During this last conclave, many English-speaking people online were fascinated by the name of one of the candidates to the papacy, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem.
I can totally understand why his family name sounds peculiar. It was the same for many Italians in the second half of the last century, and for most of us, ‘Pizzaballa’ refers not to a prelate, but a football player 1.

Nomen omen, maybe, at least for what concerns the balla part, Pier Luigi Pizzaballa was a renowned goalkeeper in Italy’s top league, Serie A, during the sixties and seventies.
But despite his professional successes, his fame with later generations (including mine) was due to a tangential reason: the ‘urban legend’ that his was the rarest and most coveted sticker for the Figurine Panini album, one of the main pastimes and bonding activities for Italian young boys (and sometimes girls), and a money drain for their parents.
Pizzaballa’s alleged rarity, although no longer applicable in my era of sticker collections, was always the counterargument to Panini’s official stance that ‘all stickers are printed in equal quantities’.

Figurine were a learning ground for pre-teens to practice trading and negotiating skills, and learn to assess how many spare stickers a specific player’s effigy could be worth to you or one of your mates.
Me, in my (future) typical ’let’s get to the point’ style, I was more than happy to trade my sixty extra stickers for the only one I missed (the Genoa shield), complete the ‘83-‘84 collection, and triumphantly exit the game.

  1. Pizzaballa is not a common family name in Italy, and, actually, the two notable people are first cousins once removed ↩︎