The flame is out. Tonight, the Arena di Verona — a place built for spectacle two thousand years ago — held one last act of beauty, and the world watched it exhale.
I'm writing this from Tirana, but my heart is somewhere between the stone arches of that Roman amphitheatre and the snow-dusted peaks of Cortina. As someone who grew up in Italy, who studied in Bologna and Milan, who rolled through those streets in my wheelchair chasing physics equations and starlight, these Games felt personal. They felt like home, putting on their finest suit and saying: Look at us.
And look we did.
Beauty in Action — Not Just a Title
The ceremony's official name was "Beauty in Action" — a tribute to beauty in motion in all its forms, blending opera, music, dance, cinema . That phrase alone tells you something about how Italy sees itself. Not as a museum. Not as a postcard. As a living, breathing performance.
It opened the way only Italy can: with a colossal illuminated chandelier rising from the stage, Rigoletto perched at its peak, and the notes of La traviata filling every crack in those ancient stones. Dancers, performers dressed as camelie, women draped as chandeliers — all swirling through "Libiamo ne' lieti calici" while a frantic stage director (the brilliant Francesco Pannofino) tried to keep order backstage. It was chaos. It was gorgeous. It was Italy.
When 93 Nations Walk Together
The parade of nations began with Greece — always Greece, the birthplace of the Olympic idea — and 1,400 of the 2,900 athletes who competed in these Games walked through the arena. The soundtrack? A mash-up of Italian classics: Caterina Caselli, Mina, Rino Gaetano, Paolo Conte. If you've ever driven through Emilia-Romagna with the windows down, you know these songs live in the air there.
One small detail that made me smile: the Japanese delegation, just as they did at the opening ceremony, carried both their own flags and Italian tricolours. Human kindness transcends borders. It always has.
Italy's flag bearers were Lisa Vittozzi — gold medallist in biathlon — and Davide Ghiotto. Vittozzi said something before the ceremony that stuck with me: "I never stopped believing in myself. It hasn't been easy to reach this success". I know that feeling. Not the gold medal part, obviously — my sport is surviving surgeries and reading astrophysics papers at 3 a.m. — but the part about not stopping. That's the whole game.
The Moment Everything Went Quiet
Every closing ceremony has a moment of remembrance. This one came wrapped in Puccini.
The notes of Madama Butterfly filled the arena as the ceremony paused to honour those no longer with us. In a Games that carried the memory of Matilde Lorenzi — the young Italian skier who died during training in 2024 — this silence weighed more than usual. Her father spoke earlier in the day about weeping when Tomasoni won silver, a medal he said was won for his daughter.
I've spent years in hospitals. I've had a deep brain stimulation device implanted and later removed. I know what it means to sit in a room where someone's absence is louder than any sound. Puccini understood that. The Arena understood that.
Roberto Bolle Flew — Literally
Then came the moment nobody expected.
Joan Thiele sang "Il Mondo" by Jimmy Fontana — her voice delicate, almost fragile — while Roberto Bolle, Italy's greatest living dancer, performed an aerial dance for the first time in his career He was suspended inside a circle that evoked the colours of a frozen sea, and as the structure rose, it transformed into a luminous sun
Let me simplify the physics for you: a man defied gravity inside a Roman amphitheatre while 2,000 metres of stage rigging and 1,500 lighting fixtures conspired to make it look effortless. That's not just choreography. That's engineering dressed in poetry.
The Flames Go Dark
The extinguishing of the Olympic cauldrons — both the one in Milan and the one in Cortina — was accompanied by Venetian pianist Gloria Campaner playing the music of Ludovico Einaudi. On stage, a metaphorical third cauldron dimmed progressively, marking the symbolic end of the Games
This is the part that gets you. The part where the party stops and you realise it's over.
IOC President Kirsty Coventry spoke the words that closed it all: "Dear friends, I declare the XXV Olympic Winter Games of Milano Cortina 2026 closed. In keeping with tradition, I invite the youth of the world to gather in four years in the French Alps" The Olympic flag passed from the mayors of Milan and Cortina to the hosts of French Alps 2030, where the next Winter Games will take place from 1–17 February 2030.
Italy's Record — 30 Medals and a Standing Ovation
Let's talk numbers, because numbers matter.
Italy finished with 30 medals — a national record, ten more than Lillehammer 1994 Norway topped the overall table with 41 medals, followed by the United States with 33 . The US men's hockey team beat Canada 2-1 in overtime in a final that had half of North America holding its breath — their first Olympic gold in the sport since 1980.
Giovanni Malagò, president of the Milano Cortina Foundation, was direct: "Grande Italia, you kept your word" The IOC's assembly gave the organising committee a standing ovation — "they all stood up, and that's not something trivial," Malagò said. CONI president Luciano Buonfiglio called it "an Olympiad worth 30 and honours — thirty medals, and honours because everything worked".
Coventry herself told Italy: "Every time there was a challenge, you found a way. You created a new kind of Winter Games and set a new standard for the future"
Achille Lauro, and Then Silence
The final performance belonged to Achille Lauro, who walked slowly to the centre of the stage — elegant, deliberate — and sang "Incoscienti giovani". Reckless youth. A fitting last song for Games that celebrated daring, risk, and the stubborn refusal to accept limits.
Then the lights went out.
What These Games Leave Behind
I'm a physicist. I study the universe. And I'll tell you something about the universe: it doesn't care about your medals or your ceremonies. Stars burn and die without applause.
But we're not stars. We're people. And people need these moments — the shared breath of 20,000 spectators in an ancient arena, the sound of a national anthem sung by a crowd standing on their feet, the sight of a dancer suspended in mid-air like a planet in orbit.
440 performers. 1,500 lighting fixtures. 6,334 preparation meetings. 2,000 metres of stage. Behind every second of beauty, thousands of hands working in the dark. The volunteers — thanked during the ceremony in a dedicated tribute — are the dark matter of the Olympics. You don't see them, but nothing holds together without them.
From my wheelchair in Tirana, watching the Arena di Verona glow and then go dark, I felt what I always feel when something extraordinary ends: gratitude, and the quiet ache of knowing it won't come again.
But the French Alps are waiting. 2030 is just four years away.
And if there's one thing I've learned — from surgeries, from physics, from staring at the night sky until the equations start to make sense — it's this: never give up. The flame goes out. You light another one.
Gerd Dani is the founder and president of FreeAstroScience, a science and cultural group.
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