‘We lived a miraculous thing’: Castel di Sangro 30 years on

The WhatsApp group in Castel di Sangro springs to life each morning with a greeting from Osvaldo Jaconi, the 79-year-old former manager, and a roll call of salutations from across Italy. Its name, “Serie B,” is a reminder of 1995-96, when a rag-tag side from this Abruzzo town climbed from local amateur leagues into the second tier and, as Angelo Petrarca puts it, “It’s like 30 years haven’t passed.” Joe McGinniss embedded with that team and wrote The Miracle of Castel di Sangro and La Salvezza, capturing an era and the characters at its heart.

Petrarca, nominally the masseur and often a one-man backroom, recalls a family-run operation: washing kits with his sons, three staff covering every role, and players who were among the lowest-paid in Serie B and Serie C yet who still “survived” trips to Palermo, Bari, Turin and Genoa.

The rise did not last. After relegation and a later bankruptcy, a sequence of name changes and restarts led to a club run from Naples that competed in Molise.

Italy, Castel di Sangro