Pugilatos, a photo essay of boxers at the oldest gym in Italy

Andrew Gray (July 29th, 2008)

These shots where taken in Trieste’s, Italy, oldest gym. The town itself has a great boxing tradition with such athletes as Nino Benvenuti, world champion in the middle weights in the sixties, and Tiberio Mitri, who lost his major chance in a world championship match against Jake LaMotta in 1950.

The first and strongest impact I had when I began to attend the gym was the smell. A poignant mixture between sweat and ferormones that tends to have the same effect as the red mantel for the bull. Then you begin to evaluate such a microcosm where everybody has its own place, without any kind of division given by social status, age or sex.

The gym’s humanity vary from the old coach who has seen to many fights and seems to come out directly from an FX Toole page, to the fifteen year old kid, the youngblood, who listens to the words of his trainer the same way that Moses did in the desert. There’s the thirtysomething year old lawyer who grew up with the myth of Rocky Balboa and the eighteen year old girl who’s tired of losing all her fights with her three older brothers. There’s an old man practicing slow movements like if he was doing Tai-Chi and everybody wonders about his past and then there’s the big hope of the gym. The only one who has all our eyes on him, with admiration and expectancy. Will he be able to bring us back on top of the world?

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Photography by Escapista