The Italians

by John Hooper

  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.

  Fan radio was originally an invention of Rome’s formidably well-organized, powerful and wealthy fan clubs. In this, however, the capital is by no means unique. Every Serie A team is followed by one or more groups of die-hard fans generically known as ultras.* The oldest ultras groups date back to at least the 1950s. Ultras fans see themselves as different from—and more disciplined than—British-style hooligans and the originators of a style of support that spread from Italy to much of the rest of Europe, featuring the use of drums, flags, banners and above all flares. These days, however, they project a mix that is well known among soccer fans in Britain and elsewhere: a taste for violent behavior and extremist, usually far-right, politics that routinely comes out in the form of naked racism.

  What continues to distinguish Italy’s ultras from hard-line supporters in other countries, though, is not so much their extremism as the degree of legitimization they get from the managements of the clubs they support. Some ultras are even put on the payroll. They often get subsidized travel to attend away games. Their leaders frequently get free tickets. And they can usually get friends into the stadium to watch matches for free. But such perks are nothing compared with what they can make for themselves by using their symbols—and often those of their clubs—for merchandising. BBC journalists who made a documentary about Lazio’s Irriducibili found to their astonishment that the Irriducibili had their own headquarters and stocked fourteen shops in and around Rome.

  Ultras leaders routinely have access to the players and the implicitly menacing influence they exert can lead to changes of tactics, players and club policy. In 2004, Lazio’s Irriducibili and AS Roma’s Ultras gave a frightening demonstration of their power at a “derby” between the two sides. In the first half, a rumor went around among the spectators that a young Roma fan had been run over and killed by police outside the stadium. It is widely suspected that the rumor was agreed upon between the Ultras and the Irriducibili before the match for reasons that have never become clear. At all events, a few minutes after the restart a delegation of Ultras somehow got onto the running track that surrounds the field, and Roma’s captain, Totti, went to speak to them. Paddy Agnew, the Rome correspondent of the Irish Times, who was commenting on the match for Rai, wrote afterward in his book on the game in Italy3 that Totti’s words to his coach immediately afterward “came loud and clear over the effects headset.” They were: “Se giochiamo adesso, questi ci ammazzano”—“If we play on now, these guys’ll kill us.” With the agreement of Lazio’s captain and despite the protestations of the referee, the game was called off.

  “Fan power had won,” wrote Agnew. “Fan violence too then ensued as violent elements in both Roma and Lazio camps engaged in a series of running battles with riot police outside the ground.” Over the next few years, football violence went from bad to worse, with clashes between Ultras and the police becoming considerably bloodier than those between rival groups of fans. In 2007, a police officer died as a result of injuries sustained in a riot during a match in Sicily, and a fan was shot dead by a policeman during a clash between supporters of rival teams at a motorway service station. With the public clamoring for a response, the government introduced a program of restrictions and reforms that has curbed, but not yet eliminated, violence from the game.

  If the Ultras’ adversary is the sbirro (cop), then the enemy of all fans is the referee. In Italy, he is not just shortsighted, but an object of almost universal contempt.* Gianni Brera, a journalist whose opinions were read by millions, could write that “in almost every case, we are dealing with either a frustrated person with a need to show to himself that he exists and has free will, or a bully.” Ennio Flaiano, a fellow journalist and writer of fiction—he cowrote with Fellini the s
creenplays for La dolce vita and 81/2—thought Italians hated the referee for a much simpler reason: “Because he gives a verdict.”

  Over the years, a view formed that these detested creatures were susceptible to influence: that consciously—or more probably unconsciously—they favored the big clubs. A term was even coined for the condition from which they were suffering: “psychological slavery.” Nowhere, it was argued, was this more obvious than in their handling of matches involving Juventus, the team that more than any other exuded power. Rooted in Piedmont, the region that unified Italy, and owned by Fiat, the embodiment of Italian industrial pride, Juventus has a national character—and a national following—greater than that of any other club. One of its nicknames indeed is La Fidanzata d’Italia (roughly, “Italy’s Sweetheart”). You can go into bars in the wilds of Calabria, at the other end of the peninsula from Turin, and find a black-and-white-striped pennant on the shelf and a notice proudly declaring that the bar is the meeting place for the local branch of the Juventus supporters’ club.

  The idea that referees subconsciously felt it was unpatriotic to let Juventus lose might seem far-fetched. But fans—and particularly those of clubs like Fiorentina, Cagliari and Verona, who have won the championship only once in a blue moon—could nevertheless point to a number of controversial decisions that had gone Juventus’s way at crucial moments in the history of the league. In 1981, for example, in the seventy-fourth minute of the vital clash with Juventus, the referee disallowed a Roma goal that was later shown to be valid. The result was that the title went to Juventus. The same happened the next year after the referee refused a goal that would have given Fiorentina the championship with only fifteen minutes of the season left. On more than one occasion, moreover, Juventus finished the season with noticeably more penalties awarded in their favor and suspiciously few given against. As the years passed, and suspicions increased, fans of rival teams taunted Juventus’s supporters with chants of “You only know how to rob” and “We’d rather be second than thieves.”

  It was only in 2005 that they began to wonder whether Juventus’s singular good luck might be due to something more than just psychological subjugation. It was then that the first reports appeared of an investigation code-named “Offside” being carried out by a prosecutor in Turin. He subsequently concluded that nothing the police had discovered was proof of a crime. But he passed the evidence he had gathered to Italy’s main soccer authority, the Federazione Italiana Giuoco Calcio (FIGC), and a few days after the end of the 2005–2006 season extracts from the transcripts of wiretapped telephone conversations leaked to the press.

  It was the beginning of a scandal like no other in the history of football in Italy, or anywhere else for that matter. From time to time, players or referees are caught fixing matches. It happens in all countries. Usually there is a link to some kind of betting ring. But Calciopoli,* as this scandal came to be known, was different. What the transcripts suggested was that Juventus’s top managers had created a web of influence that did indeed enable them to secure compliant referees for their games. Some other clubs were in on the system too, and could benefit from similar favors. The implication was not, as in other scandals, that this or that game was fixed, but that Serie A was fixed; that it was not a tournament between sides that began the season with a theoretically equal chance of winning, but a puppet show: a colorful, dramatic performance that lasted from one year into the next for which the script was written by a handful of powerful and conspiratorial men. And that did not just apply to what could be seen in the stadiums. Some of the transcripts indicated that Juventus’s general manager, Luciano Moggi, was in contact with Aldo Biscardi,* the presenter of what was by then Il processo di Biscardi. The idea was to ensure that the slow-motion reconstructions on his program were interpreted in the way that suited Juventus. It was the quintessential demonstration of how, in Italy, what is visible is not necessarily real. Biscardi took his program off national television after it was caught up in the scandal, and he, his Supermoviola and his vallette were last seen—more than thirty years after the first edition of the program—on a circuit of minor local stations.

  There were two bizarre things about Calciopoli. One was that, while the scandal was at its height, Italy won its fourth World Cup. The other was that no money was ever shown to have changed hands.* The system worked because the managers concerned had created a belief that they were so powerful and influential that they could make or break the careers of anyone else in the game. And the very belief that their word was law gave them the power and influence they needed to secure their aims. It was a perfect example of a mafia in the loosest sense of the word—of the sort of inclusive (yet exclusive), anticompetitive and perhaps family-like arrangements that abound in Italy.

  CHAPTER 15

  Restrictive Practices

  Per lungo tempo si sono confuse la mafia e la mentalità mafiosa, la mafia come organizzazione illegale e la mafia come semplice modo di essere. Quale errore! Si può benissimo avere una mentalità mafiosa senza essere un criminale.

  Mafia and mafia-like mentality, the mafia as an illegal organization and the mafia as simply an outlook on life have long been confused. What a mistake! You can perfectly well have a mafia-like mentality without being a criminal.

  Giovanni Falcone

  Claudia had been left with several houses when her husband died. She rented them out to vacationers wanting to spend time in the Italian countryside. We had agreed to meet her at the house of a mutual friend. Claudia had to pick up some guests—nonpaying guests who were old friends, as it happens—from the railway station. She said she would catch up with us once she’d dropped them off at her home. As she was coming out of the station, she was approached by a group of local taxi drivers.

  “They said that, by collecting my guests from the station, I was taking business off them,” she said. Claudia was clearly shaken by their intimidating manner and concerned by what might happen if she ignored their protest. This did not happen in Sicily, nor even in Puglia. The station in question is in Tuscany.

  I have a friend who lives on one of the Italian islands. She needed a table. She had seen just what she wanted in another part of the island. But there was a furniture shop in her immediate vicinity, and it was owned by someone she had known since she was a child but who was not in any sense a friend. To buy the table anywhere else, however, would be seen not as the legitimate choice of a consumer, but as a gross betrayal. She and her partner were his customers. He would probably never speak to them again if they went elsewhere. So they ended up buying the table at the shop on the other side of the island and then carrying it between them all the way back to their home on a circuitous route so that neither the table nor a delivery van of the rival shop would be seen by the man who regarded himself as their furniture supplier.

  Anyone who has lived in Italy will no doubt be able to recount similar anecdotes. If you go regularly to a shop, bar or restaurant, you risk arousing possessive instincts (and particularly if you have accepted—and there is really no way you can refuse—an unsolicited sconto, or discount). This has been a special problem for me because of the nature of my work. I travel frequently and on my return I have often been greeted in regular haunts with an ever so slightly sardonic “Ben tornato” (“Welcome back”). If I explain apologetically that I had to go abroad, then everything will be fine. But if I limit myself to the customary—pretty much untranslatable—response of “Ben trovato,” there is a danger that my coffee will be served with just a tad less care and that the bar owner will remove himself to the other end of the counter to chat with exaggerated warmth to someone he clearly regards as a genuine regular.

  This desire for the preservation of monopolies—or, in the case of Claudia’s disgruntled taxi drivers, a cartel—runs like a semivisible vein through Italian society. And it has a long history. The enduring strength of the Italian craft guilds and the restrictions they enforced were among the reasons
the Italian economy went into decline during the seventeenth century. One of the most jealously protected cartels was that of the glassmakers on the Venetian island of Murano: anyone who tried to take their skills elsewhere faced severe penalties, or even death.

  The spirit of the guilds lives on today in Italy’s still formidable trade unions and in the ordini and collegi—professional bodies, membership of which is essential for anyone who seeks to practice. There are more than thirty of these, and they regulate access to a much wider range of professions than in other EU countries. There are ordini for notaries and architects, but also for social workers and employment consultants. There is a collegio for nurses, but also one for radiological technicians and another for ski instructors.

  The professional bodies are part of a vast web of restrictive practices. One of the most ludicrous examples to surface in recent years was that of the Venetian street artists. It turned out that their licenses were inherited. So even if someone had no talent for drawing or painting, he could occupy a spot that would otherwise have gone to someone with real artistic talent.

  It is a moot point as to whether the Catholic Church developed its antiliberal attitudes because its outlook is essentially monopolistic or because until very recently it was run largely by Italians. At all events, Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors, issued in 1864, anathematized liberalism along with a long list of other creeds and beliefs. His stance put an even greater distance between the Vatican and the new Italian state in which liberalism became the dominant ideology.* Early free-market economics, particularly as practiced by the governments of Giovanni Giolitti in the period leading up to the First World War, delivered prosperity. The Italian economy surged ahead as the country industrialized. But the liberals became hopelessly—and quite justifiably—identified with official corruption.