Serravalle stadium in San Marino »Baseball.it
The Serravalle pitch, which six months ago saw the last act of the 2021 season, has fairly recent roots if we compare it to other Italian baseball facilities, including historical ones. The hit and run in San Marino took some time to make its way into the sporting panorama of the Titano, so much so that the team initially played on the football fields of Domagnano and Fiorentino. Gradually the climb began, reaching the B league in 1980 and the top flight five years later. Exactly in the middle of these two dates the Serravalle stadium was inaugurated, let’s say the first version. And it was an international event that held him in baptism, the European Cadet Championship. The curious thing is that the assembly of the two excavated was started shortly before the game and completed at the end of the match. Well, actually there was another type of inauguration, because the helicopter that brought Pope John Paul II to San Marino also landed on the field.
Returning to purely sporting questions, the stands were in tubular and the lighting system appeared on the Serravalle stadium in the year of the first Serie A championship. built San Marino in 1988), the structure was improved in 1992, on the occasion of the Pool B Champions Cup won by the titans. Then real changing rooms are built, a refreshment area is created, the room for the classifiers and some other small “chore” are assigned.
And it is another edition of the Champions Cup, that of 2007, the “real” one that sees the Serravalle plant in its definitive version, or almost. The structured club, the team fresh from their first European triumph and shortly after the protagonist of a long cycle of victories and even the stadium received a “winning” restyling with the construction of the current new concrete stands, offices and changing rooms. In September 2009, San Marino hosted some World Cup matches, but it was in 2011 that the Serravalle stadium reached its peak of fans, almost “sold out” on the occasion of the championship finals against Nettuno. An unforgettable full house where fans from Rimini and San Marino and Lazio mixed together. And someone was also “perched” on the grass of the Wimbledon-style hill.
A fabulous glance, repeated in the following three years when challenges “without tomorrow” against Rimini were staged: two championship finals and one of the Champions Cup, all in favor of San Marino. Rino Zangheri chewed bitterly those years, but San Marino wanted to pay homage to him in the best possible way. In fact, two months after his death, the patron Antolini and the whole San Marino society decided to remember him with the inaugural match of the 2019 season between the titans and Fortitudo. It was historic on April 19 San Marino played with the Rimini Baseball jerseys in the presence of the whole “Pres family, invited to the brand new and functional Sky Box”. And the players of both teams were accompanied on the pitch by boys from the various youth sectors in the area. Now at the camp you enter an old cable car cabin. Because everything does…. Titan.