Tomorrow the football world championship will start, Qatar 2022 but without our Italy.
8 years have passed between Italy and Uruguay and the last memory we all carry with us is Luis Suarez's bite on Giorgio Chiellini, symbol of a bad match and a bitter elimination from the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.
Bitter elimination after a promising start with victory over England.
The national football team has not qualified for the world cup since then.
After the disaster with the failure to qualify in 2018, we never, ever thought it could happen again.
Since then, Italian pride and the desire to show our football to the whole world was great and after a show of strength and unity between team and nation with the victory of the 2021 European Championship, imagining such a scenario still remains today hard.
And so, once again, we'll have to wait another 4 years before seeing the blue shine.
Qatar 2022 will not be a football World Cup for us but quite the opposite.
For us Italians, the World Cup also means warm, ice-cold beer, overcrowded bars with big screens, pizza parties with friends or trips with the radio blaring, and it is therefore already quite complicated to accept that a World Cup can be played in winter, if this we add that our national team will not be present, what the heck of a world cup is it?
Thus, with nostalgia, we find comfort in memories thanks to old memorabilia and symbols of one of the most loved world cup ever. Italy 1990 World Cup.
June 8, 1990, a stadium packed with enthusiastic fans greets the world soccer champions at the San Siro stadium in Milan. After months of waiting, budgets blatantly overrun, the expectations for the football orgy are enormous. The public exalts the underdog Cameroon, the "indomitable African lions" repay him by beating Argentina 1 to 0 of a very angry Maradona.
On the notes of the ubiquitous hymn "An Italian summer" (International version to be Number one), optimism flies with a myriad of gadgets of all kinds as long as they are marked with CIAO, the most Scrausa and at the same time most loved mascot in history of the World Cup. Among the many products, FIAT announces a panda in a special series, with wheels in the shape of a soccer ball, carpeting and blue seats with the CIAO brand that looks like something out of a Mickey Mouse comic.
We show it to you, thus recalling indelible moments of an Italian summer.
Video directed and created by Pietro Gabriele.