When football meets art, something inexplicable happens.
The format that showcases art and football returns to Pisa. Aldo Dolcetti and Matteo Graniti, with Gianni Lucchesi and Nicola Calzaretta, return to the shadow of the Tower for the third edition of "Invasione di campo".
On Tuesday, June 23, 2026, at 6:00 PM, one of the most original cultural formats born from the intersection of two seemingly distant worlds: art and football, returns to the Toniolo Auditorium of the Opera della Primaziale Pisana. Yet those who have lived both know that the moment is the same: when inspiration takes over whether the hand holds a brush, or the foot kicks a ball, one stops thinking and simply the action lives on. These are those minutes when the commitment accumulated over the years dissolves into the gesture, and the result emerges on its own, precise and inevitable. A moment of grace that the artist and the footballer both recognize, and that neither of them can really explain.
"Invasione di campo" is the format created in 2021 by Aldo Dolcetti and Matteo Graniti - a soccer player turned artist and a Milanese contemporary art gallery owner - with the aim of bringing these two universes into dialogue, exploring common metaphors, shared structures, and the centrality of the creative act in both fields. In the first two editions (summer 2021 and 2022) the format involved names of international scope such as Gigi Buffon, Oscar Damiani, Igor Protti, Giuseppe Stampone, Adelisa Selimbasic and Francesco Bonami.
For this third edition, thanks to the invitation of the Social Promotion Association “Insieme Sì” of Zambra (Pisa) and the hospitality of the Opera della Primaziale Pisana, the game becomes even more intriguing: this time it is the creators of the format themselves who challenge each other - and tell their stories - in the shadow of the Tower. Dolcetti and Graniti take the stage together, embodying firsthand the two worlds the format has always brought to the stage.
THE PROTAGONISTS
Aldo Dolcetti was born in Salò in 1966. He grew up in the Juventus youth team and joined Pisa Sporting Club in the 1987-88 season, where he played for four years, making 118 appearances. A quality midfielder, after a career between Serie A and Serie B he began his coaching career: Cavasin's assistant at Fiorentina and Brescia, then personally with Honvéd Budapest, Spal and Milan Primavera, and finally on Allegri's staff at Juventus since 2014.
But Dolcetti is also an artist, with a journey through several series of works that will be on display this evening. In the Hotel Rooms (since 2019) he portrays the anonymous and intimate spaces of the footballer's life away from home: rooms that all look alike, televisions turned on to other people's matches, time suspended before a match. In Roots in the Drawer (2021-2022) he recovers archive photographs of youth teams - those yellowed shots where everyone recognizes something of themselves - and passes through them with pictorial signs that erase, emerge, question memory. With Pallarte (2024, exhibition "No Playing" in Pietrasanta) he brings the pictorial gesture directly to the ball: unlikely and visionary sculptures that transform the instrument of the game into an object of art.
Matteo Graniti is a gallery owner and curator of contemporary art, active between Milan and the main Italian and international squares. Co-founder and director of IPERCUBO (Milan) and co-director of the Yeast Residences at La Cap-Rehub (Sinalunga), he curated the Lucca Center of Contemporary Art in 2020-21 and the Teatro del Silenzio in 2019, collaborating with Italian and foreign institutions including the University for Foreigners of Siena and the Museum of Anthropology of the Principality of Monaco. Con Dolcetti created "Invasion of the Field" as an open laboratory of ideas, convinced that the boundaries between disciplines have always been more permeable than one might think.
Two guests will be in conversation with them: Gianni Lucchesi, a Pisan artist and passionate fan, and Nicola Calzaretta, a journalist and writer from the world of football.
Free entry.
