The “political” adventure in the most side of Silvia Salis, 39 years old, new mayor of Genoa, had roots in the athletics field of Villa Gentile in Genoa of which the father was custodian. “Growing up on the track,” she always said when she was “only” an athlete with ten absolute Italian titles in the launch of the hammer, and several European and worldwide participations as well as at the Olympic Games of Beijing and London in the specialty of the hammer launch.
He had started at 8 with the long jump, and then move on to 13 at the hammer, a specialty for pioneer girls. Natural to ask: what does politics have to do with it? It has to do with it.
When in 2022 he published for Salani The strongest child in the worldautobiographical fairy tale for Giovanissimi, Silvia Salis explained to a conference in terms of sport, disabilities and equal opportunities, that the book was born from an intuition had in Rome in Trastevere on the day of Carnival: “The girls all dressed as a princess and the like, the boys all in costumes of the superhero family” reflected in an idea of the world that seemed to be referred to two aspirations: for the girls a passive. Marriage, for the boys a somewhat muscle intraprentation that made them consider how women with positions of power often said: “My husband helps me a lot”, an expression that hid a not seeing the domestic and familiar dimension of paternity and motherhood as a naturally shared “we”.
Silvia Salis looked back, thinking about the world that she lived in, born in 1985, on her being a child always in motion, who at school felt different, and reproached, because her agitated way of being was perceived as little suits to a “girl”, not to say that of her curiosity for a discipline that has long been only male: The women competed in the world championship for the first time in the hammer in 1990, for the Olympics Sydney 2000 had to wait. At the beginning when Silvia Piccola was intrigued “because children do not know stereotypes learn them from the grown -ups, it was already exotic to train in the hammer let alone compete”.
In 2016, after participating in the Beijing Olympics and London, Silvia Salis left the competitive activity due to an accident, in 2018 she graduated in Political Science and started a path in sports policy starting from Fidal, until the CONI of which in 2021 became the first woman Vice President Vicariamaking the importance of sport in giving people to people one of his battle horses, recognizing that it had been his sports talent who opened doors to which he would not have easily come starting from a workers’ family like the one he came from. Not by chance in its sporting policy path: sport for all equal opportunities have been key elements.
In November 2020 Silvia Salis married Fausto Brizzi, director of films such as Night before exams, Males against females And Where the storks dare. In 2023 Edoardo was born from their marriage. From 26 May 2025 he is the new mayor of Genoa, a result obtained with the abundant 51% of the votes for the civic list supported by the so -called “wide field” of the center -left.
