in night shifts to defend the San Teodoro from mobsters.
Briganti’s biggest match would therefore take place
in exile, 10 miles to the north, in a modest little village
that in no way resembles the club’s home neighborhood
of Librino, a sprawling high-rise district—“Catania’s
Bronx”—that ranks among Europe’s poorest.
Panebianco, 22 and short, with a military fade and limbs
like dirigibles, expected these hardships would galvanize
his teammates against San Gregorio, which they had
already steamrolled 49–14 in the regular season. And with
80-odd fans cheering them on
from the Rizzo’s shallow bleach-
ers, Briganti started well, repel-
ling its rival’s attacks in wave
after wave of crunching tackles.
But offensively Briganti
lumbered. Players threw away
possession and rarely threat-
ened a try, rugby’s touchdown.
San Gregorio kicked one three-
point penalty, then, in the sec-
ond half, another. Rather than
release Briganti, the pressures
of the day were strangling the
club into unforced errors and
turnovers. Panebianco, a gifted
attacker, barely saw the ball.
Briganti scored a consolation
try, but when the match finished
6–5, he understood that mentally
his team was a work in progress.
At first Panebianco had seen
complacency in this result, as if
Briganti had already written a
triumphant ending into the story
of its annus horribilis. But he
managed to look past the sting.
His team’s presence, he knew,
was salvation alone, from poverty
and from an underworld that has
ruled Sicily for centuries. Win
or lose, Panebianco knew that
without rugby his life could have
taken a far darker path.R
ICCARDO PANEBIANCO moved his growing family
f rom t heir home in Cata nia to Wiesbaden, Ger ma ny,
near Frankfurt, in 1999. A year later, his wife, Antonella,
gave birth to their fourth child, Alessio, and for a while
they lived frugally but well off Riccardo’s construction-
worker salary.
But eventually Riccardo’s job fell through—and one
more child arrived—so in 2006 the Panebiancos, with
no other choice, returned to Italy. They crammed into
a small unit on the eighth f loor of a giant, magnolia-
colored apartment block, right where Librino meets the
Sicilian countryside.Librino was no Frankfurt. Its 70,000 residents had
no high school, and most stores were shuttered. Every
other adult was jobless. Buildings not four decades
old lay in ruin. Attenuated palms lined the median of
the Panebiancos’ street, Viale Moncada, and through
these palms young Alessio Panebianco stared out to
the Mediterranean Sea, imagining he was somewhere
remote and exotic.
It was a dream easily shattered. The street below
was potholed. The neighbors tossed trash and old
furniture out of their apart-
ment windows. It was as if
the entire neighborhood had
fallen down, and nobody had
bothered to pick it back up.
Librino began very differ-
ently. Kenzo ̄ Ta n g e , o n e o f t h e
most inf luential architects ofthe 20th century, developed the cluster of high-rises
in 1969, envisioning a utopian satellite for Catanians
who’d suffered wartime ruin under Benito Mussolini.
He plotted homes for 100,000 people across a series of
concentric rings, in the middle of which would sit stores,
a cinema and a swimming pool. Catania’s nearby airport
and a highway connecting Librino to other major cities
would link up with ample employment opportunities.
But throughout the 1970s, Italy was slammed by eco-
nomic crises, unemployment and far-left and far-right
terrorism. Industry on Sicily died, and Librino’s transport
links never materialized. Nor did the cinema or theSPORTS
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MAY 2022
75GIMME SHELTER
Panebianco ( left) and
his Briganti brethren
find community at the
San Teodoro, and in its
kitchen-library-café space.