When Nicola Pietrangeli told the'autogol with Edwige Fenech.

In September 2021, shortly before his 88th birthday, Nicola Pietrangeli was interviewed by Corriere della Sera ahead of the anniversary. The great former tennis player had also told some details related to his love life. “In my life, I have loved four times – he had been keen to remark -: Susanna, the mother of my three children, Lorenza, who left me because I did not marry her, Licia, with whom I still do not understand why it ended, and Paola, 60, with whom we are dating. I don&#8217t want to come across as macho, but dressed in white, against the red or green background of a field, I made my figure…”.

During the same chat Pietrangeli had then revealed a backstory related to one of the actresses who most challenged the adolescence of Italian males: Edwige Fenech. “At a time when I was free, and she was free, I went out with her – the tale of the captain of Italy, which in 1976 won a historic Davis Cup in Chile -. I take her to dinner, at the next table is Luca di Montezemolo, I introduce him. I shot myself in the foot but what was I doing, pretending I didn’t know him? ”. Between the former Ferrari executive and Fenech, then, there was a long liaison, which ended a few years ago.

The racquet star, the first Italian to win a Grand Slam tournament, has died at’age 92. Born in Tunis in 1933, Pietrangeli won Roland Garros in singles in 1959 and 1960, writing Belpaese tennis history. Also in the Paris tournament he reached the final on two other occasions, in 1958 and 1961, and won the doubles tournament in 1959 paired with Orlando Sirola. World No. 3 in 1959 and 1960, he was a specialist and great dominator on clay and became the’icon of Italian tennis in the world and brought many youngsters to this splendid sport.

Pietrangeli, recently hospitalized at Gemelli Polyclinic, where he had undergone hip surgery in late 2024, had lost his long-suffering 59-year-old son Giorgio a few months ago. “Today Italian tennis loses its greatest symbol, and I lose a friend – wrote Federtennis President Angelo Binaghi in a note. &#8217 Nicola Pietrangeli was not just a champion: he was the first to teach us what winning really meant, on and off the court. He was the starting point for everything our tennis has become. With him we realized that we too could compete with the world, that dreaming big was no longer a gamble”.