The Papers

The Clerici Archive gathers documents of every kind, reflecting the wide range of Gianni’s interests. The Clerici Archive gathers documents of every kind, reflecting the wide range of Gianni’s interests. Alongside drafts of his novels, corrected by Sergio Ferrero, Giorgio Bassani, and Mario Soldati, nearly a hundred folders hold: working materials for his tennis technique manuals and essays; unpublished works such as El general pirla, a dialect comedy based on Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus , co-written with Gianni Brera; various documents and certificates, including his law degree diploma from Urbino; correspondence with cultural and sports personalities like Vittorio Gassman, Maria Corti, Attilio Bertolucci, and Giuliano Amato; and also notes, notebooks, even the journals where, as a boy, he tracked matches played and wrote his first reports and statistics.

The Articles

Perhaps the most astonishing collection in the entire Clerici Archive, bound in dozens of large volumes in chronological order, are the newspaper articles Gianni wrote for various publications during his celebrated career, which spanned over seventy years of sports and cultural history. It starts with Il Tennis Italiano, the monthly magazine where Clerici made his journalistic debut in August 1948; in 1951 the baton passed to La Gazzetta dello Sport, which published his pieces until the end of 1954, after which he wrote for about a year at Sport Giallo. From 1956 to 1987, he contributed to Il Giorno, where his reputation as a journalist-writer—what he called a “giornatore”—was firmly established; finally, from 1987 until 2022, the year of his passing, he wrote for La Repubblica. In total, these are over seven thousand articles, a vivid testimony to his deep passion for writing and for that little ball, “which over time turned from white to yellow” (Cf. “Pallina” in Postumo in vita, Pavia, Sartorio, 2005).