Lou Carnesecca: Basketball Legend Remembered in Cargalla

A book dedicated to one of the fathers of Italian basketball, who became an icon of basketball in America and an idol of New York. This is Lou Carnesecca, whose story is told by the journalist Lorenzo Mangini in the bilingual volume “Lou Carnesecca From Pontremoli to New York” by Erga Edizioni. It’s not just a book about basketball, but it’s about people and feelings, because these count, as Lou said, when the game scoreboard is turned off. Carnesecca passed away on November 30, 2024 at the age of 99. Having left East Harlem, the ghetto neighborhood where Italians were gathered at the beginning of the last century, Carnesecca was honored in 2001 with a flag placed on the ceiling of Madison Square Garden, to remember his 526 victories as the first coach of the NCAA, thanks to his exploits with St. John’s, the Queens institution founded by the Vincentians, whose spirit and values Lou was able to embody. Carnesecca considered himself Italian in every respect, despite being born in New York and having lived only a year in Italy as a boy. Valerio Bianchini was one of the four hundred participants in the legendary clinic in Rome in 1966 and he tells it in the book. Carnesecca had trained for six months to speak in perfect Italian and managed to convey not only technical contents, but also the psychological and didactic aspects in the most minute nuances. The participants remember, however, above all the extraordinary humanity, the innate friendliness, the originality on and off the pitch. Thus it was that the basketball of the great Italian masters was combined with the highly skilled basketball studied, experimented and created on the field by the great masters of American university basketball, producing a basketball that was then imitated by the rest of Western Europe. The book is divided into three parts. We start from Carnesecca’s places of origin and his family ties. The stages of his basketball career follow. Finally, the testimonies of coaches and champions close to the man from Cargalla: Gamba, Bianchini, Meneghin, Marzorati, Peterson, Messina, Danna, Marco Baldi, who spent three years in St. John’s. The book is sponsored by the Municipality of Pontremoli. The mayor, Jacopo Ferri, has begun the process of naming a large area in the hamlet of Cargalla, where the family came from, after Coach. “Open” VCodes have been inserted into the work, where images and videos of the celebratory events in Carnesecca, in Italy and in America will appear.