy that occurred a few months earlier. Those supporters felt they had no choice. Or rather, that they had already decided. They would spend their lives forever next to Palermo. Regardless of the division. For this reason as well, the club's 125th anniversary festivities, observed during the weekend, carried a unique significance, beyond the fourth kit dedicated to the anniversary and the 5–0 victory by Filippo Inzaghi's team against Pescara.
A 48-hour celebration, which began in evocative locations such as the Teatro Biondo and Villa Filippina, then continued at the stadium with the embrace of 27,077 people who watched the show of lights, music and dance that colored the pre-match before the greeting to the Legends who came to the city: because however painful the past may be, history cannot be erased. And so a roar accompanied the lap of honour of the teams that reached the Coppa Italia finals in 1974 and 1979, the heroes of the promotion to Serie A in 2004, the victory at the Boleyn Ground against West Ham in the UEFA Cup and the third Coppa Italia final in 2011 without forgetting those responsible for the promotion from Serie D to Serie C. It was a moment to definitively exorcise the nightmare of past times, to be able to take each other's hand and look to the future with confidence thanks to an ownership that wants to bring the team back to Serie A.
