The Italians (32 page)

The issues at stake between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines may long since have become irrelevant, but the scars left by their conflict nevertheless run deep. In 2007, a banner—fully sixty meters across—was draped from the terraces at the grounds belonging to AC Siena (also known, from the original name of its footballing section and the date of the club’s foundation, as Robur 1904). The banner, which stayed there for three years, read: “Ghibellini Robur 1904.” A message posted to a fan Web site explained that it summed up in a phrase “the soul of the Senesi: [their] pride in being Ghibellines and love of Robur 1904.”

Some Italians, of course, are indifferent to football. Some—and progressively more—follow other sports, including a few that are very much minority interests elsewhere. Fencing, for example, has a wider following than in most other countries. And Formula One motor racing is immensely popular, largely because of Ferrari’s achievements over the years. On Sundays from spring through to autumn, the high-pitched whine of Formula One engines can be heard issuing from TV screens in bars the length and breadth of the country.

But it is still football more than any other sport that captures the imagination and fires the passions of Italians. No other country in Europe, except possibly Spain, is quite as soccer crazy. Nor has any other been as successful on the pitch. Italy’s national team,
Gli Azzurri
(“The Blues”),
^*
has taken home four World Cups, more than any other country except Brazil.

Football in Italy began with the British, and specifically with British expatriates living in the industrial and commercial cities of the north at the end of the nineteenth century, when the Italian economy was growing fast. The oldest surviving club is Genoa, which still uses the English version of the city’s name rather than the Italian Genova. It was founded in 1893 as the Genoa Cricket and Athletic Club (later renamed the Genoa Cricket and Football Club). Cricket never caught on with the Italians (though that could have been because they were not allowed to join the original, Genoese clubs). Football, on the other hand, spread rapidly. By 1898 there was a league of four teams, the other three—all in Turin—with Italian names. But though a growing number of the players were locals, the coaches—then called managers—were still usually British. Even today, the man in charge of an Italian team, regardless of his nationality, is referred to as the
Mister
and is addressed as such by players, journalists and officials. AC Milan, which has also kept its English name, dates from the final years of the nineteenth century, as does Juventus, whose full name in Italian remains Juventus Football Club. FC Internazionale Milano—usually known as just Inter—came into being later as the result of a dispute and split from AC Milan.

Genoa dominated the early years of the game in Italy, but its fortunes declined in the 1930s. The club won its last
scudetto
^*
in 1924. By then, Mussolini was in power and keen to exploit Italians’ gift for soccer to reap glory for his young Fascist state. As a first step, he had to give what was by then the national game an Italian origin. In the sixteenth century, one Antonio Scarino had written about a game that was then popular in Florence known as
calcio,
which means “kick.” In fact,
calcio
had little resemblance to modern football, but it provided Mussolini with an exclusively Italian name for the sport and it has survived to this day. The Fascists also strong-armed Genoa and AC Milan into dropping their English names in favor of Italian ones. They reassumed their original names after the Second World War.

Enthusiastically backed by Mussolini and his regime, Italian soccer went from strength to strength. In 1934 and again in 1938, the national team carried off the World Cup. On the second occasion, Italy’s captain gave a Fascist salute—albeit a rather hesitant one—before accepting the trophy.

Back home, the emblematic team of the Fascist era was Bologna (ironically, since the city would later become a Communist stronghold). Bologna FC won the league five times between 1929 and 1941. Inconveniently for Mussolini, two of those titles were won with a Jewish coach, Árpád Weisz. He was fired in 1938 after the regime brought in anti-Semitic legislation. Weisz left Italy and found work in the Netherlands. But after the Nazi occupation, he was deported to Auschwitz, where he and his family were killed.

The recovery in Italian football after the Second World War was much slower than in either the arts or the economy. During the late 1940s, Torino dominated the league in a way no side has done since. It took five titles in a row and Italy’s national team was sometimes composed almost entirely of Torino players. But on May 4, 1949, a plane carrying eighteen members of the squad crashed into the wall of the Superga Basilica on a hill overlooking Turin. Everyone aboard was killed. It was not until 1963, when AC Milan won the European Cup, that an Italian team again triumphed internationally.

The 1960s were a sparkling decade for both the big Milanese sides. Coached by an Argentinian, Helenio Herrera, who earned the nickname
Il Mago
(“The Magician”), Inter won both the next two European Cups. The club continued to collect trophies in the 1970s and 1980s. But, starting in 1990, and for the fifteen years that followed, what had been one of Italy’s greatest teams was unable to win a thing. It was as if Inter, the club once bewitched by
Il Mago,
had fallen under a curse. Imitating the Inter fans’ chant of
“Non mollare mai”
(“Never give in”), rival supporters would taunt them with choruses of
“Non vincete mai”
(“You never win”).

The dominant team of the 1970s and 1980s had been Juventus. The Turin side carried off the championship nine times before Silvio Berlusconi bought AC Milan in 1986 and then hired Marco van Basten, the first of three Dutch stars who helped pilot the club to a string of league and then European victories. As in many other instances, events on the pitch in Italy reflected and perhaps influenced developments in other areas of the country’s life: Berlusconi stormed to an unexpected victory in the 1994 general election as his team was clinching its third successive Serie A
^*
title.

Sir Winston Churchill is credited with having said, “Italians lose wars as if they were football
matches, and football matches as if they were wars.” Apocryphal or not, there is certainly some truth in that quip and it is often quoted by Italians themselves. Soccer is accorded a degree of respect that Italians certainly never give to their politics. But then, for the most part, those involved in football behave with a lot more dignity, consistency and overall seriousness than Italy’s politicians. Matches, like Masses, begin on time even in parts of the country notorious for their lack of punctuality. Football is played with a tactical complexity that would baffle the coaches, let alone the spectators, in many other countries. It is analyzed by professionals and amateurs alike, with a sophistication that is far greater than that to be found in most other societies. And though there are exceptions, the players themselves approach their calling in a spirit of resolute earnestness. They train hard. Most drink sparingly, if ever. They eat carefully. And it is almost unheard of for an Italian player to be caught up in a nightclub brawl (even if that also has something to do with the deference shown by the media). At all events, Italy has seldom produced a tumultuous character like George Best or Eric Cantona.

The criticism most often leveled at Italian players is not that they are unprofessional, but rather that they are
too
professional: that, on the pitch, defenders all too often resort to professional fouls, attackers make exaggerated use of the dramatic arts when robbed of the ball in a legitimate tackle. And that players of all kinds try to intimidate the referee with repeated, specious protests. Such criticism, though, is seldom heard in Italy itself. On the contrary, as John Foot observes in his history of the Italian game,
¹
fair play does not really come into it:

Italian defenders have always tried to anticipate forwards . . . If the anticipation went wrong, then a well-placed and well-timed foul was always a key part of the stopper’s armory. In Italy this became known as the “tactical foul” in the 1990s, and was taught to defenders as part of the game. They all knew when to foul and when not to, and how to foul without picking up a booking. Often, Italian football commentators will praise a defender for a foul, sometimes adding that “maybe it isn’t fair play, but . . .” Allied to this concept of the useful or tactical foul is the idea of the
useless
foul. Hence the parallel notion that being sent off for a useless offense is stupid, and unprofessional, whilst being called up for a
useful,
tactical foul is not only good practice, but deserving of praise as it represents—if the player has been booked or sent off—an individual sacrifice for the greater good of the whole team.

Soccer is part of the fabric of Italian life in a way that not even motor racing can rival. One of its archetypal figures was the anxious father with a transistor radio pressed to his ear on a Sunday afternoon as he listened to the progress of his
squadra del cuore
while his wife and children relaxed on the beach or enjoyed a walk in the country. Nowadays, he is more likely to be seen on afternoon television in old comedy movies. He was conjured out of existence by the arrival in 2003 of Rupert Murdoch’s Sky TV, which made available live coverage of all the Serie A matches. These are now split between Saturday evenings, Sundays and even some weekdays. But Italian fans were never satisfied with just going to a Sunday match and then reading about it in the newspapers the next day. Soccer has long been available in one form or another throughout the week.

La Gazzetta dello Sport
was originally published to provide coverage of the first modern Olympics in 1896. But it evolved into what was virtually a football daily.
Corriere dello Sport
followed in the 1920s and
Tuttosport
after the Second World War. At the height of its influence in the early 1980s,
La
Gazzetta,
with its distinctive blush pink newsprint, was Italy’s bestselling newspaper. Its most famous editor, the late Gianni Brera, went on to write for a number of other publications and even changed the Italian lexicon.

Brera claimed to think in dialect, yet his Italian prose was enriched with a vocabulary of astonishing breadth. In Brera’s writing, for example, Diego Maradona, the legendary Argentinian striker, becomes “the hyperbolic beast, in the infernal, mythological sense of Cerberus: if you do as much as respect him, out of sporting fairness, he’ll plant his teeth in the scruff of your neck, rip off your head and let it fall to the ground like a piece of fruit [torn] from the already sodden petiole.”
^*
2
Just that passage, in the original, contains two words that would have most Italians reaching for a dictionary, and a third they would not even find there.

When Brera lacked the word or phrase he needed, he would either resort to dialect (not necessarily his own) or make one up. Among the words he is credited with inventing is
libero
(for a defender not assigned to marking a specific opponent), a term that has passed from Italian into most of the other major languages of the world.

On Monday nights, fans who had read their favorite sporting daily from cover to cover could continue to alleviate their withdrawal symptoms by tuning in to
Il processo del lunedì,
which started on Rai television in 1980. It soon became a national institution and its presenter, Aldo Biscardi, a national celebrity.
Il processo del lunedì
means “The Monday Trial.” It consisted of a meticulous reexamination of the more controversial moments from the weekend’s games using a device—or rather, a technique—dubbed the
Supermoviola
. Using know-how reputedly developed for military purposes, Biscardi and his team let viewers study each contested move in slow motion from every possible angle, including even those not available to TV cameras at the time. The
Supermoviola
was the ultimate argument settler. It provided apparently indisputable proof that penalties had been wrongly awarded or that goals disallowed by the referee had in fact been scored by players onside at the time. Biscardi’s program, which has since had many imitators, also benefited from the presence of
vallette,
^*
whose role was to introduce the studio guests and announce the commercial breaks, but above all to be stunningly beautiful and alluringly dressed. The combination of soccer and sex is still a winning one, though these days the women with the big hair, high-gloss lipstick and low-cut dresses usually play a more active part. Several female presenters are recognized by even the most
maschilista
fans to be knowledgeable and passionate about the sport.

Not that every Italian woman is. “Seven out of every ten programs is about football. It’s unreal,” Ilary Blasi, the showgirl and wife of Roma star Francesco Totti, once complained. “If I happen to watch them, I fall asleep.” Plenty of other wives have expressed similar exasperation with the quantity of soccer on Italian TV. In addition to the replay and discussion programs, pay TV has brought with it channels devoted entirely to individual clubs. Nor does radio necessarily guarantee an escape. Several cities now have FM radio stations concentrating exclusively on the activities of a local team.

Their output—up to fourteen and a half hours a day of it—can be sampled in many a Rome taxi. For anyone whose life does not revolve around the club in question, it is mind-numbingly boring: meandering discussions between experts punctuated every so often by a phone call from a fan whose state of mind is usually somewhere between indignant and apoplectic. The capital is maybe the most football-crazed town in a football-mad country. Though AS Roma
^*
is meant to represent the city and SS Lazio the surrounding region, there is plenty of overlap that makes for searing rivalry between them. Unsurprisingly, it was in Rome that fan radio began. Currently there are no fewer than four stations focusing solely on Roma (and a fifth with a daily four-hour program devoted entirely to the club), and two for Lazio. The most successful of the Roma stations had an estimated daily audience of 150,000. The concept has since been taken up in Florence and Milan.