ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

‘If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants’.
- Isaac Newton
‘Hey, there is some guy standing on our shoulders’.
- Giants

A 'Coffee Table Book' - a book, first and foremost, to tell myself what I cannot see but deeply feel: the Mystery of Basketball. All I had to do was stand at the edge of the court and try to give that mystery a visible face. I began searching within myself for words and visual imagery that could tell the hidden story - a task I believed to be impossible. Even though writing may come easier now, with age and experience, it was still incredibly difficult to give visual form to a feeling.

I wanted to magnify those quiet, private moments of intimacy - or the absence of it. I’m drawn to capturing the small, subtle, seemingly unimportant moments and presenting them as grand, meaningful, and full of weight. The body language, the knowing eyes, always gazing at something just beyond the frame of the court, suggest interiority, complexity, and a life that continues even after the viewer has moved on.

It all starts from a ‘gaze’ that has learned to see, even where everything seems extinguished - and from a basketball court, the last one visited: the one in Mariano Comense, Como, Italy. A place marked by prejudice and preconceptions, often ignored superficially or judged arrogantly. Yet, within this deliberate fog, a silent voice rises: the free and stubborn cry of young people who do not inhabit the geographical margins, but the mental ones of certain ‘visions’ of the country. But it does not speak of just one place. It also tells of many other courts scattered around the world, different and distant, yet similar in their thirst for expression, identity, and redemption.

These pages are a gesture of listening. An act of gratitude toward all those voices who, in silence, keep playing, resisting, existing. This book is an invitation to bring wisdom into the world - the kind of wisdom that listens, that sees, that knows how to break free from the fences of the mind. It speaks of the real world, the one we so often fail to notice, or choose not to see, because it lies too far from what we’ve been taught to accept as real. But none of these words, none of these insights, originate from me. Wisdom has always been here. Woven into the silent gestures and forgotten faces of countless generations - passed down, practiced, whispered, and lived by sages, both great and small. Many of them walk beside us, invisible, unheard, muted by our prejudice, blurred by the noise of the modern world. I see luminous souls moving quietly among the crowd with the grace of the ordinary. They themselves do not know how extraordinary they are. No, I do not possess wisdom. I have only tried to translate it into words simple enough for me to understand. I am merely a vessel, an interpreter for the wise. In truth, they are the real authors of this book - I am only the one who presses the keys, who prints the images, who attempts to give shape to what has always existed.

I would like to thank the co-authors of this book - Gabriele Sironi, Fabio La Rosa, Riccardo Sironi, Walter Ferraioli - for their invaluable contributions and for the deep passion they bring to basketball and the street courts.

My heartfelt thanks go to all the boys from street basketball courts I met during my travels across different countries, who gave me not only their interviews and thoughts, but above all precious fragments of their souls - intimate and authentic expressions that I have had the honor to preserve and share within the pages of this book - you were there, even in silence.

Thank you to Gus Andy, whose eye turned fleeting moments into lasting echoes. Your photographs gave form to the invisible.

I am also deeply grateful to all the ‘great’ coaches I have encountered along my path, from whom I have learned not only technical knowledge, but also spiritual understanding - practices of meditation, breathing, and inner stillness.

Last but not least, I am thankful to the friends who took the time to read through my early drafts in their entirety and offered many useful suggestions, including ....

To all of them - and to those unnamed voices, gestures, and presences that silently shaped this journey - my heartfelt thanks.This book exists because of you. It carries many hands and hearts.