Now even the Roman bus drivers honour him

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.