The Penalty Taker: The Marble and the Sculptor

Marco is fifteen, plays striker, and already knows that football is the only language in which he can say everything. Then, on a November afternoon in Ancona, he misses the most important penalty of his life. In the stands is Arianna, the green-eyed girl he has never dared approach. The wrong moment, in the most definitive way possible. Twenty years later, under the floodlights of a World Cup final, Marco finds himself face to face with a man eleven metres away. A man who stares back at him with an air of arrogance, a look of pure challenge. But who is scratching the tip of his nose, exactly the way Marco used to do it, as a boy. The Penalty Taker is a novel about time that cannot be undone, about a love that changes shape without changing substance, and about that precise instant when foot meets ball and a whole life decides what it was meant to be. With a surprise ending. This story was adapted into the short film "The Last Penalty" (2013).