Previously published by Rizzoli in 2003.

On the occasion of the release of the film directed by and starring Neri Marcorè, the splendid novel by the late Roberto Perrone returns to move us and make us smile with an unusual and wonderful friendship, able to reshuffle the cards and change forever the life of two strange, unforgettable heroes.

Walter Vismara is thirty-six years old and is an accountant in a small textile factory in Milan. His is a quiet existence, made up of small repeated gestures: every day behind a desk to make ends meet and on Sundays a cinema or a theater with his sister Elvira.  When he is fired, however, that intimate universe of established habits begins to creak. The new seal company where he finds work is dynamic and modern, but the boss, the cavalier Tosetto, has a real obsession with football, or rather, for the fòlber, as he says.  Every Thursday, he subjected the employees to exhausting training in view of the meeting of the year, the game "bachelor-married" at the Breda stadium in Sesto.

Vismara hates football, knows nothing about this sport, and always ends up being a goalkeeper. So, colleagues start teasing him by calling him "Zamora", like the legendary Real Madrid player, whom he, of course, has never heard of. Every week, the newly hired accountant takes to the field to undergo that public humiliation, but he is soon tired of the jokes of his companions and decides to follow his sister’s advice: take "repetitions" from Giorgio Cavazzoni, former Milan goalkeeper who squandered the earnings of a brilliant career in women and alcohol, but who is perhaps the only one able to help him. 

"In his life of established habits, of little gestures repeated over and over again, Walter didn’t feel alone at all. He lived well, with his sister Elvira in the large house bequeathed by his parents, peace to their souls, missed for a few years. He was not an ugly man, although he did not consider himself interesting, he was not ignorant, although not particularly educated. He was a 36-year-old Milanese accountant, young enough to think he could still start a family, but certainly not imagine a short football career."