'Panatta was and is a legend, I would like to launch a tennis tournament in show business'

"A bit by chance I met Panatta, who was, and is, an absolute myth for me. We were at a dinner, a very pleasant one, at Giovanni Veronesi's house, and at the end he threw out the idea: "Why don't we play?". Incredibly, Adriano agreed and we found ourselves on the field: I was totally in plaster. I immediately heard the difference in the sound of the ball, the famous 'pof'. We were producingThe Prophecy of the Armadillo (the film based on Zero Limestone's comics, ndr) and I wrote that scene because I had the unmistakable sound in my head. He played it'.

Domenico Procacci, 66, recounts the episode in Rome in his office at Fandango - the cinema/books/music company founded in 1989 and grown over time - in the quiet Trieste district, a stone's throw from the house where Pirandello lived. The passion for tennis, which then led to the docuseries Una squadra (2022) and the successful podcast that no fan misses (La telefonata between Panatta and Bertolucci), is only the latest to have oriented the choices of the producer born by the sea in a hamlet on the outskirts of Bari, Santo Spirito. Growing up in a well-to-do family (his father had made his own money in the 1960s and set up a construction company, his mother did not work and looked after their three children), as a boy Procacci satiated himself with films at the Ariston, the little cinema that at one point became a supermarket, and at the film club in town. "At the time you almost had to defend yourself when you said you were from Bari, the imitation of Lino Banfi would start. Now if you live in Puglia they tell you 'blessed are you' and old Bari is a bomboniera. When I was twenty I went to Rome'. Attending a film school, after the 'nourishment' of American films of the 1970s - from Easy Rider to Five Easy Pieces, to Bogdanovich, Sidney Pollack, Martin Scorsese, Brian de Palma - seemed a natural choice. "I liked that auteur cinema but with a focus on the audience as well, and this is perhaps the big difference with European art-house cinema: the desire to make a spectacle".

At Gaumont, the school led by Renzo Rossellini, with a circuit of cinemas and many names, now well-known, coming from there (such as Giuseppe Piccioni, Daniele Luchetti, Carlo Carlei, the editor Angelo Nicolini and many others), resounded 'words that are forbidden now but which were in vogue at the time: self-management, interdisciplinary. We did everything, each of us tried various experiences'. Procacci began within a cooperative that produced Piccioni'sThe Great Blek: 'I was the legal representative, only because nobody wanted to do it, and so I found myself dealing with many aspects of the production of that film. So, I felt I could do more or better by continuing to follow that front and I founded Fandango'. Sergio Rubini's La stazione (1990), the first film produced when he was less than 30 years old, was followed by watershed films such as Radiofreccia (1998) and then Gabriele Muccino's L'ultimo bacio (2001), a success beyond all expectations.

But appetite comes with eating and, says Procacci, 'I came across a book in verse by an Australian author, Dorothy Poster, which I found beautiful. I thought "my father will never read it" and so I called a constant companion of mine - the crazy ones - Sandro Veronesi and said "why don't we make a publishing house?". It was the late 1990s, today that project, after various evolutions, is a defined reality, led by publishing director Tiziana Triana. It has never been an activity at the service of cinema, Procacci clarifies, 'I have always imagined it with its own identity because in a certain sense Fandango is also a political project, an idea of telling reality. It is no coincidence that the latest work is a book by Claudio Fava, which in 2020 we took to Strega Febbre by Jonathan Bazzi, which made the five-year shortlist. We published XY by Veronesi, then This Story by Alessandro Baricco. And so also the story of San Patrignano, which came from Delogu and Cedrola, became a book, La collina'.

Tennis had already appeared with an operation that was courageous to say the least, namely the translation of David Foster Wallace's Infiniti Jest by Edoardo Nesi, 'the first in the world to do so' in 2000. The publishing house has expanded, 'we have acquired BeccoGiallo and we are partners with Coconino Press who make different uses of comics from each other: the latter is aimed at Italian and foreign auteur comics, the former has a popular slant on major events or biographies (see the Peppino Impastato affair, or that of Ustica or the attempted Borghese coup, the massacres): a way of getting to know a complex subject in a visual way and through a faster reading'.