Nino Benvenuti, one of the greatest Italian boxers ever, has died at age 87. An Olympic gold medalist in Rome in 1960, world champion at superwelterweight and then at middleweight, he was an icon of sports and entertainment, a symbol of Italy’s economic boom and newfound confidence. He passed away in Rome, the city that celebrated him as a young athlete and accompanied him throughout his public life. Benvenuti was born in Isola d’Istria on April 26, 1938, in a disputed land that forced him to flee as a child with his family to Trieste, where he began to build his legend.
In the 1960s he was a phenomenon of manners, as well as a sportsman. Handsome, talkative, elegant, and confident, he embodied the perfect national hero: able to win in the ring with intelligence and style, and to charm outside the ring with his charismatic presence. His matches at New York’s Madison Square Garden against Emile Griffith, watched in the middle of the night by millions of Italians, also turned him into the idol of emigrants, into a symbol of Italy that wanted to be respected in the world. “No champion is liked like Nino,” Life magazine wrote at the time.
His boxing, interpreted as an art of rhythm, elegance and precision, remained for decades the model for all Italian boxers who came after him. His rivalry with Sandro Mazzinghi divided the country, while the hook that landed the Soviet Radonyak in the Olympic final remained an Italian sports icon. After his career ended, he devoted himself to much else: he was an actor, participated in public life, financially supported friends and colleagues in need such as Emile Griffith and Tiberio Mitri, and even experienced a humanitarian interlude in India, alongside lepers.
Despite his popularity and success, Benvenuti’s life was not without difficult moments. Family crisis, estrangement from his children from his first marriage and, finally, the death by suicide of his son Stephen during the pandemic deeply marked the last years of his life. “The later is not scary for me,” she said in an interview. He had also confessed that he felt increasingly drawn to the need to help those who were left alone, perhaps even to give something back of the much that life had given him.
With his death, there goes one of the last great popular figures capable of representing an entire country. A sports champion, but also a cultural one, a protagonist of an era when boxing was a national spectacle and a social redemption.
Article Gone is Nino Benvenuti, world icon of Italian boxing comes from TheNewyorker.
