For sixteen years, a marathon runner has crossed capitals and continents proudly waving a flag. Not the usual tricolor but the flag of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which Antonio Gianni, a doctor from Cosenza born in 1956, carries with him in every competition. And so the race becomes a form of testimony to one’s southern identity. His next destination will be Cape Town, South Africa, in 2027, where he will attempt to complete a personal feat: having run a marathon on all five continents. Medical director of the independent evaluation body of the ASP, Gianni has collected 34 marathons from 2010 to today, including the seven World Marathon Majors in Berlin, London, New York, Boston, Chicago, Tokyo and Sydney. An international journey in which he never gave up displaying the Bourbon banner, even bringing it to cities far from the history of Southern Italy. «He accompanied me in all the marathons around the world, from the Majors to those in Helsinki and St. Petersburg, where they recognized the flag. We come from this history”, he says.
The last stop was Naples, on the occasion of the Neapolis Marathon. Forty-two kilometers through the city, up to the finish line in Piazza del Plebiscito, where the doctor from Cosenza took first place in his category. Then the gesture that accompanies each of his races: unfurling the flag of the Two Sicilies. A custom that does not go unnoticed and which, this time too, has aroused curiosity among the marathon runners present at the international event. For Gianni, Naples is not a city like the others. It is “his” city, the capital of a history to which he feels he deeply belongs, the symbolic place of a southern identity that he still considers too little known and valued. His is a declared southernism, which finds a cultural reference in the Bourbon memory and its main point of recognition in the Campania capital. «The South must recognize that its locomotive is Naples», he maintains. Not simple nostalgia, therefore, but the desire to keep a historical memory alive even outside regional and national borders.
The Neapolis Marathon was also a test in view of the South African event. At seventy, Gianni continues to compete with the queen distance of athletics, chasing a goal that combines sporting ambition and belonging. Cape Town represents the next chapter in a story that began in 2010 and was built kilometer after kilometre, without ever separating the passion for running from the connection with one’s roots.
