Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  Often, there was much more subtlety to the art of leaning on a referee. Back in the 1950s, trains didn’t come all the way inland to Cosenza but stopped at Paola on the coast. A club official would often offer a lift to the ref, driving him the half-hour to the stadium. The lift back was, of course, dependent on the right sort of decisions having been made during the game. If it had gone well, the official would be escorted back with all the treats the club could afford.

  An escort out of the ground was no small incentive for a ref. Half-a-Kilo, an ultra friend whose ironic nickname refers to his huge figure, tells me an apocryphal tale about the time his grandfather was goalkeeping for Cosenza. The referee gave a penalty against him, which he saved. The ref ordered it to be retaken and the keeper again saved it. When the ref saw another irregularity and ordered it taken a third time, Half-a-Kilo’s grandfather ran up to him and bit off part of his ear. Although it’s a tall tale (one hears many variants of it in Cosenza), its endurance in oral history does show how fans love to feel victimized by figures of authority and relish any redemption (even invented and imagined) through the infliction of violence.

  There were often very real fatalities. In November 1958 the seventeen-year-old son of a former Inter player, Giordano Guarisco, was crushed to death when ticketless fans stormed into the stadium. Then in April 1963, on the day of the Italian Republic’s fourth general election, Salernitana were playing Potenza in a play-off match for promotion to Serie B. Salernitana was losing 0–1 (the goal, fans thought, was offside). When in the dying minutes the referee failed to award a penalty to Salernitana, fans climbed over the fence separating them from the pitch. What happened next would be repeated many times over the years as police and fans engaged in brutal combat. One fan’s shirt was turning red as police truncheoned him and he ran back to the stands to ask for help. Fans surged forwards, knocking down the fence that kept them off the pitch, and shots were fired. A forty-eight-year-old Salernitana fan, Giuseppe Plaitano, was still in the stands, standing next to his son, Umberto. He died almost instantly. The police maintained that there was no order to shoot and that the sounds of firing were simply the explosions of tear gas canisters. But the autopsy showed that Plaitano died from a 7.65 calibre bullet, the same round used by the police. That day sixty-seven people were also wounded: thirty-seven civilians and twenty-four security officials, three Carabinieri and three firemen. One sporting almanac, in 1968, wrote about a riot at a Livorno–Monza match: ‘… if we continue in this vein the archaeologists of the fourth millennium will find in Ardenza [a Livorno suburb] the bones of referees and linesmen.’

  The killing of Giuseppe Plaitano, like the shooting of Augusto Morganti in 1920, was the result of trigger-happy policing. It meant that the hatred between fans and authority was no longer confined simply to the corrupt referee. Now, above all, it was focused on the police and Carabinieri. One of the main Salerno ultra groups is now called Ultras Plaitano. In that decade of mounting social unrest and rebellion, a prelude to the revolutionary 1960s, there was growing cynicism towards the celerini (the riot police) who, with tear gas, truncheons and pistols tried to maintain order at Italian football matches.

  In those years, various football teams started to encourage what were called, in English, ‘clubs’ for their supporters. These fan associations were often created and financed by the football club proper: they were given help with transport to away games, with tickets and finding an empty bar to use as an office. Many people credit the great Argentinian coach, Helenio Herrera, with the creation of supporters’ clubs (he wanted to have an away support to encourage his Inter players in the 1960s) but in reality there were much earlier precedents: Lazio had its Aquilotti (‘Eagles’) in the 1930s, and later, its Circolo Biancoceleste. Torino had been followed by its Fedelissimi Granata ever since 1951. Fiorentina had its own Club Vieusseux and Club Settebello.

  Occasionally those supporters’ clubs did favours for players and team officials. Carlo Petrini, the former player who, after retirement, blew the lid on the game with a few tell-all books about the shadier side of the sport, recalled how certain supporters would provide flats for players to meet their mistresses. Supporters’ clubs were also, sometimes, channels of political propaganda: the Inter groups were organized by Franco Servello, who was on the Inter board and also a parliamentarian for the neo-fascist MSI party. Supporters’ clubs of the biggest teams often had hundreds of offices (and hundreds of thousands of members) throughout the country, making them powerful political and financial lobbies.

  By 1964, Cosenza’s little football stadium, the Emilio Morrone (named after a twenty-three-year-old goalkeeper who died during a game in the 1940s) had been replaced by a new stadium, the San Vito, a mile or two to the east. The walk there had become a procession every Sunday afternoon. A man nicknamed ‘the Baron’, Giacomo Gigliotti, used to pick up the orphans from Piazza dei Bruzi and walk them to the stadium after lunch. On the way they would all sing ‘Dove Sta Zazà?’, a Neapolitan song from 1944 about a man who had lost his love.

  Present Day: Matera v. Cosenza

  Stadio XXI Settembre. The singing has been off for a while. When it peters out, you can hear a few shouts. There is something about the fury in those sounds that makes it clear that they aren’t the usual insults aimed at the players. A few people turn around to see what is happening, and that makes more take a look. The voices are raw now and suddenly it is kicking off: feet flashing in faces, the windmilling arms of unprofessional fighters. Others start piling in and above the shouts you can hear the muffled thud of knuckles on skulls. It’s mean now, people being dragged across the steps by their collars, others being twatted on the ground, two on one. This is Cosenza fighting its own – it’s the Curva Sud against Anni Ottanta. Those on the wrong end of it limp out of the ground.

  Everyone has a different idea of what the row was about. Some say it’s about who is true to the faith and who is a heretic. It’s about who has always been present and who has been absent. It’s about who has the right to lead the singing at away games and, therefore, who is the top dog back home too. It’s about who pulls in the most supporters. Since in this ultra world the weapon of choice is that blunt but brilliantly effective one of sheer force of numbers, whoever has more ‘hands’ is likely to be the toughest defender of the honour of Cosenza.

  The game finishes 0–0 – Cosenza’s first point (one point is awarded for a draw) of a possible nine – but no one is talking about that afterwards. Within hours, one of the main groups from the Curva Sud, the Old Drunkards of Cosenza Vecchia, publishes an online communiqué: ‘Fistfights are part of the ultra world, and in thirty years of history we’ve given, taken and given blows. Many of us have paid the price of being ultras, with stadium bans, arrests and repression.’ Then it got to the real issue: ‘… we believe that what’s left of the Anni Ottanta should dissolve itself with a bit of dignity. The time for chats and wars on Facebook is finished. Now the historic figures above all must take a step backwards… to turn a new page for the organized fans of Cosenza…’

  That, it seemed, was key to the disagreement. Here was one group claiming to be the radical, youthful wing (despite the name ‘Old Drunkards’) and asking the older generation to clear off. Later that week there was another communiqué, once again from the Curva Sud, announcing a fan strike:

  On the occasion of Saturday’s game against Fidelis Andria, the ultras of the Curva Sud will stand alongside our banned brothers on the little hill and will therefore desert the stadium. No banner will be present… this is the emptiness they want. All this to protest against repressive and disproportionate measures which have seen Daspos [stadium bans] of up to five years… because of a simple if nervous protest against the club and the team…

  By now, such press releases were easy. You could post them online in a flash. There are millions of them from ultra groups up and down the peninsula: long, eloquent, verbose explanations and justifications. What they reveal is how much group creation and retent
ion is now political and public: calling for the resignation of a rival leader or the dissolution of his group, announcing a strike, denouncing repression, expressing an ideology. It is – and this is where hooliganism receives its unexpected, Italian twist – extremely well-organized.

  1960s, Acri and Montagnola (Cosenza)

  By the 1960s, Francesco, the motherless boy from Cosenza, had entered the seminary in Acri. Acri was a remote, hill-top town 25 kilometres northeast of Cosenza, halfway between the Tyrrhenian and Ionian seas. A journey that now takes half an hour from Cosenza used to take half a day.

  The Franciscans had a sports association called Gioventù Francescana, and Francesco played as much football as he could. He always wanted to play up front because with his robust frame, and the odd elbow, he could bounce defenders off him. He was always screaming for the ball, swearing that he couldn’t miss if they would just give him the thing. He counted his goals and told everyone all about them. Maybe his boastfulness came from loneliness: his siblings and father had by then emigrated to America, and in the cool corridors of the seminary, the only approval he could come by was his own.

  His other passion mixed vanity with goodness: he wanted to make a name for himself, following in the footsteps of the saints and the apostles. He studied the New Testament every day but also raced through books about contemporary holy men like Raoul Follereau, the French ‘friend of lepers’. Even during his novitiate, he would stand underneath trees in the parks and preach loudly. He went to Napoli to finish his theological studies and, in 1964, took orders and a new name: Padre Fedele.

  He was sent to Rome and then to Milano. He devoured books and imagined he would become a theologian. ‘I thought,’ he says, ‘I was always going to live amongst books.’ But for his first posting, in November 1969, he was sent back south, to a dirt-poor suburb called Montagnola, just down the hill from Acri. Quite a few people there were illiterate. The houses didn’t have running water or electricity. ‘There was nothing,’ he says, ‘not even a church.’ They used a schoolroom for services.

  This was a part of the world where a young, enthusiastic priest on his first posting was mocked to his face. Many of the old men of the town were openly anticlerical or so used to the Church’s broken promises that they just ignored him. But Padre Fedele wasn’t the sort to be ignored. He was what they call a nut-cracker. When he saw men playing cards in a bar shortly before Mass, he sat down to play with them, saying they would compete for a bottle of wine. Padre Fedele wanted another bet too: he would give them 10,000 lire if he lost, but if he won they had to come to church. He won: ‘I drank the whole bottle myself,’ he laughs, ‘and the next Sunday they came to Mass.’

  In 1970 he organized a protest march against the authorities for failing to provide basic utilities. People thought it was a religious procession and took off their hats as the march passed, but Padre Fedele kept shouting about there being no lights and no running water. He threatened to go on hunger strike unless everything was sorted out within ten days. ‘I made,’ he says with typical modesty, ‘an unforgettable speech.’ Nine days later – in a land where nothing ever seemed to change – the telegraph poles and pipes arrived.

  The old men playing cards started saying hello to him. They weren’t exactly warming to him but they weren’t hostile any more. He was a lad who made things happen. Padre Fedele carved out a football pitch on a rare bit of horizontal waste ground and set up a team. He played centre-forward, still screaming for the ball as he had done ten years before. He was a pain in the neck but great fun to be around. ‘The only thing bigger than his ego,’ one mother said, ‘was his heart.’

  The Birth of the Ultras

  Groups of ultras existed before the actual name came into being. Tradition has it that the first group was Milan’s Fossa dei Leoni (‘the pit of lions’ was the name of an old training pitch used by the team). Founded in 1968, it had emerged – like another Milan ultra group, the Commandos Tigre – from one of the formal Milan supporters’ clubs. Even then, the habit of splinter and division was evident: although both groups were supporting the same team, AC Milan, they were divided zoologically into ‘tigers’ and ‘lions’.

  A year later, in 1969, other groups were founded: the Ultras Tito Cucchiaroni of Sampdoria, the Commandos Fedelissimi of Torino, and the Boys (with their subtitle ‘the black-blue furies’) of Inter. The Commandos and Boys, too, had emerged from their teams’ official clubs.

  There’s much debate about when the word ‘ultra’ entered the lexicon: its first recorded use was as a description of the diehard monarchists of restoration France in the 1820s, but the Sampdoria group liked to believe they had invented the word ‘ultras’ as an acronym of ‘Uniti legneremo tutti i rossoblù a sangue’ (‘united we will beat up the red-blues [Genoa] till they bleed’). In 1970 there was a rollercoaster game between Torino and Vicenza. Two penalties awarded in the last five minutes allowed Vicenza to win the game after going 2–1 down. Furious Toro fans followed the referee all the way to the airport, smashing as much property as they could on the way. When a journalist later called them ‘ultras’, the name stuck and the hottest heads of the Commandos Fedelissimi became the ‘Maratona Club Torino Ultras Granata’.

  By then, it was becoming a trend. Two teenagers in Verona founded, in 1971, the iconic Yellow-Blue Brigades. In 1972, Gennaro Montuori, known by his nickname Palummella, created the Commando Ultrà Curva B in Naples. In 1973, Genoa’s Fossa dei Grifoni (‘pit of griphons’) was born and, in the same year, the Ultras of Fiorentina.

  In the beginning it was hard to understand quite what these new groups were. In many ways, they were just youthful splinters from those formal supporters clubs, the product of yet another schism. But very soon it was clear that the ultras were different. They stood behind the goals inventing new songs and choreographies, and were so loud that often the other supporters on the terraces complained. The unruly exuberance of British fans was always a point of reference. One Inter fan returned from Anfield in Liverpool to say that the waving scarves made him feel seasick. He meant it as a compliment, implying that the fans were – and it wouldn’t be a bad adjective for the ultras – choppy.

  Emerging at the very beginning of Italy’s anni di piombo, its ‘years of lead’ of political violence and assassinations, the ultras borrowed the language and imagery of the armed struggle. Ever since the Piazza Fontana bomb of 1969, which killed seventeen people in a bank in Milano, the country had suffered a series of slaughters and assassinations. The 1970s was a decade in which the Red Brigades and other guerrilla groups killed numerous industrialists, policemen and politicians, leading to the arrests of thousands of far-left activists. Neo-fascist terrorist groups, meanwhile, set off bombs that killed dozens and contributed to a feverish suspicion of conspiracies and coup plots by shadowy far-right forces. Many early ultra groups had names like Brigades, Commandos, Fedayeen, Red Army, Tupamaros, Vigilantes, Armada, Fronte, Phalanx and so on. The slogans of the terraces were borrowed from the political struggle: ‘better red than dead’ (an inversion of the usual, anti-communist line) or ‘Boys [instead of fascists] get back in the sewers’. The aping of the political insurgency was evident from the gestures of the curva: raised left fists or Roman salutes or the two forefingers of the right hand waving a flat pistol in the face of the bourgeoisie. Often balaclavas, and scarves pulled up to the eyes, lent anonymity to the menace.

  From their very inception, then, ultra groups reflected the violence of the ‘years of lead’. The late sociologist Valerio Marchi wrote that the movement was made up both of ‘people having experimented with mass violence in the political field’ as well as by ‘people having experimented with violence in the fulfilment of everyday needs’. The bloodthirstiness of the early chants (constantly invoking the death of the enemy) reminded many of the ‘sangue, sangue’ chant of the ancient Roman arenas. ‘We are the pit of the lions,’ sang the Milan fans. ‘Blood. Violence.’ The symbols held aloft to the opposing fans – coffins, skeleto
ns, skulls and so on – created a charade that this would be a fight to the death. ‘Devi morire’ – ‘you must die’ – was a recurrent chant. Most of the big teams, of course, played each other at least twice a season (and more if there were cup games), so the fans had plenty of time to observe and envy rival ultras. The competition between teams was, in their minds, now a competition between terraces to decide who had the best names, moves, songs, banners, flares, drums and muscle.

  Like all subcultures, the ultras relished their bad-boy status. The self-portraits of ultras often combined both a parody of what the bien pensant commentators said about them, but also a pride in recounting that disdain, in listing all the reasons that the ultras were beyond the pale: ‘The ultras are evil,’ wrote one, ‘they are the dark side of the football, the horrid obscenity of civilization… the open sewer of the stadiums. The icon of blind and irrational violence. The worst, if not the only evil, of the football system which otherwise appears as candid and immaculate as a virgin… we are thugs, misfits, sons of a violent and unhealthy society. We are everything you don’t want us to be, but we continue our lives in the ghetto of stadium violence… we’re ultras and we don’t give a fuck about anything else. We’re ultras and we love the ‘tifo’, the chaos, the struggle, the fights, and urban violence.’

  In many ways, the ultras seemed to be defining themselves against Nietzsche’s Letzter Mensch, the ‘last man’ in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The apathetic, pacifist and decadent bourgeois was the opposite of what they aspired to be. In a bloodless, atonal world they yearned for action. Life in Italy is very often described as farraginosa, muddled or confused. It derives from the spelt (‘farro’) mulch fed to cattle, and implies the sticky gloop of compromise or bureaucratic complication that creates inertia. The ultras – like the futurists before them – wanted to slice through that stodgy morass. They were, they repeatedly said, opposed to the meekness of the comfortable life, they were rebels who refused to compromise, they were crusaders who saw little valour in lonely, modern existence that offered no causes and no battles.