by John Hooper
CHAPTER 14
Taking Sides
Quella del calcio è l’unica forma di amore eterno che esiste al mondo. Chi è tifoso di una squadra lo resterà per tutta la vita. Potrà cambiare moglie, amante e partito politico, ma mai la squadra del cuore.
Football love is the only sort of love on this earth that is eternal. The fan of a team will remain one for the whole of his life. He may change his wife, his lover or his political party. But he will never change his favorite team.*
Luciano De Crescenzo
When my wife and I moved back to Italy, we lived for a while in a flat in EUR, the adjunct to Rome that Mussolini began in the 1930s. It was intended for the 1942 World’s Fair (hence the initials, which stand for Esposizione Universale di Roma). In the event, the Duce and his ally Hitler were busy with other things when 1942 came around. Today, there are government offices in EUR as well as headquarters of some of Italy’s biggest banks and corporations. The problem is that when the office workers all go home, the place becomes a morgue. Apart from a concert venue, just about the only evidence of life is offered by the numerous prostitutes—many of them transvestites—who hang around on street corners near the parks. But EUR has its attractions. It is within easy reach of the coast. It is home to one of the finest twentieth-century buildings in Europe, the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, better known as the Square Colosseum. And EUR also has a splendid man-made lake surrounded by acres of lawns and hedges.
For most of the year, this pleasant spot is the preserve of joggers, local dog walkers and office workers taking a stroll during their lunch hour. But there comes a moment in the spring when one weekend the park around the lake, which is known as the laghetto, fills to bursting. It remains that way for two or, at most, three weekends. Then, at a certain point in late July, the droves of people from elsewhere in Rome disappear as abruptly and conclusively as the swifts.
There is a logic to this. The weather is not yet hot enough to encourage a visit to the beaches at Ostia. But it is sufficiently warm to make a walk by the lake a pleasant experience. Even so, the unanimity with which thousands of Romans reach the decision to go to EUR for a walk and an ice cream is astonishing. It is as if an order had gone out: “This is the weekend that we all go to EUR.” And it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that something a bit like that has indeed happened.
Extensive consultations will have taken place in hundreds of circles of friends and acquaintances all over Rome. And the “wisdom of crowds” principle means that each of those circles is likely to reach a similar, if not identical, conclusion. So at a certain point in the spring, the consensus will be “Let’s all go to EUR.”
The crowds you see as a result are the tangible evidence of il piacere di stare insieme, which can be translated as “the joy of being together”*: a love of communal social action that points up one of the many paradoxes that characterize life in Italy. Ask any group of Italians for their outstanding national character trait and it is highly likely that at least one, if not most, will tell you it is individualismo. This does not mean individualism in the sense that Britons or Americans mean it. Individualismo combines “independence of action” with “self-interest.” Yet the vast majority of Italians are instinctively—almost compulsively—gregarious. So they may all prefer to go their own way. But they often end up in the same place.
When foreigners look around for a country with which to compare Italy, they usually light on Spain, or maybe France or Portugal, where the cultures are actually very different. No one ever mentions Japan. Yet it has often struck me that il piacere di stare insieme is one of several things that link the Italians to the Japanese. Both put a high value on the appearance of things. The Japanese, like the Italians, have a recent history of wielding an economic power that far exceeded their influence on the world stage. Both have traditionally had a high level of savings. Both have a tendency to form anticompetitive, cartel-like structures and partly for that reason have engendered seemingly indestructible organized-crime syndicates.* Japan, like Italy, is highly seismic. And both are long, narrow countries where the vast majority of the population is crammed into river valleys and narrow strips of land along the coast. You have only to look at the hinterland of Naples or the near endless conurbation that follows the Po to the sea to realize how accustomed Italians are to living cheek by jowl.
Italians are great joiners. The reason, as mentioned in the previous chapter, that there are so many presidenti is that there are so many clubs, associations and federations—noticeably more than in Spain. Even youthful rebels join centri sociali, which are more like communes, even though that idea went out of fashion in the rest of the West sometime between the 1970s and 1980s.
I have never quite fathomed whether this powerful associative tendency among Italians exists because they are trying instinctively to replicate a family structure, or inversely because they are attempting subconsciously to pull themselves free of the family’s tentacles. Perhaps there is an element of both. At all events—and this is where we get to a paradox within the paradox—it coexists with a formidable tradition of querulousness.
The political conditions in central and northern Italy throughout the Middle Ages gave full rein to a combination of mutual collaboration and antagonism. The papal government of most of the center of the country, though sporadically cruel, was rarely strong. Farther north, there was no administration—or rather, there were many administrations. First came the self-governing communes. Later they were replaced by a patchwork quilt of principalities, duchies and counties. For a period of centuries, Rome and the cities to the north of it were racked by vicious fighting between factions based on loyalty to a noble family, a clan or a neighborhood. This is the world of Romeo and Juliet, of the Montagues and Capulets. In Siena these bitter rivalries can be seen today, channeled more or less harmlessly into the twice yearly Palio horse race.
The factions, with their stores of weapons and fortified towers, lent themselves naturally to being subsumed into a broader conflict between the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire. In the twelfth century, this crystallized around the rivalry between two German noble houses, each aspiring to the emperorship: on the one side the Welfs, and on the other the Hohenstaufens, with their battle cry of “Waiblingen,” the name of a prized family castle. Since it was the Hohenstaufen candidate who got the job, the opponents of the empire and supporters of the papacy (who were not always the same) later adopted the Italianized name of guelfi, while their adversaries came to be known, from the war cry of the Hohenstaufens, as ghibellini. Entire cities were one or the other: Orvieto was Guelph, whereas Todi, just a few miles away, was Ghibelline; Cremona was Guelph, but Pavia, upstream on the river Po, was Ghibelline. Other cities, like Parma, on the other bank of the Po, went back and forth between the two sides. Over the years, clashes in and between cities belonging to different factions left thousands dead. In 1313, fighting between the two parties in Orvieto went on for four days. Florence, a Guelph city, and Ghibelline Siena were intermittently at war for decades.
The tendency for entire societies to split into two camps along a fault line is scarcely confined to Italy. But few divisions have lasted as long as that between the Guelphs and Ghibellines. Several Italian writers have seen in their bloody rivalry a legacy that can still be discerned today. According to one theory, it was reenacted throughout the Cold War in the standoff between the Christian Democrats and the Communists: the former, allies of the papacy, had the same essential characteristic as the Guelphs; the latter, like the Ghibellines, aligned themselves with a foreign power (just as the Ghibellines had taken the side of the empire, so the Communists looked for support to the Soviet Union).
But that interpretation has to be squared with another two-sided conflict that was suppressed at the end of the Second World War and never quite went away: between the supporters and opponents of Fascism. It is argued, mostly by right-wing intellectuals, that the Second World War
in Italy did not end cleanly in a popular rebellion against the Nazi occupiers (which was the version of events that underpinned the postwar years). Instead, the Allied invasion put a stop to a messy civil war between Mussolini’s die-hard supporters on the one hand and a predominantly Communist partisan force on the other. Seen from this standpoint, the conflict resurfaced in the murderous street fighting that erupted between young neo-Fascists and left-wing revolutionaries in the 1970s. And it was resolved only after the Christian Democrats and the Communists were swept aside by history in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Silvio Berlusconi brought the far right into alliance and from there into government. In doing so, it might be argued, he also put an end to the age-old enmity between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines: his success in the 2000s eventually forced most of his adversaries, including both former Communists and ex–Christian Democrats, into a single center-left movement, the Partito Democratico (PD).
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.