A minute's silence. A minute to honor Davide Astori. The Italian player, captain of Fiorentina, who died unexpectedly at 31 in the night between Saturday and Sunday.
This is what the audience at Nou Camp in Barcelona did as tribute to him before Barcelona took on Atletico Madrid. This is what UEFA has decided to do before every match of the next days of the Champions and Europa League.
Astori was in his hotel room at Udine where his team should have played against Udinese for their Serie A match. Stefano Pioli, the manager of Fiorentina, has said that he and the players were all in the restaurant room of the Hotel 'La di Moret' to have their breakfast in the morning.
But Davide wasn't there. 'Where is Davide? He's the only one missing' was his question. And, while one stockman was going upstairs to wake up Davide, the other players chanted, laughing, "The captain will pay the fine". There was a lot to smile, because Astori was so meticulous and punctual that none could expect a delay from him in coming to the breakfast!
This was one of the reasons he was the captain.
The stockman, as reported in La Nazione newspaper, the most important of Florence, knocked the door of the room number 704 for one, two, three and four times.
He came down the stairs with a white pale face and the laughs of the guys suddenly turned into terror.
Every Angel is terror, wrote the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. The same terror that came over the room when the concierge of the hotel opened the door with his passpartout and saw that Davide was still on the bed with his eyes closed: an Angel.
A minute of respect. A minute of empathy and community with his wife Francesca and their little daughter Vittoria, aged two.
There's no time for disrespectful conjectures and suspects about doping or things like that, vomited on the socials or on some worthless media just to gain a click.
No time for polemics about the opportunity of playing the Sunday matches in Italy of Serie A and Serie B after this terrible loss, of letting the show going on.
If we aren't able to stop our circus even when a dad, a husband, a boy dies, we are losing our humanity.
I repeat: no time for useless words. Only respect and silence, if possible for more than one minute.
