by Mark Dyal
On another occasion, Curva Sud chose to connect the eternal (Roman) law which guided the rise to dominance of Rome over all other Mediterranean cultures to the victory of AS Roma in the Italian championship of 2000–2001. During that season’s game against AC Milan, the Curva held aloft the crowned SPQR shield that acts as the crest of Rome.284 Below, the Curva announced ‘Legge Eterna di Roma Eterna...la Vittoria!’ (Eternal law of eternal Rome ... to victory!).
In case any Milanisti (AC Milan fans) might miss the point, AS Roma Ultras unfurled a banner just after the game started which read ‘Siamo Noi Romani, Siete Voi Schiavi’ (We Are Romans, You Are Slaves). There is no contradiction or contradistinction between Rome, AS Roma, and the Curva. There is no level of abstraction that the Ultras justify by presenting the crest of the city as their own. Nor is there a contradiction in their having signed the anti-immigrant graffiti on Via della Lupa with the words AS Roma Ultras (to be discussed in Chapter Seven).
The mentalità of AS Roma’s Ultras was perfectly summarized in a banner displayed by Tradizione Distinzione Roma during an unknown game. It connected the good of the Ultra and AS Roma with the good of the city. It enmeshed the classical glory of Rome with its own. It reveled in the agonistic form of life maintained by the Ultras, and connected it with the good of Rome, past and future.285 It read simply ‘Contro Tutto e Tutti. Gloria a Roma’ (Against Everything and Everyone, Glory to Rome); again, not AS Roma, but Rome. The Ultras rarely, if ever, feel the need to distinguish between the two.
Conclusion
In this chapter, it was shown how Romanità resembles and is distinguishable from campanilismo (extreme localism). Although it too is a discourse of localism, Romanità also has a history as a concept meant to unite the Italian nation, in both liberal and Fascist contexts. For the Ultras, it is, instead, a discourse of localism, but one that incorporates the Fascist period of the city’s history while promoting a critique of the universal values of liberalism. More important than its discursive uses, though, are the ways in which Romanità is a salient feature of the Ultras’ general worldview. Not only is it prominently displayed in the choreographies of Curva Sud Roma but also in its use of Roman symbols like the Lupa Capitolina. These symbols are designed to promote ‘Roman values’ in a way that distinguishes the Romans from all other peoples. In this light, their politics are given meaning as the positions and actions of a population who understands itself as under siege from forces that seek to diminish the value of Rome and being Roman.
Coda: Three Songs of Curva Sud Roma
The most common means of expression for the Ultras is through song. Each Curva in Italy has its own songbook, featuring songs of devotion, insult, threat, irony, and scorn. Curva Sud Roma is no different. During any game the Ultras may perform between twenty and thirty songs, with the higher number usually being reached by songs that insult specific teams. For reasons already made clear, AS Roma’s Ultras sing many songs which insult SS Lazio, AC Milan, FC Juventus, and SC Napoli; but sing very few against smaller provincial teams and cities. Overall, the majority of songs performed by AS Roma’s Ultras are of their devotion to the squad and city.
There are three songs created by Curva Sud Roma in recent years that demonstrate their understanding of Rome, Romanità, and themselves. In each of them the Ultras are above all else defenders of the city — either the actual city or its honor. The songs demonstrate how aware, and prideful, of the city’s history and traditions are the Ultras, who, in addition, present themselves as a line of defense against those who would reduce its value to that of a marketplace.
Dai rioni, dai quartieri From the districts and neighborhoods
siamo venuti fino quato here we have come
siamo gli ultras della Roma we are the Ultras of AS Roma
onoriamo la città and we honor the city
Siamo gli ultras della Roma e fieri We are the Ultras of AS Roma and fierce
centurioni e cavalieri, a difendere la città centurions and knights, to defend the city
orgoglio della nostra storia proud of our history
Ave Roma, Roma vittoriosaHail Rome, Victorious Rome
com’è scritto nella storia as it is written in history
il vento gelido del Nord the cold wind of the north
non ci potrà fermare cannot stop us
Semo romani trasteveriniWe are Romans from Trastevere
semo signori senza quatriniwe are gentlemen without money
er core nostro è ‘na capanna our heart is a mere hut
core sincero che nun te ‘nganna an honest heart that does not seek to fool you
si stai in bolletta noi t’aiutamo if you are without money we will help you
però da micchi nun ce passamo but we are not to be considered stupid
noi semo magnatori de spaghetti we are spaghetti eaters
de le trasteverine li bulletti the cocks of Trastevere girls
Roma bella, Roma mia beautiful Rome, my Rome
te se vonno portà via they want to take you away
Campidojo co’ S. Pietro se vorebbero comprà they’d like to buy Campidoglio and St Peter’s
qui se vonno comprà tuttoand everything else besides
pure er sole e l’aria fresca even the sun and the fresh air
ma la fava romanesca je potemo arigalà but we can present them instead with a Roman fava
Chapter Seven
Globalization and Local Particularity
In the previous chapter I demonstrated how Romanità motivates the Ultras to celebrate the rich history, culture, and cultural symbols of Rome. It explained that the Ultras’ self-understanding, as well as their understanding of the world-at-large, is filtered through Rome, producing an aggressive awareness of discourses of glory and greatness. This chapter continues these ideas but applies them to the political narratives and actions of Ultras belonging to groups of the Far Right.
While I was unable to witness the most extreme political actions of some Ultras, like the raiding of Roma gypsy camps or the storming of RAI’s studios, instead, I witnessed Ultras talking about them. Because of this, much of what follows is rhetorical. I am not suggesting that discourse is apolitical, however; on the contrary, in the pages to follow, there are acts of thinking and speaking that accentuate the derelict potential of discourses and philosophies that undermine the bourgeois form of life. In instances where I was present, such as the MTV Day protest, Family Day, and the Gay Pride parade, what the Ultras had to say about what they were doing seemed more important than what they, in fact, did. By focusing on discourse, though, I was able to get a clear sense of how localism was used by the Ultras — not as a discourse, per se, but as a framework for interpersonal relationships and for understanding the contemporary world’s right to expect, or demand, change in and to Rome. In other words, the Ultras’ ‘local’ was so glaring, and, as I will demonstrate, so permeated with ideas of Classical and Fascist glory, that liberal change was understood as something that had to come from outside — something imposed upon the city by the forces of liberalism that they associated with globalization.
The chapter begins by demonstrating how Romanità operates as a discourse, inculcating the Ultras with a critique of modernity that aims above all at protecting Rome from the influences of the postmodern State and globalization. I then discuss the impact of the organized Far Right on Curva Sud Roma before examining the political interests of the Ultras. To do so I detail Ultra protests against MTV, a Gay Pride parade, African immigration, and the presence of Roma gypsies in Rome.
Postmodernity and Globalization
One of the reasons that the Ultras are such an important aspect of the Western peoples’ struggle for autonomy and self-determination in the face of the unthinking servility that capitalism and the State demand of our lives, is that they are situated at the nodal point at which so many of these demands intersect with our bodies; and at these intersections, the Ultras willfully complicate the exchanges at hand: morality and trut
h, the State and passivity, minority and majority, consumption and happiness, security and prosperity, radicalism and the Left, and conservatism and the Right.
For example, the Ultras undoubtedly stand and fight against the form of economic and moral postmodernity that the contemporary State uses to effectively control its subject populations, at once proclaiming an embrace of the Third World, multiculturalism, and ecumenical visions of globalization as well as demanding a concomitant intellectual and social duty to reject the stifling contours of ‘traditional European values.’ These are now understood, without irony, not as core aspects of a collection of distinct ‘local cultures’ (as non-Western, previously Other, cultures would be celebrated), but as racist and exclusionary albatrosses weighing down the efforts to make Europe and the world one free market.286 The discourse and ethical content of No al Calcio Moderno, as we will see, demonstrate the Ultras’ awareness of the links that can be made between moralities of altruism and the State-sponsored capitalist marketization of human life.
The Ultras allow us to see that this process involves a mediation of government, governance, and media control of information and, in effect, evaluational technologies and techniques, on the one hand, and the options given a Western individual as ‘a life’ on the other: from the understanding of one’s very subjectivity to the administration of finances and the vast array of boredom management strategies, all the way to the creation of domains of knowledge and how these come to police our access to what anthropology once dichotomized as the sacred and the profane. The postmodernization of State administration has certainly made clearer the essential functions of the effective State outlined by Mussolini: the soldier, the policeman, the tax-collector, and the judge,287 but it has done so by enmeshing this bare assemblage of force and exploitation with the regime of moral castigation and legally enforced altruistic expansionism and intellectual disarmament that has become the Ultras most powerful enemy.
And it is in engaging this enemy that the Ultras effectively expose the intolerance laying at the heart of the new morality of multiculturalism and the universal human; while pointing out how it is wielded by the State and capitalism as a type of physiological pedagogy to undermine dissent. The rest of this chapter seeks to explain, perhaps by a circuitous route, how the State’s outlawing of the most dangerous kinds of particularity in the name of universalizing the bourgeois human, works hand in hand with its drive to include ‘racial minorities, gays and lesbians, immigrants,’288 and any other loyal subculture whose inclusion makes affordable the exclusion of the becoming ever more defiant ‘native population.’289
With this perspective in mind, one may begin to understand the conditions that guide the political interests and choices of the Ultras. Simply put, the Ultras come to know and interact with the political world through the intense narratives of the Ultra mentalità. Strength, honor, discipline, virtue, sacrifice, and loyalty are just a few of the themes contained in this worldview that I have described. These lead not only to a highly Fascist interpretation of politics but also one that is moralized. In the Curva, the Ultras create a tableau of local gestures and performances that directly challenge the homogenizing tendencies of Calcio Moderno. They give greater value to local particularity than to multi-national corporate interests and the understanding of the game as a televisual product. Beyond the Curva this same commitment to local particularity dominates, but here they are also able to expose the moral bases of the forces that they believe are aligned against them.
The Ultras and Politics
While the Ultras are intensely, aggressively, and radically political, the ‘political behaviors’ to which they commit are largely extra-parliamentary. In other words, organizing, voting, holding office and campaigning for political parties is not what they have in mind when thinking or acting politically. Instead, Ultra politics is largely about putting the Ultra mentalità into action in a larger context than the Curva. In this, the Ultras’ use of politics mirrors the ‘ritual and cultish’ aspects of other forms of Italian politics (namely the Radical Left and Italian Communist Party). As David Kerzer explains, politics of this kind are not solely interested in transforming society, but also with acting strictly within the terms of the cosmological myths that buttress the movement in question.290
The Ultras and the Presence of the Far Right in the Curva
Nonetheless, the Ultras have contacts with, and are influenced by Italian political parties and movements. At this moment in Curva Sud Roma’s history, the Far Right is the most important of these, as the Curva shifted from a mix of political ideologies at its inception to being dominated by the Far Right in the early-1990s. This shift coincided with the general shift in the Italian working class from the Left to the Right, making it consistent with larger trends in Italian society.291 The Far Right still dominates today — especially amongst the large groups, yet it is difficult to ascertain why this is so from the Ultras.
According to Ultras from both the Left and Right, there is no mystery as to why Fascism took over the Curva. ‘The Right,’ said Massimiliano, an Ultra of Fedayn who grew up in a family committed to Leftist parties and concerns, ‘is the more powerful force in Rome’s history. If one looks at history, Rome has almost always been in their hands. The only Curva Sud I’ve ever known has been in their hands too.’ I asked how his family resisted the Rightist persuasion. ‘My father is from a small town in Campania between Rome and Campobasso,’ he answered, ‘where everyone is Communist. I was born in Rome in 1979 and would hear many things in school about Communism and Fascism. But for me it was just normal to follow my family’s understandings.’
‘And in Curva Sud?’ I asked. ‘Fedayn was the only strong Leftist group when I began going to the Curva in 1996,’ he said, ‘and I knew some of the guys from school. It was natural to go to Fedayn, even beyond politics in the Curva.’ Like many of the Leftist Ultras, Massimiliano is convinced that politics should have no place amongst the Ultras. ‘Ultras is a commitment to AS Roma, not to politics. The beauty of being an Ultra is the purity and focus it gives — there is only AS Roma!’ he said with a smile.
Conversely, those on the Right feel that politics is the central thrust of the Ultras. ‘To be a Roman is basically to be a Fascist,’ Stefano, a former member of the disbanded Monteverde explained. ‘But to be a proud Roman is absolutely to be a Fascist. We Ultras did the same things that Fascism is doing today. We had an office, we cleaned our streets (referring to the neighborhood cleansing of drug dealers, illegal street vendors, and Roma panhandlers mentioned in Chapter One for which Monteverde was notorious amongst the Ultras), and we fought Communists in school and in the piazzas. Curva Sud was just an extension of that because it was our advertising. We could support AS Roma but also demonstrate the joy of being a proud Fascist and proud Roman.”
Similar to Massimiliano, Stefano’s household had a political outlook, but this time of the Far Right, ‘just as was the entire Monteverde neighborhood,’ he said. And, similar to Stefano I had to prompt Massimiliano to discuss the place of the Right in the Curva. ‘I found Monteverde here on my street,’ he said, ‘so coming into the Curva as a Fascist was something I never decided. I was an AS Roma fan and Fascist just like my friends [in the group].’
It is unclear if anyone besides the Ultras and the fascists has made Romanità such an integral part of their politics or general worldview. That the Ultras of the Right equate Fascism and Romanità begs the question whether an intermediate source of inspiration for their passions is available. In the years between the fall of Fascism and the rise of the Right amongst the Ultras, was there any movement or cultural element keeping the two alive? Certainly, Julius Evola comes to mind, as do scholars of Fascism like Emilio Gentile, professor of history at Rome’s La Sapienza University. I have already demonstrated the prevalence of Evolan thought amongst the Rightist Ultras but cannot do so for Gentile. However, his model of how Fascism used Romanità is perhaps the most useful for fully explicating how the politi
cs of the Ultras evolves from a love of, and desire to protect, Rome to a will to act violently in this regard.
Romanità, Ultras, and Fascism
According to Gentile, the Fascist State was implemented with the idea that the human character is malleable, ‘as an expression of a historical tradition, of the customs, beliefs, and ethic of a whole people’.292 The State, then, felt it could create the content of its subjects’ character. Romanità was central to this project. Fascism taught of a Rome that was ‘grounded in virtue, knowledge, and discipline, the secret of greatness’ with the expectation that modern Italians would become worthy heirs of their Roman forefathers by embracing these same ideals.293 The metanoia, or change of feeling, amongst the Romanizing Italians would demonstrate that Romanità was an active agent in modern Fascist Italy. ‘This was no idea petrified in this or that traditional form, but alive and in action — belonging to our own current awareness of politics and history’.294 Romanità was a part of the mythologizing impetus of Fascism, which saw no limits to the power of ideas and ideals to motivate behaviors. And it is this affective power that the Ultras have put to use. But, just as with the teachings of Evola, Nietzsche, and Sorel, and the legacy of Fascism, the Ultras have made use of Romanità in a way that uniquely serves their purposes.
If Ultras on the Left and Right seemed to agree that Fascism was just a normal part of their experiences of Rome and the Ultras, why was this so? The Ultras never adequately answered the question. However, Stefano (above) had alerted me to the correlation between Roman pride and Fascism. I asked Federico, formerly of Antichi Valori, if he agreed with Stefano’s formula. ‘Absolutely,’ he said, ‘but only because the Fascists have always used Romanità as a way to legitimize Fascism. And today, look at how Forza Nuova uses Rome and its imagery. It is no accident that the Forzanovisti [members of Forza Nuova] use the Lupa [Capitoline She-Wolf] and Stadio dei Marmi [stadium of marbles — created by the PNF for parades, sporting events, and other public displays, it is a small oval surrounded by hyper-masculine neo-Classical statues] in their publications, as well as celebrating April 21st [as noted above, the birthday of Rome]. Aside from us [AS Roma’s Ultras] the Fascists make the most use of Romanità.’