"Excuse me, sir , but in five minutes we'll have to ask you to move your feet over the line, because there's going to be another queue with a lot of people." Without batting an eyelid, the boy lying on the blanket shifts his legs and continues watching a match on his cell phone. Order and discipline: there's no other way to keep thirteen, maybe fifteen thousand people queuing for hours on a lawn, and luckily at Wimbledon Park they know how. It's not just any queue, it's "The Queue," an institution that at the All England Lawn Tennis Club in early July rivals strawberries and cream, if not the famous predominantly white dress code dating back to 1880.

How a tail is born

There are several ways to get into Wimbledon, and perhaps being a player isn't the most complicated. The most expensive is certainly buying season tickets for the main courts, which are stadiums: covered (Centre Court and No. 1) or, like No. 2, not. If you shell out a few thousand pounds to secure a reserved seat overlooking the most exclusive stage in world tennis, you can take it easy and even take care of your appearance, wearing a dress or (for women) a sheath dress and sandals. But if you don't want to or can't, and if you're not participating in the tournament, you have only one option: arm yourself with patience and head to the lawn, where about twenty white numbered lines (from K1 onwards) establish priority to purchase the £33 Ground Ticket. With one caveat: you have to be prepared for (almost) anything.

In a tent

The first lines form at 8 a.m. the day before. They're fanatics who arrive under awnings and try to be among the first 500 to purchase, in addition to the general admission ticket for the 15 unnumbered pitches, one for one of the three stadiums: 105 pounds for the central pitch, 90 pounds for pitch 1, and 55 pounds for pitch 2. Because when you arrive on the pitch, you're guided to your position in the static queue and given a numbered card. That number tells you who you are and what your chances of getting into the important pitches are, perhaps through resale , that is, buying up seats left vacant by those who tire and go home. Let's get down to business: we arrive at 4:10 a.m. (it's already light) and are given number 2970. The wait begins.

Time passes

Staff carrying a yellow flag with a large "Q" guide people toward the slowly forming lines: each line is divided into two lines (A and B), which younger volunteers or Honorary Marshals keep in order. At the head of the line, a sign reminds them of the rules. For example, you can't leave your spot for more than half an hour. You immediately recognize who the upstarts are: the others have blankets to lie on to read or sleep, folding chairs, food, and pastimes. Different languages are spoken, with Italian and Spanish being the most common, followed by English. On the lawn, they play with everything: rackets, beach tennis, ping pong, balls of all kinds (soccer, rugby), spike balls, vortex balls, and cards. And we line up for everything (waiting to get inside to enter the fields, the museum, for strawberries, and a souvenir): for the merchandise shop, which is also open outside, for the luggage storage where those sleeping in tents leave their belongings after dismantling them (by 7:00 a.m., but they're already there at 5:00 to give the wake-up call, as if it were a Tirrenia ferry), for the vehicles selling all kinds of food, for the bathrooms. All while waiting to get up and be led in an orderly line toward the front of the moving line. Another couple of hours to the promised land. The luckiest ones enter at 10:00 a.m., the last ones in the early afternoon. Come the sun or the rain. London is definitely worth a mass. Let's queue.

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