Massimiliano

I did my best, but I have never received any feedback...

[4th of July, 2017] Coldplay @ AHFOD Tour, Milan, Italy GIACOMO’S UNFORGETTABLE C STAGE EXPERIENCE Actually It could be really difficult to explain the huge emotions we felt before, during and after our first Coldplay concert, especially in English, which is not my mother tongue. Even so, since I have been doing a course for six years, I’ll try to do that even because it’s a double goal for me. However, we have to start from the beginning, a day of october 2016… Since then, It had been immediatly clear that finding tickets would have been really difficult, so when the selling had started we had run out of then in less than ten minutes. I spent the following months to think what to do because both my wife and my son Giacomo were really disappointed about what happened. However, it seemed that miracles happen just when you don’t expect them at all; just during the days we were giving up looking for tickets, more or less two months before the gig, the online website which had sold tickets earlier started a new quick tickets issue! Having said that, the funniest thing was that I looked up on the website by chance, right in a while in which I was taking a 10 minutes break! We go tour tickets for the pitch and since our son Giacomo was a 9-year old and obviously he was not tall enough, we rather had thought to stand near the C-stage, firstly to make sure he could see the band well once they would get the stage and secondly to be able to reach the pitch not too early but in a confortable way either… So, the magic day came. Just before setting off, I encouraged Giacomo to prepare a sign, a sort of little billboard so to raise him on my shoulder and make him show it to the band once they would reach the C-Stage. Giacomo agreed and whe wrote a short message on a yellow paper: “I’m Giacomo, 9 years old, I love you”. I told him that it might happen that the band wouldn’t see the message. We arrived in Milan in the middle afternoon, went to the stadium and quickly we reached our place next to the C stage. After having waited for a few hours, the concert started and the magic became real; a lovely ambience, thousands of people who were singing their pure joy and… after one hour and half something of important was on the verge of happening. The band came to the C stage and it was such an incredible feeling to see to them so close; I had already raised Giacomo on my shoulder and he was transfixed! Just after their first song “Trouble”, our evening turned into a true dream. While speaking to the crowd, Chris Martin saw Giacomo’s sign and invited him to join the band on the stage! Both my wife and I started crying for joy and Giacomo was picked up by a really polite man of the crew, who took him to the stage. The whole stadium start clapping their hands and calling his name… “Gia-co-mo, Gia-co-mo” and so did Chris! (What a leader he is!) Once Giacomo joined the band, they made him so quiet and confortable and Jonny gave him an harmonica and after that Chris gave Giacomo some pieces of advices about how to play it. Afterwards the band started playing “Don’t Panic”, just our favourite song. After the first part, Chris looked at Giacomo giving him a signal to start, and Giacomo was able to play on time! All of that got even more thrilling because the whole stadium started clapping to Giacomo from the beginning to the end of the performance. And, most of all, what happened next was even more exciting. People around us started chatting with all of us to celebrate Giacomo, as if he was the hero of that evening. A sort of new true friendship between us seemed was born right there, at the bottom of the C-stage, and I think this is the most remarkable happening of that evening. Lots of kind and polite people around my family, to chat, to sing, to spend time together, to give an hug to Giacomo, who remained incredibly calm and relaxed util the end of the concert. We came back to Bologna late in the night and the day after we started getting in touch with lots of nice people on the social media, who wrote us to send lots of video taken with their smartphones. We have started new friendships which are still living, this is amazing! It’s the kind a love which the band often talks about, isn’t it? And nowadays… what’s happening? Giacomo is growing up quickly and he his a 14 year-old now. He’s going to high school with really good marks. He has been learning piano for three years and he often dreams to join the band again, in the future… Unfortunately we won’t attend to any Coldplay concert this summer but we are looking forward to seeing the band again in Italy, maybe in 2023. And we are still thinking how to show a new sign to the band, possibly attending to a concert next to either the B or the C stage… Are we asking too much? Sure, I think… However dreaming doesn’t cost anything and it’s worth it to try… I hope you liked our experience and, if you want to take a look, three years ago I edited a video and loaded it on my youtube channel which tells about these gorgeous memories (here is the direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KK1ILttz6XU&t=535s and, finally, I hope my english has been good enough to understand our deepest feelings… Ciao and thank you for this opportunity, Max