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There is an eight-year-old boy, in jeans and a white t-shirt, who shows up at the side of the pitch “just to take a look”. Two hours later he goes home with his shirt stained green and his jeans caked in mud. His mum looks at him and asks whether he had fun. That boy now weighs more than 120 kilos, plays prop for Benetton and carries two countries inside him.
Marcos Gallorini, born in 2004, is one of the most solid prospects in Italy’s front row. But to understand where he wants to go, it helps to start from where he comes from: Arezzo, football-mad Tuscany, and a surname that smells of South America.
From Arezzo, where rugby is an island
In Arezzo the oval ball is a rare bird. “Between schools and football clubs there must be fifteen of them in the city alone,” says Gallorini: of rugby, there is only Vasari. That is where it all begins, at eight, on the advice of a nutritionist who suggested a sport frantic enough to keep him still. That is where — already a giant among his peers, so much so that opponents asked his mother for ID documents — he learned the lesson that would stay with him: size alone is not enough.
Vasari remains his root. That academy produced players who reached the top level, and it was there, aged ten, that Gallorini met Nicholas Gasperini, today a Benetton hooker and a friend of more than a decade. “To us he wasn’t a kid who joined now and then: he was our teammate,” he recalls. A bond born among Tuscan tournaments and never broken.
Two cultures that complete each other
Marcos’s mother, Adelaide del Carmen, is Ecuadorian. Spanish was spoken at home for fourteen years, and Marcos still speaks it fluently. He has never lived permanently in Ecuador — a few spells, never longer than three months — but that side of him has grown with the years.
I’m proud of my origins: it’s a part of me.
He calls himself “60% Italian and 40% Ecuadorian”, yet rejects the very idea of percentages: the two souls, he says, complete each other. It is a pride he has never experienced as a burden, unlike many peers with dual nationality who felt uneasy about it. And when Ecuador take the field — at the football World Cup, with an inspired Ener Valencia — he is in front of the TV, agonising over three efforts that hit the woodwork in a single match.
The hardest lesson
The interview’s title mentions the “hardest lesson”, and that is no accident. His first professional season was not only won scrums and memorable matches: it was also an injury, months away from the pitch and a “dark spell” to get through. Gallorini describes it with a lucidity surprising for his age: the danger, he explains, is the vicious circle. A problem off the field that ruins your sleep, the sleep that ruins your training, the poor session that costs you your place, and from there the spiral.
That’s part of the job too.
The key, for him, is learning to separate the person from the athlete and to keep what stays outside from stepping onto the pitch. It is the maturity of someone who has understood that handling the tough moments matters as much as riding the good ones.
Who is Marcos Gallorini?
He is a tighthead prop born in 2004 in Arezzo, to an Ecuadorian mother and an Italian father. Raised at Vasari Arezzo, he moved to Unione Rugby Capitolina and then, in 2023, to the Benetton academy, making his URC debut in the 2024-25 season. Today he is one of the youngsters on whom Treviso’s front row is building its future.
Two cultures, one direction. Because the real dream wears the colour of a jersey Marcos already put on as a boy — and now chases as a man.
Read also
- The art of the scrum, by Gallorini: from Under-20 dominance to the wall of the pros
- Gallorini’s first professional season: two months in the stands, then the turnaround
- The Azzurri dream and the queue of props: Gallorini and his friend Gasperini
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