For most professional athletes, turning pro is the realization of a lifelong dream. Years of dedication and sacrifice pay off the moment they sign their first contract. But for Fabio Quagliarella, becoming a professional footballer for Torino in 1999 was only the first part of his dream. The second part? Playing for his hometown club.
After establishing himself as one of the top players in Italy’s Serie A, that dream came true when Napoli paid €18 million to bring him home in June 2009. With his friends and family close by and the famously passionate Napoli fans already treating him like a hero before he even kicked a ball, it seemed like the perfect setup for a long and successful stay.
But just a year later, everything collapsed. He left the club as a hated figure, seen as a traitor by the same fans who once adored him.
To them, his transfer to rivals Juventus was the ultimate betrayal. They accused him of chasing money and abandoning his people. What they didn’t know—what no one knew—was that Quagliarella and his family had been living in fear.
Back in Napoli, they were being stalked.
Anonymous letters and text messages flooded in, filled with false accusations linking Quagliarella to criminal activity. The threats grew more severe over time, even including death threats. On the advice of a friend who worked in the Italian postal police, they told no one, fearing that speaking out could jeopardize the investigation.
The harassment took a toll. His reputation was crumbling, his safety was at risk, and his career—his dream—was slipping away. And there was nothing he could do.
“It was painful,” Quagliarella later admitted. “Because [some letters said] that there were people on the internet who believed the allegations about me. I would be worrying about what people would be saying about me. On the other hand, I knew I was innocent, because I have never done any of the things I was accused of. I was serene because of that and thought, Bring me proof of what you are saying. I want to see them.”
The Stoics would have approved of this mindset. They believed that while we can’t control external events, true peace comes from within. As Epictetus put it:
No man can rob us of our Will—no man can lord it over that!
Golden Sayings LXXXIII
But the outside world didn’t know the truth. When he joined Juventus in August 2010, Napoli fans turned against him completely. His family couldn’t even go out in public without facing verbal abuse.
“I was detested and judged as a traitor because of that situation [being sold by Napoli to Juventus]” said Quagliarella. “And believe me, being judged in this way by my own people hurts.”
Then, the shocking truth came out.
The stalker had been someone Quagliarella knew all along—his own friend from the postal police, the man who had claimed to be helping him. In November 2010, police raided the man’s home. But it wasn’t until February 2017 that Raffaele Piccolo was sentenced to four years and eight months in prison for slander and stalking. Finally, Quagliarella could tell his side of the story.
After years of abuse from his own fans, after being forced to stay silent to protect the legal case, he decided to speak up—not just for himself, but for others in similar situations.
“I am lucky that, being a well-known football player, I am in the position to publicly denounce what happened; I can tell people what really happened. There are others, especially women, who suffer these kinds of things but have no way to report it, or maybe they report it and are not taken seriously. This [stalking] is something not to be taken lightly. I was lucky that they listened to me, but there are others who are not heard, and this is a shame.”
Marcus Aurelius, another Stoic philosopher, would also have approved of this sense of duty:
A human being is formed by nature to benefit others, and, when he has performed some benevolent action or accomplished anything else that contributes to the common good, he has done what he was constituted for, and has what is properly his.
Meditations 9.42
Even after all he lost—the dream, the years he’ll never get back—Quagliarella refuses to dwell on resentment.
It is a question that people always ask me: ‘What did Raffaele want from you?’ This is what we concluded: It was his way, with his mental illness, he wanted to make the people he was stalking need him. Then he would make himself available to them, to feel important.
For somebody like him, with a wife that works as a lawyer and two grown-up children, he must be out of his mind. I don’t know what kind of issues he must have had in his life to be doing these kinds of things. He was doing the same things to many other people.
His reaction mirrors more wisdom from Epictetus:
When any person harms you, or speaks badly of you, remember that he acts or speaks from a supposition of its being his duty. Now, it is not possible that he should follow what appears right to you, but what appears so to himself. Therefore, if he judges from a wrong appearance, he is the person hurt, since he too is the person deceived. For if anyone should suppose a true proposition to be false, the proposition is not hurt, but he who is deceived about it. Setting out, then, from these principles, you will meekly bear a person who reviles you, for you will say upon every occasion, ‘It seemed so to him.’
Enchiridion 42
Once the truth came out, Napoli fans asked for his forgiveness.
Although he didn’t get a chance to return home and live his dream again, Quagliarella became a hero at another top-flight Italian club—Sampdoria—before eventually retiring at 40.
“A setback has often cleared the way for greater prosperity. Many things have fallen only to rise to more exalted heights.”
Seneca, Letters 91.13
Quotes from Fabio Quagliarella are taken from the detailed Bleacher Report account of his story, which is a great read.
