by Mark Dyal
These rivalries are also marked by the current social and political topics of the day, as when UC Sampdoria Ultras wave trash bags at the SSC Napoli supporters on the other side of the stadium in reference to problems in Campania with State-enforced privatization of trash collection. Otherwise, the ‘tifare contro,’ or root against, aspect of Ultra agonism will pick up on a local enemy of the team being played. For instance, when AS Roma played at FC Messina in 2006, the AS Roma Ultras sang ‘Messinese Sei un Catanese’ (person of Messina you are of Catania) at the Messina crowd, not only playing on Messina’s biggest soccer rivals but also Catania’s status as the ‘Other’ of Sicily.
What is distinctive is the content of the altruistic associations with agonism. For each curva there will be a concordant ‘propter nos,’ or people on whose behalf they act. I argue that the purpose of the agonistic form of life is to promote a narrowly defined people or in-group. For Curva Sud Roma, that people is obviously Roman. In Brescia, by contrast, it may be limited to Brescia or it might be moving to incorporate the surrounding Lombard region or more fully ‘the North.’ For certain, though, it does not include Rome and the Romans. Likewise, SSC Napoli’s Ultras have an extremely limited range of altruistic co-identification, being restricted to the city itself. I have been told that the other small teams of the Campania region despise SSC Napoli as do the Romans.
In Chapter Six, I explained Romanità as a central element of the AS Roma Ultras’ worldview. That chapter also addressed the applicability of Romanità to campanilismo, the form of extreme localism that is still a powerful socializing force in Italy. From the perspective of the Ultra phenomenon in general, Romanità is a local Roman form of campanilismo. From within the concept’s own history, though, it is far more compelling as a political discourse that outweighs the other forms of Italian localism. Nonetheless, the point here is that, while I identified Romanità as a crucial part of the experience of AS Roma’s Ultras, it would be unknowable to other city’s Ultras in the same terms. For instance, whereas AS Roma’s Ultras use Romanità to attack their Milanesi counterparts as the former slaves of Rome, the Milanesi would not use their relative status under Roman rule against another curva, say that of Vicenza or Venice.
Identifying the media and State as rivals of the Ultras allowed me to consider the political ideologies and the political and social environment of the Ultras in relation to their conceptualization of agonism. It became clear that the Ultras had proper reasons to be hostile toward the media and Italian State, which often went beyond the treatment they themselves received by both. As I found myself deeper in the world of the Ultras I also became more closely affiliated with group leaders on the very Far Right. It was from the leaders of Boys Roma and Antichi Valori, in particular, that I became aware of the deep moral divide between them and the bourgeois press and State. In time, like them, I began to see the conflict between the Ultras and the media (especially) as a conflict between two competing moralities. This consciousness of morality came from their readings of Friedrich Nietzsche, who understood morality as the basis not only of peoples but also of millennia.
It is impossible to say if Nietzsche is a popular theoretical influence on other Italian curvas, but I can say that the bourgeois modern world he describes, in complete contradistinction to the warrior-based pre-modern forms of life that preceded it, makes sense well beyond Curva Sud Roma. In Juventus’ Curva Sud, for instance, the main groups are Viking and Drughi. Both groups are of the Right and, while the first is an obvious reference to the Nordic anti-Christian raiders of the Middle Ages, the second is taken from a violent gang in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange.
Aligned with the dominant and Ultra moralities are competing ethics of violence. In Rome, one can see with certainty how Sorel’s understanding of violence as a force of change is combined with Nietzsche’s understanding of violence as a way to transcend the meddling bourgeois morality of modernity. It thus acts as a tool for understanding the Ultras as a phenomenon outside or beyond the bourgeois form of life. If an American can pass time with AS Roma’s Ultras and see Sorel and Nietzsche at work, then it no surprise that both the government and the Ultras believe Curva Sud Roma to be the most violent curva in Italy. That is not to say, however, that AS Roma’s Ultras are the only violent Ultras in Italy: they are all violent to some degree, enough so to produce a cottage industry of books on Ultra violence. I will now turn to the issue of violence, especially as it relates to the conflict between the Ultras and the State.
Violent Politics
In the early years of the Ultra phenomenon, the 1970s and 1980s, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to describe a single unifying political characteristic of Italian Ultras. While some groups were born of the Left and Right, either from offshoots of the student movement or the postwar Fascist parties, others were apolitical and genuinely benign.368 Those on the political edges, though, were organized in a time of political extremism and domestic terrorism perpetrated by both sides of the liberal political divide. Even as the Leftists were weary of State repression and the Fascists were weary of the State in general, neither set of Ultras was known to attack the police as became common in the mid-to-late-1990s.369 So it is that most scholars who search for the origins of violence between the Ultras and the police begin their surveys between 1994 and 1996.370
Although neither Mariottini nor Roversi point to specific instances that triggered the now twenty-year war between the police and the Ultras, relying instead on Leicester School assumptions that the origins of social violence lie in the psyches of the perpetrators, Stefanini lays the blame clearly upon the police. ‘Whenever there was the smallest of incidents between Ultras,’ he says, ‘the police would come on the scene as hard as possible, with batons crashing down upon t-shirt clad soccer fans until all movement in the danger zone ceased’.371 He goes on to list a series of beatings into states of irreversible coma and even death by the police — deaths that became the organizing principle in Brescia and Perugia, whose curvas were re-named after the victims of police brutality. Amongst the victims, he lists thirty-two-year-old Alessandro Spoletini, an Ultra of AS Roma beaten into a coma by police in Bologna in 2001. The following week, he says, AS Roma’s Ultras attacked the police on guard at a Champions League game between AS Roma and FC Liverpool.372 He continues in this way, up through the G8 Summit in Genova 2001, where a Carabinieri officer killed Carlo Giuliani. As a result, the Ultras developed what he calls an ‘ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards) syndrome,’ and began to engage the police before the police engaged them.373
I struggled to understand the relationship between the State and the Ultras. As I said above, there was very little violence to speak of between the Ultras and none between the police and Ultras. The Ultras were, in my estimation, well policed, in that when they arrived in opposing cities by train they were met with a large contingent of assault rifle wielding Carabinieri. When they arrived by car they were often stopped on highways and driven en masse with police escort to the stadium. In Rome, the police were visible in large numbers both inside and outside the stadium.
Because of this, I turned my attention to the ethics and discourses of violence being deployed by the Ultras and the State. What became clear is that both the State and the Ultras have a purpose behind their violence. While AS Roma’s Ultras, at least at the highest levels of involvement, are committed to using violence as a way to create and maintain distance between themselves and the bourgeois form of life, they do so at the micro-political level. As a group or curva, their violence is an attack on the forces protecting the industry of soccer from those who wish the game to return to its communal roots. It was thus that the Ultras invoked Calcio Moderno as a rationale for violence.
Calcio Moderno is the Ultras’ moniker for the globalized, deterritorialized, and super-profitable soccer that now defines the game in the industrialized world. ‘No al Calcio Moderno’ has become a rallying cry for Ultras in all parts of Italy and it is the one example of a unifi
ed political agenda or model amongst the Ultras. In Rome, the experience of Calcio Moderno — of globalization as a destructive force for soccer clubs and fans — politicized Ultras in ways that moved them far beyond stadiums and the world of soccer. It was also at the core of their ethical aversion to the bourgeois form of life. Again, the details of other curvas’ involvement with this discourse and agenda are unknown to me. I have, however, perused numerous websites and Facebook pages devoted to a rejection of Calcio Moderno and have read words very similar to those I heard in Rome.
Elsewhere, the extreme political actions of the Ultras, like raiding Roma camps, were witnessed in Campania. In one instance an SSC Napoli Ultra was implicated, but never convicted, for taking part in an attack. In Palermo, I saw Ultra graffiti against African immigrants and in Milan I saw Ultra graffiti proclaiming Lombardy a separate nation. Thus, I can assume that Ultra politics take the form of issues that are closest to home.
In Rome, Calcio Moderno meant not only a world where money and the global marketplace counted more than the interests of localized Romans, but also a world in which the morality of that marketplace was hegemonic. Multiculturalism, anti-racism, tolerance, immigration, and the American tropes of democracy and freedom were to be resisted as much as foreign ownership of soccer clubs. In Rome and in Curva Sud Roma’s Rightist Ultras, one also finds a long tradition of Extreme Right politics. I cannot say if Forza Nuova, Fiamma Tricolore, and CasaPound Italia are as popular elsewhere in Italy as they are in Rome — or at least amongst Rome’s Ultras. But in Rome, as I was told by a Leftist Fedayn Ultra, ‘Fascism is in the air one breathes, and in the cobblestones that we walk [upon]. Almost every building is Fascist and even the monuments to the “real Romans” are Fascist.’ It was the normalcy of Fascism in Rome, at least amongst the Ultras, which I hope to have made clear in the previous chapters.
Returning to the violence of the State, above I used the work of Giorgio Agamben to explain the ‘state of exception’ that defines the State’s interaction with the Ultras. These exceptional states, or states of emergency, are always militarized and place a high value on State security at the expense of individual liberties. I also used Max Weber’s template of State monopoly of the legitimate use of violence to explain how the rather inconsequential violence of the Ultras can be construed to be a threat to the State. These theorists, combined with Schmitt, Wolf, and Gramsci, helped me see how the bourgeois ethics and morality of the State are legitimized and disseminated by the liberal press. Against all this, I described the Ultras as inhabiting what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘derelict space,’ beyond the hegemony of the bourgeois form of life. Interestingly, Stefanini described the Ultras’ curvas as ‘Indian reservations, or spaces where the sovereignty of Italy does not reach’.374
Regardless of city or region, the relationship between the Italian State and the Ultras is the same. The Italian media makes it clear that violence amongst soccer fans in any form would not be tolerated by the State. Regardless of the fascists in Rome’s curvas, as both AS Roma’s and SS Lazio’s Ultras are dominated by the Far Right, or the Communists in AC Livorno’s Curva Nord, the State with its troops of Carabinieri, and the media with its ability to define, signaled after the death of Raciti that the derelict spaces or Indian reservations would no longer be allowed to exist.
The Future of the Ultras
In Chapter Four I asked the question, as I did above, what will become of the Ultras if they are dispossessed of their role in Italian soccer. Returning to AS Roma’s Ultras, it is difficult to say. There are three discernable possibilities, each of which is problematic from the perspective of the Ultras.
One, the Ultras are hoping that a change of regime will loosen some of the restrictions put in place by the government of Romano Prodi and since strengthened by the Berlusconi government. This seems unlikely, as having virtually banned away-game travel and effectively banned Ultra in-stadium traditions, the State has finally rid itself of a large part of its problems with the Ultras.
Two, there is a strong enough political consciousness among the Rightist Ultras that an Ultra-based social movement might be possible. However, as I wondered above, how relevant would being an Ultra be to a social movement if soccer were removed from the equation? Fascist Ultras already mirror the earliest manifestations of the Fascist movement begun by Mussolini in 1919. The Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (The Italian Fighting League) was a small group of arditi (Italian infantry storm troopers), Futurists, and anti-communist agitators that violently engaged communist and pacifist organizers in and around Milan.375 The Rightist Ultras share the same passion for anti-liberal politics, squadrismo (political action in the form of fascist bands), and a similar ethic of violence and critique of modern morality. It seems unlikely in any case that the Ultras, as Ultras, would seek a role in parliamentary politics, as so much of their critique of modernity rests on a critique of the liberalism at its foundation.
Three, the Ultras have an inordinate amount of faith in their mentalità and form of life as a viable alternative to the bourgeois form of life and its consumerist pleasures. It is possible that they could maintain the mentalità outside the stadiums with little damage occurring to either its forcefulness or relevance. Similar to Slow Food, the movement for a return to Italian culinary habits and traditions in the face of the Americanization of local cuisines and eating practices, the Ultras offer a passionate critique of the changes to traditional life being demanded by globalized free-market capitalism. Resisting globalization, much as it is resisted in the developing world,376 may be, in my view, their most productive and sustainable option. However, it presupposes a high level of commitment to the political aspects of being an Ultra that a large number of Ultras reject.
There is a fourth possibility: that the Ultras will be policed out of existence. Based on my experience, the current generation of Ultras is defiant enough that the State will be forced to kill far more Ultras than the public is willing to accept in order to make them extinct. I am convinced that in the immediate future the Ultras will continue to wait and to play a game of cat and mouse with the State. ‘Think’ said Federico of Antichi Valori and Romulae Genti, ‘of how many governments we have seen come and go in Italy, just since I entered Curva Sud in 1995 [there have been ten governments since 1995]. Think of how many seasons we have seen, how many players and coaches come and go. Through it all there has been Curva Sud Roma.’ Although Federico ignored the internal strife within the Curva during that same period, his point was made nonetheless. With stadiums in growing disrepair (according to the Italian Football Federation [FIGC]), attendances dwindling, the number of low-priced foreign players rising, and the hegemony of soccer as a television commodity, the Ultras are the one constant in Italian soccer.
Each of these scenarios is based on the Ultras being stripped of their ability to perform in soccer stadiums. Because I propose that what is essential about the Ultras is their commitment to their mentalità, which entails a particular critique of modernity and the bourgeois form of life, I believe that they can continue to exist in some form after the stadiums are closed to them. As said CUCS founder Stefano Malfatti at the Circo Massimo, ‘one is born an Ultra and one dies an Ultra.’ Having stripped away the frame of stadium performances, Malfatti answers the question posed above. Not surprisingly, as he was one of the first to use the term, the ‘mentalità Ultras’ remains when the stadium disappears. However, and it is a perhaps fitting conclusion to this project, if that occurs, and the Ultras are in fact dispossessed of their experience of soccer, what they will lose is the joy of being an Ultra. Rivalry and hostility will remain, but the unbridled thrill of an AS Roma goal or victory will be lost. In the end, if the Ultras are able to move beyond the relative safety of the stadiums and into a more active engagement with political extremism, the State may wish it had allowed them their fights, flares, bombs, songs, and flags. That the State fails to do so points instead to another of this project’s conclusions, that the war
against the Ultras is ultimately a war against their worldview and critique of modernity. As said Andrews and Ritzer, cultural forms that are ‘generally indigenously conceived, controlled, and comparatively rich in distinctive substantive content are a virtual impossibility’ in the realm of global capitalism.377
Afterword
Hated and Proud
17 January 2018
Voi non potrete mai eliminarci, perché noi siamo un sogno,
un emozione … noi siamo la libertà!378
Curva Sud Roma
Ten years ago today, my wife and I left Rome at the conclusion of the fieldwork that produced this book. It was one of the darkest days of my life, preceded by weeks of dread; as well as anger and frustration at being unable to enter Curva Sud one last time. Although we didn’t get to properly say goodbye to so many friends and camerate, enough of them knew of our departure to bring me to sobbing tears through their messages of gratitude and support. I remember so vividly, waiting hand-in-hand with my wife in a Fiumicino airport lounge, reading and responding to texts proclaiming me — and us — a valuable part of what, in our minds, is one of the most beautiful brotherhoods that the modern West has produced. I remember the barista who prepared us one last caffè for the road, the beautiful chatter of the language in which I had come to dream, and the view of the majestic pines ringing the expanse of the airport. And when one of the messages spoke to me of being a ‘true Roman,’ I remember breaking down in one of the only true fits of despair of my life, as well as my wife’s tender consoling embrace as I shuffled like a death row inmate to our departure gate.