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Breaking stories

Now even the Roman bus drivers honour him

Saturday, June 30, 2012

By David Shonfield

Mario Balotelli profile

A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. Mario Balotelli’s personality is difficult to understand, but his complex, contradictory upbringing goes some way to explain it — as well as his unique position in Italian football. The young man with the world at his feet was lucky enough to find a caring successful middle-class family after essentially being abandoned by his natural mother. But until the age of 18 he grew up with the uncertainty and the stigma of not being properly adopted and not having the right to citizenship in the country where he was born.

He also grew up in Brescia, a tough city which over the years become one of the strongholds of the Northern League, a right-wing political party that has never been shy of playing the race card — against foreigners, and against immigrants from the south. Not the easiest environment if you are a black kid born in Sicily and part of a white family — and also when you learn that your mother’s mother was forced to flee her home because she was a Jew.

The Balotelli family’s background was reported in passing when the Italian football team visited Auschwitz before this Euro 2012 tournament started. The reality was a lot starker than you might think from reading the papers.

Young Mario grew up knowing that his mother Silvia kept a little packet of letters stowed away under a bed at home. They were letters without an address, unreadable in parts because there were lines blocked out in blue ink. In time she told him the story – just as she had previously explained it to Cristina, Giovanni and Corrado, her other three children.

The letters had been left to her by her own mother, born in Silesia, the German-speaking part of Poland before the war. Silvia’s mother fell in love with an Italian pilot and escaped. Her sister and her parents were not so fortunate. All were taken by the Nazis and perished in one of the death camps. The only evidence of their fate remains those heavily-censored letters: even the place they were killed is unknown.

Balotelli owes much to his older brothers, who have acted as his agents as well as running their own consultancy business. Their company Pandora Services provides import-export services — market research, order management, advice on joint ventures and the like, particularly in south-east Europe. Corrado is an expert on the Balkan economies with an Irish connection — he attended Dublin City University as well as the University of Pavia.

Mario’s sister Cristina was already 19 when he became part of her family at the age of 3. In many ways she has been like another mother for him — when he ran into trouble with the journalists and paparazzi during his time with Inter, it was Cristina who sorted him out and she was said to be the one person he would always listen to. It may help that she’s a journalist herself — she has worked for business channels in Italy and the USA as well as Italy’s leading business daily Il Sole 24 Ore.

“He likes to be among people who don’t judge him,” says Cristina of Balotelli. It’s a problem, because wherever he goes Mario seems to invite judgements. He’s given to making extravagant gestures which has earned him publicity, not always favourable, but like other footballers with an African background he does have a social conscience.

His visit and support for a children’s refuge in the northern Brazilian city of Salvador was not a stunt. He spent a week there at Christmas four years ago when he was still an unknown, staying at a Catholic community centre by the sea at Itapoa, and has remained in touch ever since. It was his brother Giovanni’s idea as part of an exchange arrangement with the Italian boy scouts.

Claudia Strada, one of the Italian nuns at the centre, describes him as “a simple lad who was at his ease here”, much as others do when Balotelli is out of the limelight.

He is not the first footballer to display a completely different character in private compared to his public image. In Italy, that image suffered badly because of his lack of discipline and respect for managers and other players — but also because he wouldn’t put up with the racist abuse which you still hear from the terraces during many games in Serie A.

Balotelli is now in an unique position. Italy has had its black sporting heroes — for example Fiona May — but hardly ever in football, and never with his profile. The two goals in Thursday night’s semi-final against Germany won’t change everything, but afterwards there were buses in Rome that changed their destination indicators to Super Mario. And if you can win over a Roman bus driver you can win over anyone.

© Irish Examiner Ltd. All rights reserved

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