lorenzo musetti

Lorenzo Musetti: The Last Italian Romantic in an Age of Algorithmic Tennis
By our correspondent in Rome, still waiting for the espresso machine to be fixed since 2019

If tennis were still governed by Renaissance patronage, Lorenzo Musetti would already have a ceiling somewhere—probably the Sistine Chapel gift shop, between Michelangelo’s self-checkout kiosk and a fridge magnet of the Pope. Instead, the 22-year-old from Carrara—yes, the same town that ships marble to oligarchs so they can bathe like minor Caesars—must make do with the ATP Tour, a traveling circus that smells faintly of crypto aftershave and geopolitical anxiety.

For the uninitiated, Musetti plays the way Italians drive Vespas in Naples: all sinew and sudden geometry, a daredevil elegance that suggests physics is merely a bureaucratic suggestion. One-handed backhand, Federer-grade footwork, and the unnerving habit of humming between points as if the scoreboard were merely a playlist on shuffle. In a sport increasingly colonized by 6’4” baseline howitzers and analytics departments that treat every rally like a hostage negotiation, Musetti is a walking anachronism—less data point, more sonnet.

Global implications? Start with soft power. Italy, a country whose last major export was political instability, has suddenly found itself curating cool again. Between Musetti, Jannik Sinner, and the espresso-fueled fashion houses dressing them, the peninsula has cornered the market on Eurozone charisma. Brussels bureaucrats now schedule press conferences around Musetti’s night matches, hoping a semifinal run might distract from another sovereign-debt spreadsheet. Meanwhile, China’s state broadcaster—ever alert to any narrative not featuring Xi Jinping—has begun live-streaming his matches with subtitles that translate “grazie mille” as “gratitude to the motherland.”

Then there is the demographic math. Tennis viewership is aging faster than a TikTok trend; the average fan now needs a cholesterol check before the second set. Musetti, however, draws teenagers who previously thought Wimbledon was a dating app. At the Paris Masters last fall, Gen-Z spectators arrived with homemade signs quoting Dante—misspelled, but in Comic Sans, which somehow felt spiritually accurate. Broadcasters in Jakarta, Lagos, and Bogotá report spikes whenever Musetti plays past midnight local time, proving that insomnia, like heartbreak, is a universal language.

Yet the cynic in us (fine, the cynic in me) notes the machinery humming behind the romance. Nike dresses him in pastel hues that sell out in Seoul within minutes; the NFT of his backhand reportedly fetched enough Ethereum to keep a small Balkan economy afloat for a fiscal quarter. Even his racquet strings are rumored to be woven with microfibers spun by underpaid artisans in Bangladesh—because nothing says Renaissance quite like outsourced labor.

Musetti himself navigates this absurdity with the weary amusement of a man who’s read too much Calvino. Asked recently about the pressure of being “Italy’s next big thing,” he replied, “There are 60 million next big things in Italy; the queue at the post office is longer.” When pressed on geopolitics, he offered that the real Cold War is between gluten and celiac disease. It’s the sort of answer that makes diplomats chuckle into their prosecco and dictators briefly wonder if irony is a weapon they’ve overlooked.

Of course, the cruel arithmetic of sport still applies. One torn ankle in Madrid and the marble cracks; a lost tiebreak in New York and the ceiling collapses. Should Musetti flame out tomorrow, the marble quarries will keep shipping slabs to Dubai, Brussels will return to its spreadsheets, and teenagers will migrate to the next fleeting messiah. But for now, while the espresso machine remains broken and the world stumbles from crisis to crisis with the coordination of a drunk centipede, the kid from Carrara is slicing drop shots like tiny love letters to a planet that forgot how to write.

In other words: tune in at 3 a.m. your time. It beats doomscrolling.