Mattia Giovanella
Mattia Giovanella is an Italian curler from Cembra, Italy. He currently plays lead on Team Joël Retornaz.
Career
Giovanella and his team of Luca Rizzolli, Alessandro Odorizzi, Giovanni Gottardi and Luca Casagrande represented Italy at the 2019 World Junior-B Curling Championships. There, the team made it to the gold medal game, where they lost to New Zealand's Matthew Neilson. Their second-place finish qualified them for the 2019 World Junior Curling Championships in Liverpool, Nova Scotia. At the championship, they finished in last place with a 1–8 round robin record, only beating Sweden's Daniel Berggren.Giovanella competed as lead for the Italian National Men's Curling Team skipped by Joël Retornaz at the 2021 World Men's Curling Championship as regular lead Simone Gonin failed to pass the COVID-19 regulations to travel outside the country. At the Worlds, Team Italy finished in seventh place with a 7–6 record, just missing the playoffs.
Giovanella would move up from alternate to their full-time lead on Team Retornaz starting during the 2022–23 curling season. With Team Retornaz preparing for the 2026 Winter Olympics, in which it would be hosted by their home country of Italy at Cortina d'Ampezzo, they would start to find more success. Notably, they would win 4 Grand Slam of Curling events at the 2022 Masters, 2023 Tour Challenge, 2023 National, and 2023 Masters. They would also win Italy's first medals at the World Men's Curling Championship, with two bronze medals in 2022 and in 2024.