(From the website www.varesenoi.it) Those banners hanging above the north curve of the Masnago stadium hide names, faces and deeds that time has not forgotten.
On the contrary: he protected them, under a patina of dust, to let them be discovered by those who still today, especially today, are driven by an irrepressible desire to do so, to remove that dust to see what’s underneath, to dive in and behind them and then to put them all together, one after the other, recomposing chapter after chapter one of the most beautiful sporting fairy tales that destiny has ever written.
Thus began the journey that VareseNoi journalist Fabio Gandini transformed into “Varese Novel – The incredible story of Pallacanestro Varese in 80 portraits”, the book published by More News born from the desire to celebrate eighty years of life of Pallacanestro Varese (1945-2025), leaving a concrete sign made of love, culture, historiography and sense of belonging.
For those who love or have loved Pallacanestro Varese, Romanzo Varesino is a journey within oneself, within the awareness of a feeling that is born, resists and renews itself apparently without a reason. Only apparently, however: the reason is actually all written in pages that give life to a common heritage and identity so beautiful and compelling that it acts as a beacon that illuminates every present, as an immobile engine that no one can refute.
In the History of Varese Basketball there is much more than the account of sporting excellence and the numbers that have certified it: there is a complex story of visions and gambles, of feats so unique that they have sometimes changed the meaning of the sport and its parameters, of painful falls and tiring ascents, of magical nights full of light and of nights stingy with stars that a new dawn has erased, of loves, hatreds and rivalries, of professions of faith eternal and treacherous betrayals. In its “pages” there is the evolution of the world as we have known it over the last 80 years, the same world that this team dared to challenge and win, “forgetting” to be the expression of a very simple provincial reality.
80 portraits, it was said: 80 players. From John Mascioni to Colbey Ross, passing through the black and white darlings like Sergio Marelli and Tonino Zorzi, to the heroes of the first championships, to the Myths of the 70s, from Dino Meneghin and Aldo Ossola downwards, to the “beautiful” of the 80s, flags like Cecco Vescovi and Max Ferraiuolo, and to the terrible kids of the 90s, just say Andrea Meneghin and Gianmarco Pozzecco to understand, up to our century and the latest protagonists such as Giancarlo Ferrero.
They are all there, or almost everyone: the great Italians and foreigners who have entered our hearts, from Lajos Toth to the extraordinary and out-of-scale Manuel Raga and Bob Morse, without forgetting neither the icons such as Corny Thompson, Arijan Komazec and Veljko Mrsic, nor the talented Americans of the Castiglioni era, nor the unforgettable Mike Green, Dusan Sakota, Bryant Dunston and Adrian Banks, nor finally the latest idols such as Kristjan Kangur and Aleksa Avramovic.
We start from a second class carriage of a train that chugs along the Venetian plain, where an American boy cries over a defeat and the great sense of responsibility he feels on his shoulders, and we arrive in the confines of a changing room, where a captain tries to show the future to his teammates who have wickedly taken away the present. They are not biographies: they are stories, sometimes taken against the light, human and sporting, existential and competitive traits of heroes and anti-heroes, small and large parts on the sporting stage of this city which together have formed something unrepeatable: the History of Varese Basketball, which is none other than the most beautiful novel that has ever been written about Varese.
To demonstrate its uniqueness, Romanzo Varesino has also embraced an unprecedented graphic path, conceived by the Ticino artist Patrizia Pfenninger, along which the typography has become a way to underline the parable of each character, as if it were itself a narrative element. The result is a mosaic of 80 different fonts, each of which refers to an adjective which in turn refers to a characteristic of the protagonist player, in a sort of double story that teases the soul and brain through the eyes.
The book – which enjoys the patronage of the Lombardy Region, the Province of Varese, the Municipality of Varese and the support of Pallacanestro Varese, Il Basket Siamo Noi, Albini e Castelli, Agricola Home & Garden, Beccaria, Cascina Rocchetto and Econord – will be released on 21 December 2025, just in time to be a Christmas gift for all red and white hearts.
From today, however, enthusiasts and interested parties will be able to pre-order it on the website dedicated to the project, www.romanzovaresino.it, at the price of 20 euros.
