“I defend the city”Is a slogan that we often hear in Naples.
Even in Wroclaw it is a fairly common leitmotif for local fans. And for this reason, the fans decided to make an anonymous and battered ex-communist neighborhood of Wroclaw special.
A story that brings Wroclaw and Naples closer in sport and city life.
The neighborhood of Nadodrze conveys a resigned sense of abandonment not different from what you feel among the streets full of paper of the Neapolitan suburbs. An area that clashes terribly with the order and cleanliness of the city center, which is a gnome village.
In fact, it is enough to leave the city center to find buildings that even have bullet holes and scars from the World War II alternating with concrete blocks from that communist period in which the state assigned houses of 11 square meters per person.
The melancholy of the past breaks in the middle of Via Roosvelt: at number 5 there is a "tunnel" with a mural dedicated to Slask Wroclaw, the local football team which, unusually for Poland, has a very passionate supporters and "Neapolitan”Of head and history. The fans sing every Sunday at the Stadium about the love for a team that, in its history, has had more disappointments than joys.
Then, suddenly a view appears that resembles the murals of San Giovanni a Teduccio, while people alternate between the palaces and peacefully continue their lives amidst tales of art mixed with scrub and rough roads.
The first to greet you is the "Totti of Wroclaw“, Tadeusz Pawlowski, the star of the team that gave the fans the first championship of their history in the 70s.
And here too Naples returns. On the contrary, the SSC Napoli.
We are precisely in a quarter-final of a 1977 Cup Winners' Cup: Napoli's Weighs it, Iuliano and Bruscolotti managed to defeat the Poles with a brace at the San Paolo. (For the curious, the replays of Carmignati and Iuliano's goals)
For the Wroclaw fans, the trip to Italy was a kind of miracle to be experienced at any cost: the trips beyond the Iron Curtain were very expensive and many fans were involved.forced to barter food and clothes for a ticket to bring his wife and children to Naples, using the excuse of the game to get to know an Italy that, a year after that game, would become very close thanks to the election of the Pope.
The defeat of Naples was however digested well: that year the Slask won his first championship in history thanks to the performance of his midfielder.
But there is also room for pure art: a man moves a van parked in front of a wall and, as if by a miracle, a mural dedicated to Mondrian appears behind him.
From the recent past, a dip in prehistory, with cave paintings on an old and ruined building.
Finally, as in every Polish story, the weapons: here is the armed child of Warsaw and near the story ofInsurrection of 1944. As I try to approach the front door of the apartment building, a man in a tank top bursts into the scene to take out the trash. He asks me to delete the photograph with him present. And so remains the immediately preceding photo in which he is opening the door in the midst of the Polish revolutionaries.
On the sides of the riot scenes there are two groups of Slask fans that close the bloodiest and most heated pages of recent Polish history (Fans, even in the city, often exhibit a Italian flag". This is because the colors of Wroclaw are red, white and green and, for obvious reasons, it is easy to find Italian flags to use for the occasion).
Even in a battered neighborhood, the true constant in the life of Wroclaw explodes: the love for the Slask that mixes with the inexhaustible attachment of Poles to their land.
