The man who lives in Maradona’s head: opening a window on the new Naples

Ciro Maiello, whose home is adorned with a painting of the player, says Napoli’s first Serie A win since Diego’s days heralds a new dawn for the city

At 10.37pm on 4 May the man who lives in Diego Maradona’s head threw open the window of his flat in the Spanish Quarter district in Naples for the first time in months, erupting in a cathartic scream as the city celebrated another moment in its rebirth.

Ciro Maiello, a 50-year-old pork butcher, moved to the apartment block featuring a giant mural of the Argentinian in 2006 and lived there through a period he called the “dark days [when] dozens of people were killed in these streets.” The mural was painted more than a decade earlier, in honour of the player who gave the city’s football team the most successful period in its history, including its first Serie A title win, and whose veneration by Neapolitans is comparable only to the adoration of its patron saint, Gennaro.

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Diego Maradona ‘hand of God’ shirt sold for record £7.1m at auction

Blue Argentina No 10 jersey kept by England player Steve Hodge beats mark set by 1892 Olympic manifesto

The shirt worn by Diego Maradona when he scored twice – including the “hand of God” goal – to knock England out of the 1986 World Cup has sold for a record-breaking £7.1m at auction.

The late Argentinian player described his opening goal in the quarter-final as “a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God”. He and the England goalkeeper Peter Shilton leapt to reach the ball, which touched Maradona’s left hand and bounced into the net. The referee did not have a clear view and allowed the goal to stand.

The last violin played on the Titanic was sold at auction for $1.7m in less than 10 minutes in 2013. The instrument belonged to Wallace Hartley, an English musician whose eight-piece band played as the ship sank into the frozen waters of the Atlantic in April 1912. According to reports, Hartley’s body was pulled from the water days afterwards with his violin case still strapped to his back.

John Lennon’s flowered porcelain toilet sold for almost $15,000 (£9,500) – about 10 times the estimate – in 2010. The toilet came from Tittenhurst Park, an English estate owned by Lennon and Yoko Ono, where the former Beatle recorded his Imagine album and film. When Lennon had the toilet replaced, he told builders to “put some flowers on it or something”. Sale organisers called it the most unusual item they had ever handled.

An oak chair that JK Rowling used while writing the first two books of the Harry Potter series sold for $394,000 (£278,000) in 2016. The 1930s chair was one of four mismatched chairs given free to the then little-known writer for her council flat in Edinburgh. Before she donated it for auction in aid of the NSPCC in 2002, Rowling painted on the chair: “You may not/find me pretty/but don’t judge/on what you see.”

Marilyn Monroe’s white halter dress that she wore in the 1955 film The Seven Year Itch sold for $4.6m in 2011. “Oh, do you feel the breeze from the subway? Isn’t it delicious?” Monroe famously says in the film as the dress is blown up by air from a New York subway grate. That image become one of the most memorable in film history. The dress was designed by William Travilla and made from rayon-acetate to give it sharp pleats.

A copy of the Bible used by Elvis Presley sold for £59,000 in 2012. A pair of Presley’s unwashed and soiled underpants worn underneath his famous white jumpsuit during a 1977 concert performance went unsold after bids failed to meet the £7,000 reserve price.

False teeth belonging to Winston Churchill were sold for £15,200 in 2010. The upper dentures, one of several sets made for the wartime prime minister, were specially constructed to preserve his natural lisp and were so important to him that he carried two pairs at all times. They were designed to be loose-fitting so that Churchill could preserve the diction famous from his radio broadcasts during the second world war.

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Maradona’s shirt from ‘hand of God’ England match expected to sell for £4m

Former England midfielder Steve Hodge has owned Maradona’s no 10 shirt since the 1986 match

Diego Maradona’s infamous “hand of God” goal made footballing history and cemented the legendary status of the Argentinian superstar. Now the shirt he wore when he scored that goal at the 1986 World Cup is estimated to sell for at least £4m.

Maradona’s no 10 shirt has been owned for the past 35 years by the former England midfielder Steve Hodge. The two players swapped shirts at the end of the quarter-final between Argentina and England.

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How Maradona inspired Paolo Sorrentino’s film about Naples, Hand of God – and inadvertently saved his life

The Italian director’s new, semi-autobiographical film reveals a charming and rarely seen side of his home city

‘This, for me, is the most beautiful place on Earth,” Paolo Sorrentino told Filippo Scotti, the actor playing the director’s younger self in his latest film, as their 1980s Riva speedboat chopped the waves of the Bay of Naples. Their view stretched from the precipitous peninsula of Sorrento all the way west towards Posillipo. The two promontories flank the sprawling port city, offering a warm embrace to all those who disembark there. Sorrentino’s new film, the Hand of God, opens with that same view: the sun-mottled bay, whose peace is disturbed by the sound of four Rivas as they speed towards the shore. The film is both a love letter to, and a portal into, Paolo Sorrentino’s Naples.

In cinemas now and on Netflix this week, The Hand of God sees the Academy award-winning director return to his home city for the first time since One Man Up, his 2001 debut. Sorrentino tells the story of his own coming of age, up to the moment when his life is shattered by the death of his parents in a tragic accident. Sorrentino’s story is a tale of great grief, loss and perseverance, set in a middle-class part of Naples, a far cry from the impoverished neighbourhoods shown in the city’s other recent portraits: Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend or the mafia-focused Gomorrah series.

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Maradona Jr pleads for DNA donors in search for Argentina’s stolen babies

The son of the footballing legend is carrying on his father’s quest to trace the children taken from parents murdered by the junta

Diego Armando Maradona Jr, son of the late Argentine football legend, is urging Italians to submit DNA to help the Argentinian government trace hundreds of children who were stolen and their parents murdered by the military junta that controlled the country four decades ago.

Maradona Jr is doing radio interviews in Italy and using his 400,000-strong social media following to broaden the search, which has already seen DNA testing programmes rolled out in Madrid and Rome.

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Maradona care ‘deficient and reckless’ before death, medical board report finds

  • Footballing icon died of heart failure in Argentina in November
  • The 60-year-old was ‘not properly monitored’, says report

A medical board appointed to investigate the death of Diego Maradona has concluded that the football icon’s medical team acted in an “inappropriate, deficient and reckless manner,” according to a copy of the report shared with Reuters on Friday.

Maradona’s death in November last year rocked Argentina, where he was revered, and prompted a period of mourning and finger-pointing about who was to blame after his long battle with addiction and ill health.

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Maradona lifts the World Cup: David Yarrow’s best photograph

‘I bribed a stadium guard with whisky and got dead close just as he was lifted on to another player’s shoulders. It was like a biblical scene. He looked magnificent’

On the final day of exams at Edinburgh University in the summer of 1986, most students partied, but I flew directly to Mexico City. I was 20 years old and studying business and economics while taking photos on the side. I’d never been to the Americas before, and I wasn’t at all a good photographer; in fact, I was incredibly average.

I arrived at the 1986 World Cup under the guise of being a freelance photojournalist, but I was a Scotland fan first and foremost – they always used to say that Scottish journalists are just fans with typewriters. I did have a press pass that I’d managed to blag off the Times, which granted me access to the media pen, but I was much more interested in watching football than taking photographs of it. There was a moment in the first round of a match with Uruguay when Scotland missed an open goal. Back at the Times they were watching the TV coverage of the game and could see the striker with his head in his hands, and in the background me with my head in my hands and with my camera nowhere near the moment. And they thought: “Well this guy, Yarrow, he’s not focused on the task at all.”

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Maradonaland: Naples plans statues and museum to honour ‘Saint Diego’

City’s murals of Maradona have become pilgrimage sites since footballer’s death in November

A month since the death of Diego Armando Maradona and the southern Italian city of Naples is looking more like a Maradonaland each day.

After renaming Napoli football club’s San Paolo Stadium and a train station in his honour this month, local authorities are planning a large museum, commissioning statues and dedicating an entire square to the Argentinian who took the city’s football team to glory and is regarded as one of the greatest players of all time.

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The Maradona and child: Naples honours its hero with nativity figurine

A new addition to the Christmas scene in artisan shops shows city’s love for footballer

The southern Italian city of Naples usually enjoys a fervent lead-up to Christmas, with one street in particular – Via San Gregorio Armeno – buzzing with people buying handcrafted cribs and terracotta figurines for their nativity scenes at home.

There is also much anticipation each year over which new figurine they can buy. Traditionally, it was a shepherd or an animal that would join baby Jesus, Mary and Joseph, but now it is usually a figurine of a personality of that year. Recently crafted statuettes include tributes to doctors and nurses who have worked throughout the pandemic as well as ones of the US president-elect Joe Biden and his deputy, Kamala Harris.

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Argentine prosecutors investigate death of Diego Maradona

Officials order searches of home and office of footballer’s personal doctor, Leopoldo Luque

Argentine justice officials are investigating the death of the footballer Diego Maradona and ordered the search of properties of his personal doctor on Sunday, a local prosecutor’s office said.

Maradona died at age 60 of a heart attack on Wednesday. The search order was requested by prosecutors in the affluent Buenos Aires suburb San Isidro and signed by a local judge, according to a statement issued by the prosecutor’s office.

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Diego Maradona’s personal doctor denies responsibility for death

Leopoldo Luque in tears after officials search his home and office in Buenos Aires

Diego Maradona’s personal physician has denied responsibility for the former footballer’s death after police raided his home and surgery on Sunday, seizing laptops, medical records and mobile devices.

Argentinian media reported that police were trying to establish if there was negligence in Maradona’s treatment and that searches of premises belonging to the neurosurgeon Leopoldo Luque were carried out as part of an investigation into involuntary manslaughter.

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Director Asif Kapadia: ‘Diego and Maradona were two different people’

Film director recalls the long and rocky road to meeting the mercurial subject of his film

Football is a huge part of my life. I was 14 when Diego Maradona scored the two goals against England – the hand of God and the wonder goal. Despite the first goal, I always thought he was the best player in the world. I’ve always been a fan of outsiders, rebels.

Everyone wanted to be Maradona. He was the global phenomenon. The pope wanted to meet him. Fidel Castro would sit and listen to Diego tell a story.

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‘It’s like my old man died’: Argentinians flock to palace for Maradona goodbyes

  • Thousand queue to pay their respects to national hero
  • Tears, football chants and tributes ring out for El Diego

The death of Diego Maradona brought Argentina to an almost complete standstill on Thursday as the nation turned its gaze to the Casa Rosada presidential palace where thousands of people queued up to file, slowly, reverently and one-by-one, past the iconic footballer’s coffin.

Tears and sobbing could be heard from the mourners of all ages and classes who had gathered from the early morning to pay their respects to Maradona as his body lay in state. Among the lamentations, football chants rang out, chief among them: “¡Olé, olé, olé, olé, Die-go! Die-go!”

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Diego Maradona: the achingly human superstar who embodied Argentina | Marcela Mora y Araujo

Maradona was a perfect representation of the human ability to be contradictory, to convey ugly and beautiful at once

“A man of genius is unbearable, unless he possesses at least two things besides: gratitude and purity” – Friedrich Nietzsche, on love, perseverance, and moving beyond good v evil.

Diego Maradona said that when you’ve been to the moon and back, things get difficult. “You become addicted to the moon and it’s not always possible to come back down.”

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Diego Maradona, one of the greatest footballers of all time, dies aged 60

Argentina, Naples, and the world of football were in mourning on Wednesday at the death of Diego Maradona, in many people’s eyes the greatest player of all time, following a heart attack. He was 60.

The Argentinian president Alberto Fernández, who declared three days of national mourning, said that Maradona had taken his country to the “highest of the world” with his virtuoso performances in the 1986 World Cup in Mexico. “You made us immensely happy,” he wrote. “You were the greatest of all. Thanks for having existed, Diego. We will miss you all our lives.”

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Maradona laughing and responding very well to brain surgery, says doctor

  • Argentina great in intensive care after operation
  • ‘He laughed, looked at me, grabbed my hand’

Diego Maradona is showing signs of improvement after undergoing an operation for possible bleeding on the brain.

Dr Leopoldo Luque, the 60-year-old Argentinian’s personal physician, has said that Maradona “laughed” and “grabbed my hand” a day after the procedure.

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Diego Maradona to undergo brain surgery in Argentina

  • Argentina legend has a subdural haematoma
  • His personal physician says procedure is ‘routine surgery’

The former Argentina captain and World Cup winner Diego Maradona will undergo surgery for a subdural haematoma, a blood clot on the brain, his personal physician said on Tuesday, after he was admitted to hospital in La Plata, about an hour from Buenos Aires. Maradona coaches the local club Gimnasia y Esgrima.

The operation was expected to begin on Tuesday to address the condition, which is a pool of blood, often caused by a head injury, that can put pressure on the brain.

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