Anna Vania Mello

Anna Vania Mello was on the Italian volleyball squad at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the first Italian women’s team to compete at the Olympics. She was a middle blocker with clear talent, but also inconsistency in her performance and possessed of a difficult personality, all of which led her to abandon competitive activity for three years, from 2004 to September 2007, at only 25-years-old.

After Mello’s début at the age of 15 in First League with Aquila Trani, she began to wander around Italy the following season, including time with Jogging Volley Altamura (1995-96), Pallavolo Femminile Matera (1996-98 and 1999-2000) after a year with Club Italia, a youth selection with a permanent training camp, and Volley Bergamo (2000-02), with whom she won the Italian title in 2002. In the 2002-03 season she played in Spain with Club Voleibol Tenerife, where she won the Queen’s Cup and the Spanish SuperCup, but a year later she returned to Italy and joined Novara.

Mello was a member of the Piedmont regional team until 2004, with whom she won an Italy Cup (2004) and a SuperCup (2003). In the 2007-08 season she decided to return to the volleyball with Asystel Volley Novara and then (2008-09) with Pallavolo Villa Cortese in Second League.

With the national team, Mello won the Student (1995) and Junior (1996) European titles and was runner-up at the World Championships in 1997. She débuted as a senior on 10 June 1995, at only 16, in a losing friendly match (3-1) against the United States. She made a total of 169 international appearances, with the apex of her career coming at the 2002 World Championships in Germany where, with the squad coached by Marco Bonitta, she won the gold medal. At the Europeans she earned bronze in 1999 and silver two years later. Finally, she won gold at the 1997 Bari Mediterranean Games with a team coached by Julio Velasco, defeating Turkey 3-1 in the final. In 2002 she was a recipient of the title of Knight of the Italy’s Republic and, in 2004, of the Collare d’Oro for sporting merits.