Another pillar of the legendary “Cantù Wall” is missing. Nine months after saying goodbye to Argentine native Alberto De Simone, Alberto Merlati died yesterday. From Cuneo, he started playing basketball in Cantù: with Oransoda, in 1968, he won his first championship. «The engineer lent to basketball» – as he described himself in our newspaper on 6 April 2018, on the day the city of Cantù celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the first Cantù scudetto – Merlati also played for Italy: 30 games and 123 points were scored, all in 1967 between the European Championship in Finland, the World Cup in Uruguay and the Mediterranean Games in Tunis where Italy won the silver medal. And, only because of some injuries, the Italian expedition in the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City did not participate.
But if you say Alberto Merlati, the Cantù fan – especially the older ones – you can’t help but associate him (pronounce them all in one breath) with Bob Burgess (returning to Cantù in the summer of 2023 to say goodbye to old friends) and Alberto De Simone, or rather the other two members of the trio invented by coach Boris Stankovic, immediately nicknamed the “Cantù Wall” “against that all the opponent, at least for the year, they are broken”, as the Federbasket website recalled in the message of condolence published on its website. And messages came from Pallacanestro Cantù and from the world of basketball, remembering him happily. Merlati played in Cantù and, later, also in Gorizia, Venice, Saclà Asti and then in Turin. After his retirement, he was a valued businessman in the field of culture and literature. He worked for Garzanti, and was also editor for a time of “The Giants of basketball” magazine. In 1984 he founded La Fabbrica, a multinational with offices in Milan, Turin, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile, specialized in the creation and distribution of educational projects supported by companies and institution of schools in different countries. And, together with Pierluigi Marzorati, he is one of the founders of Liba Italia, the association of basketball stars, involved in social projects.
Teammate, but above all friend, Carlo Recalcati, flag of Cantù, has many memories of Merlati: “I have many memories with Alberto: I suggested to the club to bring him to Cantù, after facing him in the championships of the university of Naples: he was in Cus Turin, I was in Cus Milan.”