From Verona in Italy, Richard Hough charts the highs and lows of following his local football team. In this Notes from Verona long read he remembers the life and times of Giuliano Giuliani and the tragic circumstances surrounding his premature death in 1996.
The tragic and little-known story of Giuliano Giuliani is one that I’ve wanted to tell for some time, but I’ve never quite found the right moment.
Until now.
Unless you’re extremely well versed in Italian football of the 1980s and 1990s, you’ve probably never even heard of Giuliano Giuliani.
That, in itself, is a tragedy.
This is the story of an Italian goalkeeper who was rated among the very best of his generation, regarded by some as second only to the legendary Walter Zenga.
A player who made 118 appearances for Hellas Verona at the height of the club’s success in the late 1980s.
A goalkeeper who won the UEFA Cup with Napoli in 1989 and was a key figure as Napoli won its second-ever scudetto the following year.
As if that wasn’t enough, he was the only Italian to save two Maradona penalties!
How is it possible that “Maradona’s goalkeeper” has been so completely erased from our collective memory. Even the Gentleman Ultra’s editorial team hadn’t heard of him! Nor does John Foot’s opus on the history of Italian football, usually such a reliable reference tool on the events and personalities of that era, contain a single reference on the subject of Giuliano Giuliani.
So, what happened to Maradona’s goalkeeper, and why was the footballing world so quick to forget him?
Breaking through at Como
Giuliano Giuliani was born in Rome in 1958. Following the breakup of his parents’ marriage, Giuliano went to live with his aunt and uncle in Arezzo, Tuscany, while his mother built a new life for herself in Germany. Although well cared for in Arezzo, Giuliano carried the scars of a traumatic childhood and a violent father. Separated from his brother when his parents split up, he had a third sibling who he barely knew.
Those who got to know Giuliano would describe him as quiet but with a certain self-confidence. He was thoughtful, cultured and intelligent – smarter than the average footballer – though prone to a certain melancholy. Just before his professional football career took off, he had enrolled in the Faculty of Economics at the University of Siena. Later in his career he would become friends with the abstract artist Giorgio Olivieri.
Giuliano spent four formative years with his local club Arezzo in Serie C. He was then spotted by Serie A newcomers Como, making his debut against Torino in November 1980 at the relatively tender age (for a Serie A goalkeeper anyway) of just 22.
Over the next five seasons he made 135 appearances for Como, as they shifted between Serie A and Serie B. During this time Giuliano developed a reputation as reliable if unspectacular goalkeeper.
But, in the spring of 1983, news arrived from Germany that his mother had been strangled to death by her new partner. She thought she had escaped domestic violence but it was, as one observer poignantly described it, simply an illusion.
Somehow Giuliano managed to suppress the turmoil and pain of his family life. That ability to control his emotions, to remain focussed in the face of adversity, was one of the attributes that made him such a formidable goalkeeper.
In fact, the high point of his time at Como came in the 1984-85 season. With nine points from the opening nine fixtures (in the days when it was only two points for a win), it was a promising start for the newly promoted minnows. That season, Giuliano kept clean sheets in the both encounters with eventual champions, Hellas Verona, and equalled the long-standing record of AC Milan legend Fabio Cudicini, conceding just two goals at home all season, as Como remained undefeated at home.
Despite the promising start and the strong home record, Como finished the season in a disappointing but respectable 11th place. Despite the trauma in his personal life, Giuliano was destined for bigger things.
In the footsteps of a legend
By now Giuliano Giuliani was attracting the attention of some of Italy’s biggest clubs.
In the summer of 1985, he was signed by Hellas Verona, the newly crowned champions of Italy, as a replacement for the charismatic Claudio Garella, who was on his way south to Napoli, where they were busy building a team capable of winning the Italian championship around a certain Diego Armando Maradona.
Over the next three seasons, Giuliano made 86 appearances for Hellas Verona, including rare appearances for the club in both the European and UEFA cups. Giuliano was a consistent and decisive presence for Hellas during that unprecedented period when they were competing at the highest level of domestic and European football. According to Osvaldo Bagnoli, who coached him for three years at Verona, Giuliani was “an outstanding goalkeeper,” second only to the great Walter Zenga and Stefano Tacconi.
Following the highs of 1985, however, by the late 1980s the Hellas star was beginning to fade.
In one particularly humiliating defeat to Napoli, Giuliano was on the receiving end of a five-nil thumping that included one of Maradona’s most iconic goals, as the diminutive Argentine lobbed the sprawling keeper from over 40 yards.
By the end of the 1987-88 season, Walter Zenga was being tipped to replace Garella at Napoli, with Giuliano lined up to replace Zenga at Inter. Everything was in place. Giuliano had even signed a pre-contract agreement with Inter. However, the network of deals eventually fell through and it was Giuliano who was on his way south to Napoli, following once again in the footsteps of the legendary Garella.
With a beautiful wife and a child on the way, Giuliano seemed to have put the traumas of the past behind him and was emerging as one of the most effective goalkeepers of his generation.
The loneliness of a goalkeeper
For Paolo Tomaselli, an aspiring young goalkeeper growing up in Treviso in the 1980s, Giuliano Giuliani was more than just a goalkeeper. He was a hero. Paolo even wrote a letter to Giuliano to tell him how much he admired him and how he wanted to be like him when he was older.
Paolo is now a respected sports journalist and the letter he wrote to Giuliano as a child is reproduced in the forward to his award-winning biography, Giuliano Giuliani, più solo di un portiere [“Giuliano Giuliani, more lonely than a goalkeeper”].
Recently, I spoke to Paolo about his childhood memories of Giuliano.
“Giuliano was a goalkeeper just like me. He had curly hair and rosy cheeks – just like mine! I even had the same brand of gloves as him. Hellas had just won the scudetto and were competing in the UEFA Cup. Giuliano was a big part of my life. Then, as I got older, he just seemed to disappear.”
As Paolo explained, Giuliano got married on 5 June 1988 in the church of San Mamolo in Bologna. Raffaella Del Rosario was a model and television personality who appeared on various light entertainment shows like L’Appello del martedì, Calciomania and Casa Mosca. She met Giuliano while he was on a retreat with the National Olympic team at Milanello. It was love at first sight. They moved in together almost immediately and got married soon after. Beautiful and self-confident, she was the quintessential WAG, before the term had even been coined.
Although they’d barely arrived in Napoli, Giuliano and Raffaella spent their honeymoon with Maradona, his partner Claudia and an entourage of friends and family on the idyllic South Pacific island of Mo’orea. Remembering the honeymoon years later, Raffaella described Maradona as “Crazy”. “He always dances, day and night. He never sleeps. He performs in Polynesian skirts, he never sits still, whenever he can he plays football on the beach.” Of Maradona’s renowned excesses, his cocaine habit, Raffaela suspected nothing.
The following year Giuliano was a guest at Maradona’s wedding in Buenos Aires. Maradona chartered a jet for 250 friends and teammates to travel to Argentina for the wedding. As well as football stars and athletes, the guest list included tv celebrities and pop stars. Even Carlos Menem, the Argentine President, was invited! During three days of partying, the 1,200 guests were kept entertained by, amongst other things, an 80-piece orchestra! Raffaella, heavily pregnant with their daughter, did not attend.
Maradona personally ensured that his teammates were well looked after. In every possible way!
For Giuliano, attending Maradona’s wedding would have profound consequences.
Winners and losers
In 1989, Giuliano won the UEFA Cup with Napoli. Paolo Tomaselli has a particularly vivid memory of Giuliano’s time at Napoli. He remembers his childhood hero running half the length of the pitch to celebrate with Alessandro Renica. The defender had just scored Napoli’s third goal in the second leg of the UEFA Cup quarter-finals against Juventus. Juventus had won the first leg 2-0 and the game was deep into extra time when Renica scored the dramatic late winner. “No one had ever seen Giuliano run before”, Tomaselli explains, “let alone in such a raw display of emotion”.
Napoli would go on to beat Bayern Munich in a semi-final that would be immortalised as the backdrop for Maradona’s iconic (allegedly cocaine-fuelled) Life is LIfe warmup (though there is some dispute about where that event actually took place). Napoli then beat Stuttgart in the final, but Renica’s late goal against Juventus would be the defining moment of the season.
The following year Giuliano played a decisive role in the Napoli team that won that historic second scudetto – playing with a badly dislocated finger for the last six weeks of the campaign. A banner in the Neapolitan dialect at the time proclaimed:
“quant’è bello o primm ammore, ma o sicondo è cchiu bello ancora”
[how beautiful is the first love, but the second is even more beautiful]
For Giuliano, winning the scudetto with Napoli marked the high point of his career. He was about to enter the final tragic chapter of his life.
As the Maradona era in Napoli was drawing to a triumphant climax, Giuliano knew that his destiny lay elsewhere.
Despite his almost flawless contribution on the pitch, at the end of the 1990 season, Giuliano was transferred to Udinese, newly relegated to Serie B.
It was here, during a routine annual medical, that he received the devastating news that he was HIV positive.
He broke the news to his wife, without revealing the true nature of his illness. He also confessed that he had betrayed her at Maradona’s wedding. She was, understandably, devastated.
A disease without cure
Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is the most advanced stage of Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), an infection that targets the body’s white blood cells weakening the immune system. There is no effective cure, though with proper medical treatment the illness can be managed.
HIV and AIDS entered the mainstream lexicon in mid 1980s, when doctors in America began to see increasing numbers of healthy young men presenting with an unusually deadly form of pneumonia. Back then, AIDS was fatal for virtually everyone diagnosed with it. By 1991, it had claimed more than 100,000 lives. The ignorance and shame surrounding the disease compounded the pain and suffering of those infected, who were often stigmatised as in some way morally deficient.
Rock Hudson, the first international celebrity to acknowledge publicly that he had AIDS, died of the illness in 1985. In 1991, the NBA basketball player Magic Johnson announced that he was HIV positive. In the circumstances, Johnson’s public statement announcing his immediate resignation from the sport was an incredible act of dignity, courage and grace. He would survive the diagnosis, return to basketball court and become a highly successful entrepreneur. Not everyone was so lucky. Just a few weeks after Johnson’s public statement, Queen singer Freddie Mercury died of AIDS-related complications.
Alone between the sticks
When Raffaella discovered that Giuliano was suffering from AIDS, she was angry, confused, afraid. She took repeated tests, which always came back negative.
By 1993, Giuliano was beginning to show signs of physical deterioration. It was around this time that he retired from public life to the hills above Bologna.
He lived a quiet life far away from the spotlight of topflight football, though he worked until the end as talent scout for Padova. Emaciated, with thin and greying hair, lesions now visible on his skin, former teammates and adversaries shunned him. Those who he once considered friends treated him like a ghost.
By now he had reconciled with Raffaella. They remained close friends, bringing up their daughter together. She would nurse him throughout the final stages of his illness.
From his former teammates, with whom he had shared so many highs and lows, he heard nothing.
In 1996, Giuliano went to Verona’s Bentegodi stadium for the last time. It was a cold and wet November evening and Giuliano was observing a Serie B match between Chievo and Salernitana. Not really anyone’s idea of fun, least of all if you have a weak immune system. But in the murky stands of the Bentegodi, Giuliano bumped into Alessandro Renica, Maradona’s vice captain with whom he had shared that rare moment of unbridled joy and adrenaline in the aftermath of that late UEFA Cup winner against Juventus. It had been one of the most joyful moments of Giuliano’s career.
“The illness had hit him hard” recalled Renica, “I only recognised him from him eyes. But you could sense his desire to fight and to live, to lead an existence as normal as possible.” After exchanging a few emotional words, the former teammates embraced and promised to see each other again. They never did.
Four days later, Giuliano left home early to take his daughter to school. After dropping her off, he suddenly felt unwell and was taken to Sant’Orsola Hospital in Bologna. He died later that day of pulmonary complications related to AIDS. He was just 38 years old.
Rumours circulated about Giuliano and his lifestyle, the most persistent of which was that he had contracted the virus during an encounter with a prostitute at Maradona’s wedding.
Nobody will ever know for sure, though Raffaella accepts that he acquired the virus through a sexual contagion with another woman. She doesn’t blame Maradona, his wedding or Napoli. Guiliano made a mistake. One that he paid dearly for.
For the most part, the footballing world reacted to Giuliano’s death with indifference. it was as if he had never existed.
Years later, Osvaldo Bagnoli, his coach at Verona, reflected: “He isolated himself a lot: I spoke little, he even less, and yet we had an understanding between us. His death was a great pain.”
His shy and solitary character undoubtedly contributed to the collective amnesia that followed his early death, but the stigma of AIDS loomed large. It was one that few in the footballing world wished to be associated with.
Now, more than 25 years later, it is surely time for Giuliano Giuliani to be remembered.
For the stigma around HIV and AIDS to be cast to one side.
For Giuliano’s achievements to be celebrated and his remarkable contribution to the game, not least in Napoli but also here in Verona, to be recognised.
We owe him at least that much.