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| It was Franzone who first made contact with Reggiana’s previous owners on Dec. 10, 2015. Piazza and Franzone have been friends for years, and they had long discussed the idea of investing in soccer. After the initial meeting, Franzone, who had spoken to about 20 other clubs in Italy, excitedly reported back to Piazza that it could be the perfect situation. Reggiana played in a large stadium that could eventually accommodate upper-league crowds. It boasted a training facility with 11 fields. It was geographically close to countless potential sponsors. It possessed a fan base desperate for brighter days. |
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| Presidente Piazza It has not been easy being a Reggiana fan over the last two decades. In the 1990s, the club played in Serie A, the country’s top tier, and in 1995, it opened a new stadium, which hundreds of the team’s fans helped finance through the purchase of multiyear season ticket plans. But things quickly went awry. The team was relegated in 1997, and a few years later, after going bankrupt, it was forced to surrender the title to its stadium, which had been sold at auction. Today, the arena is owned by Giorgio Squinzi, the owner of the nearby Serie A team Sassuolo. The teams share the stadium, with Reggiana paying rent — an arrangement that causes its fans much embarrassment. |
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| “He made us feel close to him even though he’s a very wealthy man,” Miari said. He shrugged when asked to rate Piazza’s language skills. “His Italian is like our English,” he said. “It needs practice.” Piazza, who took six months of Italian lessons (and acknowledges that he needs more), has been brushing up on his soccer, too. He grew up near Philadelphia and had only a passing interest in the sport until he retired. He joked that he once thought Reggiana’s favored formation was a 4-4-3, a nonsensical configuration. But Franzone said Piazza’s baseball career had given him credibility with players and fans alike. “They know you know the smell of a locker room,” he often tells Piazza. |
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| As he prepared to duck inside, an elderly man reached over to grab his hand. “You bring us good luck,” the man said in Italian. “Please come again.” A Duck Back to Water ...Piazza has adopted the same approach to life in Italy. He was 34 when he visited Italy for the first time. He had been to Japan seven times at that point in his life, but somehow never to the home country of his paternal grandparents. The trip changed him, he said. ...In Rome, he found these stray fragments of his identity fitting naturally, exhilaratingly, into his surroundings. The next year, he and his father visited Sciacca, the town on the southwestern coast of Sicily where his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Giuseppe Piazza was born in 1789. “I felt like a duck going back to water,” Piazza said. “I just related. I could just feel it. I just felt Italian.”....These days, Piazza has been renting a home in a village called Quattro Castella, about 10 miles south of Reggio Emilia. He has considered having his children — Nicoletta, 10; Paulina, 7; and Marco, 3 — attend Italian schools for a year. In the restaurant, Piazza fiddled with the patterned scarf around his neck, joking that he accessorized like this only in Italy, where he felt sartorially inadequate alongside the locals.... Piazza is enjoying this cross-cultural learning process. He said the rigors of this new life — stacking airline miles, struggling with a new language, savoring new foods, connecting to his family’s roots — had invigorated him in the vacuum left by baseball. |
Yeah I thought Piazza became a foodie and opened an Italian restaurant called Reggio Emilia.
if the title limit permitted and I wanted to talk about la cocina.
However, in your defense, Piazza does extoll the culinary offerings of Reggio Emilia in the piece.
lol, Piazza's new calling gets no respect, all BBI's soccer guys must be in hiding in this kind of interim week when mostly FA Cup stuff. Looking forward to Arena's cuts (and no, that's not a reference to a salumeria)