The story of Luigi Meroni – Gigi for his friends – a timeless fan favorite for both Torino and Genoa supporters, is a beautiful and tragic story at the same time. It’s the epic of a football player from the 1960s who was a character much before football players became characters, an ante litteram influencer way before Instagram and the Internet.
Gigi Meroni was larger than life itself and that’s why perhaps his life was cut so short. He was a controversial personality who didn’t hesitate to go his own way in an Italian society ruled by conformism where you were supposed to play according to the rules – and no, we are not only talking about football. All this, on top of being an exquisitely gifted player, one who was worth the ticket price.
They called him La Farfalla Granata, a nickname whose English translation “Maroon Butterfly” (maroon is the color of Torino, where Meroni spent most of his playing time) can only partially convey the elegance, beauty, and unpredictability he brought to the football pitch. And, just like a butterfly, his epic was short-lived and ended tragically.
One blink of an eye and he was gone, killed by a car at just 24. Nowadays, people continue to leave flowers in the place where he was hit, in the very center of Turin, on a tragic night of October 1967.
Born on the Como Lake, Luigi was the second of three children and was raised by his mum, as his father died when he was only two. Mother Rosa was a professional weaver and struggled to make ends meet, so Gigi had to go through different jobs since a young age – including designing silk neckties – to make a living.
In the meantime, he had started to play football. Well. Very well. He joined the Como youth academy, but would spend only two seasons in his hometown club. At 19, after a game with Genoa, the Rossoblu were so impressed by him that swooped in and took him to the City of The Lighthouse.
An agile right wing with great speed and dazzling dribbling skills, Meroni became the quintessence of the Number 7, the custodian of the right attacking side of the pitch. His specialty were not only goals – which were many, especially in his Torino days – but also his perfectly-timed assists, serviced maybe at the end of one of his unpredictable feints.
Meroni would stay in Genoa for two years. The first one was not memorable, as he was mostly kept on the bench. But then, when Argentine coach Beniamino Santos took the helm, he literally exploded scoring 6 goals out of 27 games – including a beautiful one against Mantova on April 4, 1964, when he slotted the ball home after dribbling the whole opposition defense, including no less than a young Dino Zoff.
At the end of the season, Torino made a stunning offer of 300M Italian liras to sign Meroni and Genoa’s president Giacomo Berrino simply couldn’t say no, despite the Grifone supporters had gathered outside the club headquarters to protest at the sale of their fan favorite. The coach was also furious and took a decision that would prove fatal to him.
Santos decided to interrupt his holidays and to come straight away to Genoa to resign in protest, but perished in a car crash on the way. In retrospect, that would sound like a sinister omen in the life of Meroni.
In Turin, the 21-year-old gained national fame and his polarizing character found a stage to truly shine. Meroni was no ordinary person. His shirt was always untucked (that doesn’t sound like a big deal nowadays but, yeah, it was a big deal in Italy back in the 1960s), he wore a small mustache and long hair with sideburns. He kind of looked like his contemporary George Best, tough being far from the peaks of dissoluteness reached by the Northern Irishman.
No, Meroni was a different kind of personality: He was an artist, who used to paint and write poetry in his free-time and designed his own clothes from his unpretentious attic in the city center.
But he was also extravagant to the point of keeping a hen as a pet – whom he appropriately named “Hen”- and it was not unusual to see him strolling around Turin taking her on a leash. At times, he would disguise himself as a journalist and ask random people what did they think about Meroni.
Some people absolutely loved him, some others – as it could be expected in a pretty conservative environment as Italy was in the ‘60s – simply couldn’t stand him.
What he was mostly not forgiven for was his relationship and cohabitation with a married woman, in an age when there was no legislation contemplating the possibility to divorce in the Belpaese – which was thus inconceivable in the eyes of the public opinion.
Cristiana Uderstadt, “the most beauty among the beauties” in Meroni’s own words, was the daughter of a carousel owner. She was about to get married when she met Gigi, but promptly left her husband and went to live with the Maroon Butterfly while she waited for her marriage to be nullified by an ecclesiastical court. When that finally happened, it is said that Meroni started to play like he had never before.
With the Nazionale, he didn’t do much, scoring only two goals out of six caps. The legend goes that he was asked to cut his hair by the Azzurri manager Edmondo Fabbri in order to join the team – that gives you an idea of what was the Italian society back in the days. But Meroni said no: “I don’t play with my hair.”
In one way or another, however, he was still aggregated to the Italian squad who participated to the 1966 World Cup. It was a disaster, with the Azzurri eliminated in the Group Stage after losing 0-1 to North Korea in what is unanimously considered Italy’s most humiliating defeat ever. Meroni didn’t play. He had been quarreling with Fabbri, who left him on the bench after the second group stage match. Some speculated that his larger-than-life presence had torn the group apart.
But it is domestically, with the Torino jersey, that Gigi Meroni reached the peak of his career. Initially, he was trained by former Milan manager Nereo Rocco. In 1967, he reached his highest point as he tore down no less that Helenio Herrera’s Grande Inter at the San Siro. The Nerazzurri were unbeaten at home for three years but capitulated to a Meroni fine lob to the top left corner that left no chance even to legendary goalkeeper Giuliano Sarti.
At the end of the 1966-67 season, it seemed that even Juventus and their influential president Gianni Agnelli had set their eyes on him and offered an unprecedented 750M Italian liras to make him switch to the other bank of the Po river.
But another supporters protest, maybe stronger than the Genoa one, featuring even those Granata fans who worked for Agnelli’s FIAT, suggested President Orfeo Pianelli to kindly reply “no, thank you” and the almighty Agnelli to step back from the request. Meroni stayed with Torino. For a short time, unfortunately.
Tragical, mocking, came the end. On October 15, 1967, Torino had beaten Sampdoria 4-2 in Serie A Round 4. Coach Fabbri, who had left the Azzurri and was now managing the Granata, had let his players the night off to celebrate. Together with his friend and teammate Fabrizio Poletti, Meroni was crossing the Corso Re Umberto, when he was hit by a car who made him fall. Another car coming from the opposite direction hit him again, this time fatally.
The irony is that the driver of the first car was 19-year-old Attilio Romero, a hardcore Granata fan who kept Meroni’s picture right on the dashboard of his car. 36 years later, Romero would become the president of Torino.
A week after the tragedy, with the fans from both sides remaining silent, a surreal Derby della Mole took place as a helicopter showered flower petals on the right-wing spot of the pitch – Meroni’s spot – before the game. Nestor Combin, who was a great friend of Meroni, scored three goals as Torino beat Juventus 4-0, a feat they would never be able to replicate against the cross-town rivals.
The story, as told by Combin himself, goes that Meroni – who had never managed to beat the Bianconeri – predicted to him right after the game with Sampdoria that he was going to score a hat-trick to the Old Lady. That was the last gift from the Maroon Butterfly to his fans.
