Piergiorgio Bucci

About Piergiorgio Bucci

Piergiorgio Bucci (born 18 August 1975) is an Italian showjumper from L'Aquila who, at fifty, is riding the season of his life: world No. 15 — the highest-ranked Italian — five Grand Prix wins by June 2026 including Rome and La Baule, and selection to lead Italy at the Aachen World Championships. He wrote in a school essay as a boy that he wanted to win the Grand Prix of Rome; on 31 May 2026, with the only double clear at Piazza di Siena, he did.

From a family with no equestrian background, he left L'Aquila at eighteen to ride professionally, and in January 2010 — speaking only Italian — moved abroad to build Stal Bucci across sixteen years in the Netherlands and Belgium. His one senior championship medal came early: European team silver at Windsor in 2009 with Kanebo. What followed was two decades of team service that made him Italy's record Nations Cup rider — 77 appearances by May 2026 — including Dublin wins in 2009 and 2016, and the 2017 Rome Nations Cup with Casallo Z that ended the host nation's thirty-two-year wait, a result he calls a defining memory.

Casallo Z, the Zangersheide stallion he describes as the horse of his life, delivered his first five-star Grand Prix at Estoril in 2016 and restored Italy's team credibility before retiring in 2020. The succession has been built the same patient way: Casago, bought at five and ridden to the 2020 Italian title; Hantano, the sensitive, huge-cantered gelding he took over in 2023 and shaped into the 2025 League of Nations Best Horse, winner of his first World Cup qualifier at Madrid in 2024 and of the 2026 La Baule Rolex Grand Prix; and Pallieter vd N.Ranch, the grey Cornet Obolensky stallion who arrived in June 2025 and has since won Mexico City's LGCT Grand Prix and Rome. Bucci's welfare-led restraint is characteristic: after Rome he withdrew Pallieter from Cannes rather than chase points, and he has kept the stallion out of Aachen entirely, judging him short of championship mileage.

In January 2026 he came home, basing his expanding string at Emanuela Bedini's centre near Milan. He has never ridden at an Olympic Games — the unfinished chapters are explicit: an Olympic debut at Los Angeles 2028, a first individual championship medal, and the conversion of a historic season into a result at Aachen, where he arrives as Italy's form rider with Hantano and a career built on gratitude to his horses. As he puts it: he never takes for granted what they do for him.