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 ..., 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.

‘The Subtle Design of Nothingness’ does not refer to emptiness, but to erasure. Not destruction, but neutralization. Not violence, but control disguised as care. The playground was never an innocent place. It was a refuge, yes, but also a frontier. Those who tell it as a lost paradise haven’t spent enough time there, or they passed through without paying the price. On the playground, you learn one thing quickly: nobody owes you anything. If you stay, it’s because you can hold your own. If you leave, it’s because you can. And it is this very possibility —leaving — that is disappearing today.

In recent years, they have started to color them. They call it ‘redevelopment’. New benches, shiny hoops, murals with words like ‘inclusion, community, future’. Then, inevitable, the logo. Or the corporate colors. Big enough to be seen. Not enough to be discussed. Don’t misunderstand me: the problem is not the color, nor the new hoop. The problem is when the gesture replaces the meaning. When the playground becomes a storefront and no longer a risk. The real problem is not the rebuilt playground. It is who controls its meaning.
The playground of the ghettos had an essence that is being lost today. Not because it was dirty, but because it was self-managed and now it is regulated, it was anonymous and now it is branded, it was risky and now it is sterilized, it was real and now it is narrated. The playground does not die when it is cleaned. It dies when it stops belonging to those who live it. Color does not kill. Symbolic control does. The original playground of the ghettos did not promise salvation. It didn’t sell redemption. It didn’t say: ‘we will help you’. It said: ‘Here, you are alone. If you want to stay, you must hold your own’.

This is the point that no institutional project today can tolerate. Because it is not marketable. It is not reassuring. It is not educationally correct. And above all: it is not controllable. The system cannot stand places where the truth is exposed. The system does not want men. It wants polite users. The playground of the ghettos, for better or worse, produced men. Because a real playground is not clean. It is alive. And where there is life, there is disorder. Those who put up the money say they do it for the kids. But the kids are not heard. They are managed. Control today no longer passes through explicit violence. It passes through permission. Through schedules. Through badges. Through the agreement signed ‘for their own good’. In the ghetto, if you weren’t okay, you left. Not here. Here you stay, even when something is eating you up inside, because leaving means losing everything.

This is not care. It is possession with good graphics. I know it’s not all like this. I know honest people exist, real coaches, clean realities. But these people do not appear. They have no color, no brand, no voice. They fade into the oblivion of silence, yet they shine in what is true good for the kids. I have met them. I respect them. When instead someone buys the right to ‘help’ in exchange for a brand, they are no longer giving: they are investing. They turn the kids’ lives into a display surface. And the problem is not only with those who put up the money, but with a system that allows it. Because when a system allows consent, space, and identity to be exchanged for a logo painted on the concrete, that system has already failed. When ‘good’ needs to be signed, it is no longer good: it is an image return. I have always followed the scent of the ‘real,’ countercurrent to the standardized social sense of today. A scent now lost in the labyrinths of power. I have always spotted ‘enough images’ around the playgrounds. In my experience, that ‘enough’ has always crossed the threshold of the tolerable.

This book was not born to convince. It was born to disturb. It doesn’t ask you to agree. It only asks you not to pretend you don’t see. Because there are places that do not die when they are destroyed, but when they are made safe.
And the playground, when it stops being a risk, stops being a possibility.