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Naples is a city embracing success. You can see it, hear it, feel it. It\u2019s in the eyes and the smiles, the playful chatter and swaggering strides. Neapolitans can taste it, they\u2019re living every moment of it.<\/p>\n
Napoli have cantered to a first title since 1990. Flags hailing the club\u2019s third championship hang from balconies, banners with \u201c100% campione\u201d ripple in the breeze. Even the usually superstitious Neapolitans have for months acknowledged this is their year.<\/p>\n
Some feared the city won\u2019t cope with a party 33 years in the making. I Partenopei\u2019s game against Salernitana last Sunday was even moved back 24 hours as officials feared the potential for\u00a0huge celebrations would clash\u00a0with a major comic book convention.<\/p>\n
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That ended in a draw and those celebrations were put on hold, but they can finally be cranked up to full volume after Napoli clinched the title as far away from home as it is possible for them to travel in Serie A, at Udinese.<\/p>\n
Provisions are in place for another huge party on 4 June \u2013 the final day of the season \u2013 as Naples bathes in the glory of a first championship since Diego Maradona strolled these narrow streets.<\/p>\n
In the Quartieri Spagnoli, throughout Naples\u2019 historic centre, up to Stadio Diego Armando Maradona in Fuorigrotta and beyond, the streets are decked with blue and white festoons. Buildings and steps have been painted the same hues.<\/p>\n
Life-size cutouts of the current squad stand in one piazza, club shirts and player posters are pegged to washing lines in alleyways, and youngsters queue for half a block to buy Napoli-coloured panino at\u00a0popular sandwich shop Con Mollica o Senza.<\/p>\n
Hotel rooms for the next couple of months have nearly all gone. Expats wanting to celebrate, football fans intrigued by Napoli\u2019s story and visitors unexpectedly caught up in this historic moment are descending on the city. Sporting success coincides with a tourist boom.<\/p>\n
\u201cNaples is experiencing a moment of self-recognition and rediscovery of its greatness,\u201d says author Angelo Forgione.<\/p>\n
When Maradona inspired Napoli to a first Scudetto in 1987, fans placed a banner outside the city\u2019s largest cemetery proclaiming: \u201cYou don\u2019t know what you missed.\u201d Now, a generation too young to remember such glory are living it themselves.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was six months old in 1990 but I grew up watching VHS tapes of Diego Maradona,\u201d says Vincenzo Credendino, from CalcioNapoli24 TV. \u201cNow this Scudetto is like reconnecting with that time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tributes to Luciano Spalletti\u2019s players intertwine with endless Maradona artwork. He is everywhere in Naples\u2019 charmingly gritty and dizzyingly chaotic labyrinth of streets \u2013 in bar windows, on bumper stickers and billboards, and etched across crumbling walls on giant murals.<\/p>\n
At Bar Nilo, a strand of Maradona\u2019s hair rotates as part of a shrine to the Argentine. An underground museum displays the belongings acquired by his maid\u2019s son when Maradona left the city.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaradona is like God here,\u201d says 23-year-old fan Maria Roberta De Iesu. \u201cHe gave people hope. Neapolitans see themselves in Maradona.\u201d<\/p>\n This mural in Quartieri Spagnoli became a shrine to Diego Maradona following his death in 2020<\/em><\/p>\n When Maradona arrived for a world record fee from Barcelona in July 1984, the city was still on its knees from an earthquake that had killed almost 2,500 people four years earlier. Feuds between the Camorra, the region\u2019s mafia, were as bitter as ever, unemployment was huge and the Bank of Naples was facing bankruptcy.<\/p>\n \u201cYet in a Naples on the bottom, Napoli, with the help of politics, managed to buy the strongest and most expensive footballer in the world and touch the sky,\u201d adds Forgione.<\/p>\n Then president Corrado Ferlaino had to lean on the city\u2019s mayor to help finance the deal, and fans offered contributions to help get it over the line. Anything to get Maradona.<\/p>\n \u2018El Pibe de Oro\u2019 was everything to Naples, and Naples was everything to him. The city resonated with its Golden Boy not just because he inspired their club to two Serie A titles and a Uefa Cup but because they recognised him. He was anti-establishment, he echoed their principles and shouldered their concerns.<\/p>\n \u201cMaradona was really good with his tongue, his mouth, his attitude,\u201d explains Credendino. \u201cHe understood how to get the heart of the Neapolitan people; he touched the right chords.\u201d<\/p>\n Maradona, despite his relationship with the Neapolitan mafia, brought \u201cjustice to the people\u201d after struggles against the north that date back more than a century to the unification of Italy, says culture expert Francesco Carignani.<\/p>\n \u201cHe had many problems in his life but in Naples we only remember him for the joy,\u201d adds fan Paolo Cimmino. \u201cWe connect him as a man to a conqueror \u2013 the south won versus the north.\u201d<\/p>\n No club south of Rome had won Serie A since the Napoli of Maradona, Careca, Ciro Ferrara and a young Gianfranco Zola in 1990, and Neapolitans still endure hostile taunts from their northern rivals about crime, poverty, cholera outbreaks and calls for Mount Vesuvius to erupt over the city.<\/p>\n People here \u201care first of all Neapolitans and then Italian\u201d, explains Daniele \u2018Decibel\u2019 Bellini, Napoli\u2019s iconic stadium announcer. They have their own language, culture and history. Naples was once a thriving European capital, it remains a city of intriguing architecture, Caravaggio, pizza. Most of all, there is an intensity to life in Campania.<\/p>\n \u201cSouthern people in Italy, they live everything with love, with so much emotion, in different ways to the north,\u201d adds Cimmino.<\/p>\n Napoli had to fall before they could rise again. Financial decline, relegation and bankruptcy followed the glory years but the fans remained. More than 50,000 attended a game in Serie C in 2004-05.<\/p>\n \u201cFor our city soccer is so important,\u201d explains journalist Elena Lopresti. \u201cIt is not only football, it is a social instrument, a tool to develop us as a society.\u201d<\/p>\n Film producer Aurelio de Laurentiis seized an opportunity to purchase the club in 2004 and restore top-flight and European football to Napoli, the fourth-most well-supported club in Italy after Juventus, Milan and Inter, but one whose fanbase is concentrated in the region, rather than spread \u201cfrom the Alps to Sicily\u201d as Forgione says of the big three.<\/p>\n \u201cDe Laurentiis had a parachute,\u201d adds Credendino. \u201cIt was the love of the people, always ready to go to the stadium, always ready to support the team.\u201d<\/p>\n Naples, Forgione explains, is a rare European metropolis represented by a single club. \u201cNapoli\u2019s victory is the victory of identity, of those who live it completely,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n \u201cIn Naples, football is everything,\u201d says Cimmino. \u201cIt is joy, it is love, it is fun, it is sadness. It is a way to escape from the daily problems, a way to have fun with the people and party, and this period is happiness.\u201d<\/p>\n Cardboard cutouts of Napoli players stand in a piazza in Naples<\/em><\/p>\n The De Laurentiis era has been characterised by astute recruitment \u2013 Edinson Cavani, Ezequiel Lavezzi, Jorginho, Gonzalo Higuain \u2013 profitable sales, and falling short in the title race.<\/p>\n It was only last summer, after another championship bid slipped away, that ultras promised to return boss Spalletti\u2019s stolen Fiat Panda on the condition he left the club.<\/p>\n \u201cNow he deserves a Ferrari, not a Panda,\u201d laughs journalist Credendino.<\/p>\n Spalletti is not from Naples, but he shares that Neapolitan passion. After being sacked by Inter, he spent two years on his farm in Tuscany before taking on the Napoli job. Now he lives by the training ground, and has worked relentlessly to deliver the Scudetto.<\/p>\n Maradona was the face of Napoli\u2019s previous triumph but this time unfamiliar heroes have emerged \u2013 cleverly acquired by sporting director Cristiano Giuntoli and fuelled by Spalletti\u2019s coaching.<\/p>\n \u201cGiuntoli is the man of this miracle,\u201d says Credendino, despite some fans fretting when the club sold high-profile stars Kalidou Koulibaly, Lorenzo Insigne and Dries Mertens last year.<\/p>\n \u201cGiuntoli discovered Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, he discovered Victor Osimhen, Kim Min-jae,\u201d adds Cimmino. \u201cSpalletti makes this talent, makes this character. He can find the right keys to get the best of all the players. [Slovak midfielder Stanislav] Lobotka now looks like Iniesta, he looks like Xavi.\u201d<\/p>\n On a sold-out match day against Milan, outside the stadium that bears Maradona\u2019s name \u2013 an amphitheatre worthy of the Greeks who founded Neapolis, the \u201cnew city\u201d \u2013 kids sport the mask of top scorer Osimhen and Georgian flags fly for irrepressible winger Kvaratskhelia.<\/p>\n There are a sprinkling of Boca and Argentina jerseys too, and, if there is a likeness to Maradona in this team, it is 22-year-old Kvaratskhelia. Signed from Dinamo Batumi last summer, he\u2019s aptly been dubbed \u201cKvaradona\u201d, but Cimmino sees him like\u00a0Gianluigi Lentini at Torino\u00a0or Kaka during his Milan years.<\/p>\n \u201cHe is incredibly unpredictable in the field,\u201d adds Credendino. \u201cBut if Maradona was a demigod, Kvaratskhelia is the Pope. He has a totally different attitude, a totally different personality.\u201d<\/p>\n Kvaratskhelia plays with a rugged urgency, socks around his ankles, calves exposed. He cavorts, he conjures. Against Milan, without 21-goal forward Osimhen \u2013 a man Spalletti calls a \u201cdragon with two heads\u201d \u2013 he could not stop a vacant and disjointed Napoli sliding to a jarring 4-0 defeat, though that only delayed their title celebrations.<\/p>\n Neapolitans\u2019 relationship with their club is complex. Rather than the result, the fallout was about wider issues. Scuffles broke out between different sets of ultras in Curva B over how to protest against De Laurentiis\u2019 ticket prices and rules over which flags or banners they can bring into the ground.<\/p>\n \u201cDe Laurentiis has a really complicated relationship with the city because the supporters don\u2019t like the power, and he represented the power,\u201d explains Carignani.<\/p>\n \u201cBut we have to say that this victory is great for him because he is a great businessman, he put passion in the city but also his entrepreneurship view in managing the team and that has made the difference.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, though, supporters and the board will both celebrate Napoli\u2019s first title in more than three decades. The fans have been asking the city\u2019s patron saint San Gennaro for this moment, they have called on the spirit of Maradona. Residents have been saving up in preparation for the mother of all celebrations.<\/p>\n \u201cWe just feel this power, this emotion,\u201d says De Iesu. \u201cIt will be a great party all around the city, all the squares will be full of people.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNow we are enjoying it,\u201d adds Carignani. \u201cIt was worth the wait.\u201d<\/p>\n Banners celebrating Napoli\u2019s imminent Scudetto win hang in front of a San Gennaro mural in Napes<\/em><\/p>\n Stadio San Paolo was renamed after Diego Maradona in December 2020<\/em><\/p>\n READ ALSO<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"Maradona](\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/_129286375_gettyimages-1250769951.jpg\")
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