Luca Caioli - Messi: 2022 Updated Edition

24 June 1987

A cream-coloured block built in the nineteenth-century style occupies a rectangular plot at number 1249 Visasoro street. It is the Italian hospital dedicated to Giuseppe Garibaldi, who is also honoured with a statue in Rosarios Plaza de Italia. He is a popular figure, known as the Hero of the Two Worlds, because during his exile in South America he fought battles along the length of the Paran river. In those parts his Red Shirts left their mark wherever they went: for example, in the names of the Rosario and Buenos Aires hospitals, which were founded by political exiles, supporters of Mazzini and Garibaldi, and their workers unions. The Rosario hospital complex was inaugurated on 2 October 1892 in order to serve the Italian community, which at that time represented more than 70 per cent of the immigrants who had arrived from the other side of the Atlantic. Today it has one of the best maternity units in the city. It is here that the story of Lionel Messi, third child of the Messi-Cuccittini family, begins at six oclock one winter morning.

His father, Jorge, is 29 years old and is the head of department at steelmaking company Acindar, in Villa Constitucin, some 50 kilometres outside Rosario. Celia, 27, works in a magnet manufacturing workshop. They met as youngsters in the Las Heras neighbourhood, previously known as Estado de Israel and today known as the San Martn neighbourhood, in the southern area of the city, where the residents are humble and hardworking. Celias father Antonio is a mechanic he repairs fridges, air conditioning units and other electrical items. Her mother, also called Celia, has worked for many years as a cleaning lady. Jorges father Eusebio makes his living in construction; his mother, Rosa Mara, is also a cleaning lady. Little more than 100 metres separate their homes. Like many other local families, they have Italian and Spanish ancestors. The surname Messi comes from the Italian town of Porto Recanati, in the province of Macerata, which saw the birth of the poet Giacomo Leopardi and the tenor Beniamino Gigli. It is from there that one Angelo Messi departed on one of the many boats bound for America at the end of the nineteenth century, in search of a better life in the new world, like so many other emigrants carrying third-class tickets. The Cuccittinis also have Italian roots, on their fathers side. Despite these families originating from the humid pampas, they eventually came to settle in the city.

At 305 kilometres from the capital city of Buenos Aires, and with around a million inhabitants, the city of Rosario is the largest in the Santa Fe province, extending along the banks of the Paran river. The Costanera promenade runs alongside the river until the Nuestra Seora del Rosario bridge, which crosses the waters and the islands in the river and connects the city with Victoria. The Paran has always been an important highway in the river trade: from here, many agricultural products are exported to the whole of the Mercosur like soya, which, in recent times, has brought wealth to this region and transformed the areas urban fabric. New buildings, skyscrapers and incredible villas are springing up in front of a beach of fine sand deposited by the river. And yet, Rosario remains the patriotic city par excellence. School groups dressed in white pose for photos at the base of the monument of the flag, built in the old Soviet style and inaugurated in 1957 to mark the place where General Manuel Belgrano ordered the raising of the national flag for the first time, on 27 February 1812.

Rosario is a city of the grandchildren of immigrants, of slums and country houses. But let us leave aside the stories of immigration, the mix of cultures, languages and traditions, which are plentiful in Argentina, and return to Jorge and Celia, who fell in love and began dating at such a young age.

On 17 June 1978 they marry in the Corazn de Mara church. The country is thoroughly absorbed in the World Cup so much so that the newlyweds, honeymooning in Bariloche, still ensure that they catch the Argentina-Brazil match taking place in Rosario. The result is nil-nil. Eight days later, at River Plates Monumental stadium in Buenos Aires, Csar Luis Menottis Argentine national team, known in Argentina as the Albiceleste (literally meaning white and sky blue), beats Holland 31 to win the World Cup. Collective mania ensues. Fillol, Olgun, Galvn, Passarella, Tarantini, Ardiles, Gallego, Ortiz, Bertoni, Luque and Kempes seem to banish all memories of the Proceso de Reorganizacin Nacional (period of military rule) the deceased dissidents, the more than 30,000 disappeared citizens, and the tortures and horrors of General Jorge Rafael Videlas ferocious and bloody military dictatorship, which was instigated on 24 March 1976 with the dismissal of Isabel Pern. On the streets of Buenos Aires you can still see the words Inmundo mundial dirty world (cup) painted beneath the green of a football pitch and the inscription 1978.

Two years after the coup dtat, the country is still under a reign of terror, but life goes on. Celia and Jorge become parents: Rodrigo Martn is born on 9 February 1980, and their second son, Matas Horacio, is born in one of the darkest hours of the countrys history. The date is 25 June 1982, just eleven days after the end of the Falklands War. Argentina, defeated, counts her losses (649 dead) and her casualties (more than 1,000), as well as all the men who will never forget those two and a half months under fire. Young, inexperienced and ill-equipped, volunteers convinced to enlist by a cheap patriotism in order to re-conquer the Falklands archipelago, occupied by the British in a distant 1833. Operation Rosario, the name of the key Argentine invasion led by General Leopoldo Galtieri on 2 April 1982, was the umpteenth attempt at distraction orchestrated by the military junta, intended to divert attention from the disasters of the economic programme introduced in 1980 policies that had led to 90 per cent inflation, recession in all areas of the economy, a rise in external debt for both private companies and the State, the devaluation of salaries, and in particular the progressive impoverishment of the middle class (a characteristic of the countrys history which stands out as compared with other Latin American nations). The war should have made the country forget the dramas of the past and engulfed the people in a wave of patriotism, but Galtieri was not prepared for the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, nor had he taken into account the British army.