Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  But at the same time, the curva was a parody of the violence unleashed by political terrorists. It seemed a son-et-lumière satire of that world, a teenage imitation of violence. To many it was little different to the way young boys pretend to be great centre-forwards when they’re having a kick-around in the streets. Paradoxically, the ultra world actually seemed like a safe retreat from the political extremism of the time. Against that backdrop, the ultras’ folkloristic recreation of a medieval contrada seemed almost innocent, as removed from political assassinations as a Punch-and-Judy show is from domestic violence: related, but imitative, a warning as much as an incitement.

  In fact, one of the earliest tenets of ultra faith was that politics should be banned from the terraces. The curved terrace was – the paradoxes in this world quickly pile high – a place both of political extremism but also of neutrality, of violence but also of pacification. In the sacred space of the terraces, all divisions were supposed to be healed. Adherence to different political hues – invariably red or black, communist or fascist – was surpassed by attachment to the colours of the maglia, the football shirt. So, for example, an ultra from the far left like Pompa in Florence (a huge man who would defend his brothers to the last) could work side-by-side with an ultra from the far right with a strangely similar nickname, Pampa, because for both the violet of Fiorentina was the colour that transcended all others.

  The ultras’ scorn for society was, inevitably, reciprocated. The early ultras were described – in language still replicated almost fifty years later – as a ‘primal horde’ or ‘mob’, the infernal result of a deindividuation in which human reason is submerged by collective, animalistic instincts. Stanley Cohen, in his book Folk Devils and Moral Panics, wrote that society’s scapegoats are like ‘Rorschach blots onto which reactions are projected…’ It was the same with ultras, who were quickly interpreted according to the prejudices of the mainstream. An ultra seemed, to some, a twentieth-century ‘homo sacer’, that accursed man of Roman times who was expelled from society and considered so worthless that he could be killed by anybody without incurring guilt. Alberto Arbasino’s criticism typifies such disgust, describing a ‘spontaneous, collective, very violent crowd without aim. I have never seen such ridicule, never seen such a numerous crowd so out of control… an immense, biological outburst, like the dark, disordered Mediterranean carnivals, like the sad Mexican fiestas, like the apocalyptical saturnalias of the Roman slaves…’

  The great critic Umberto Eco was characteristically subtler. He wondered if these outlaws weren’t just Italianate Larrikins (mischievous, but good-hearted) or Beagle Boys (the cartoon criminals from Donald Duck): ‘… a cheating rabble, true, but with a certain charge of crazy amiability because they stole, to the tunes of proletarian confiscation, from the stingy, egotistical capitalist.’ Since the inception of the ultra phenomenon, the question has been posed whether they are scallywags or hardcore criminals, countercultural Robin Hoods or just violent hoods. The ultras seemed so youthful, energetic and mercurial that every label seemed to slide off them. Valerio Marchi drew comparisons between the ultras and all those historical inversions of the social order, from the Feast of Fools (promoting revelry and humility in the church when the lowly clerics briefly took power) to the Charivari (noisy, symbolic processions) and the Soties (when fools dispensed wisdom).

  Back in the early 1970s, the terraces often looked surprisingly unthreatening, rather like a low-budget carnival. The choreographies were performed with loo rolls and paper plates, with cardboard, Sellotape and bedsheets. In the same way that the players, in the 1970s, appeared a bit rough-and-ready, far less pampered than their successors, so too did the ultras. Paint was slapped on banners without worrying too much about the type font (nowadays there’s a specific font called Ultras Liberi [‘free the ultras’]). Drums were often nothing more than upturned paint tins. One Lazio ultra remembers that the first drums they had were empty kegs of Dash detergent. A cut bottle was used as a megaphone. Flare effects were frequently provided by stolen fire extinguishers because it was easier to get hold of them than naval flares. It was a time in which football was affordable: one Lazio ultra remembers that the return ticket for the bus to Bologna cost 500 lire (under £4 or $5 in today’s money). Even for a Juventus game, tickets behind the goal only cost 300 lire. In most stadiums it was easy enough to sneak your way in without paying. One ultra from Ancona happily recalls that ‘the capacity of the stadium was a pretty elastic concept’. Smaller clubs often didn’t have more than one stand of seats, so the ultras gathered on the highest grass, eating pumpkin seeds and learning new songs.

  Away games were often even better. Relying on force of numbers, many ultra groups didn’t bother paying for rail tickets or food. They just burst into a carriage or café and rode, or ate, for free. There was plenty of theft, too, but the ‘bounty’ wasn’t always the obvious (a stolen car or motorbike, say) but a train emptied of paper towels for a choreography, or coins prised from a phone booth to throw at rival ultras. You would see them on the train tracks filling their pockets with stones from the sidings for the same purpose. Many returned from away games with pockets still bulging, this time with banknotes from who-knows-where.

  Coming back with a good story was almost as important. The more brazen the theft appeared, the better. Torino ultras told each other about the time that their mate, Margaro, nicked a watch in Zurich, realized he didn’t have the winding key and went back to the shop to ask for it and to get the watch wrapped too. Staff at these places were often so weary or scared that they didn’t even challenge the notoriously volatile ultras. It was rare for these groups to stop at motorway service stations – the Autogrill – or in railway bars without overwhelming the place and taking whatever they wanted. Railway and service stations were also the scene of many a pitched battle.

  The founder of Bologna’s Vecchia Guardia, Bebo, once called the ultras the ‘schiuma dei quartieri’ (‘the froth of the suburbs’). The description nods to the effervescence of the movement, the bubbling energy and dirt emerging from the less refined urban spaces. Petty criminality bled into hedonism because the terraces were a sort of zona franca where anything was allowed. As cannabis became commonplace throughout Europe, it was inevitable that rebellious youths got high as they sang their hearts out. The terraces were where you could score and skin up with impunity. There were pushers, pick-pockets and entrepreneurs. It was all part of the carnival.

  If you were on one of those famous terraces of the big clubs in the early 1970s, it went dark as the teams came out onto the pitch because of the smoke from so many flares and fire extinguishers being let off. The handkerchiefs over the faces and the balaclavas were not just to render the wearers masked and edgy, but because you couldn’t breathe the toxic air. When the smoke cleared, you could see the team colours still flying on pillow cases and bedsheets: red and blue (Genoa, Catania and Cosenza), or cherry red (Torino), or red and yellow (Roma) or light blue and white (Lazio) or the barcode strip of Juventus.

  In the huge old stadiums of the big teams, with up to 10,000 on one terrace alone, there might have been a few hundred flags. Some were not much larger than a sheet of A4 paper, while others were as big as sixteen square metres, the inch-thick plastic poles bent like nail-clippings as the huge heralds were worked against the wind in a figure of eight. Thousands of scarves were rotated above heads or held in horizontal lines, stretched by yearning arms. Drums were beaten. The primary aim, in the early years of the ultras, was the creation of pageantry and spectacle.

  The terraces also offered many youths an alternative to organized crime. In an era in which career choices were decidedly limited, especially in the South, there was a constant temptation to make quick money by working for criminals. Although Michele Spampinato, founder of Catania’s Decisi ultra group in Sicily, was writing about the 1990s, his recollection of that temptation is echoed in many ultra memoirs from different decades. ‘… the possibility of being recruited by a Mafia clan
as muscle presented itself every day,’ he said. ‘We didn’t have a lira in our pockets and they offered you the chance to make a lot of money. Dealing drugs, doing acts of revenge. You started like that and who knows where you could end up.’ Far from being quasi-criminal gangs (which is now the default reading of the ultras), these groups were also an alternative to organized crime, perhaps the only alternative for toughs in search of camaraderie and excitement.

  But for those gentrified fans watching from the tribuna there was something sinister in all this, something reminiscent of The Lord of the Flies. The first statistical analysis of the ultras, conducted by the sociologists Alessandro Dal Lago and Roberto Moscati, showed that 57.2 per cent of ultras were under twenty-one (and 11.2 per cent were female). When those researchers cross-referenced their research with another study from Pisa, the figures were even higher: 62 per cent were under twenty-one and 13 per cent female. Often the more genteel fans expressed their dislike of this new phenomenon, singing ‘curva fè schifo, fè un po’ de tifo’ (‘Curva, you’re disgusting, do a bit of supporting’).

  The late 1960s and early 1970s were years in which sons customarily rebelled against fathers, in which the bequest of parental wisdom was scorned by impatient and angry children. The move from the tranquil tribuna to the chaos of the curva was a symbolic enactment of that rebellion. The curva was perhaps the only place in the whole country where kids felt in charge. It was an open, public place where they could finally stick it, in every way, to those pompous old men inclined to long soliloquies on the technicalities of football, all delivered in a dull, professorial drawl.

  But in common with many rebellions, it was also a strange gesture of emulation: an angry shout to the father saying, ‘I’m more passionate than you; this is how to do it properly.’ Often, the ultras weren’t renouncing their ancestral roles but reinventing them. One of the mottos used by Lazio fans was ‘from father to son’, a notion that following the white-and-light-blue shirt was an act of familial loyalty.

  The ultras took all these paradoxical strands – fidelity to tradition combined with teenage rebellion, tacit violence but also an escape from it, rejection of organized crime but embracing of petty criminals, fixation on football but also on each other, rootedness in the local and yet casting an admiring eye at other clubs and countries – and wove them into the colourful theatre of the curva. These paradoxes were present because of the immense variety of those drawn to the terraces. It’s very clear that the vast majority of terraces are inclusive spaces, with no entry requirements other than your attachment to the same colours. ‘When I become a fan,’ one says, ‘no one asks me what I do in life. I have a scarf, a flag, a banner and the rest doesn’t count. At the stadium you never have that feeling of being surplus or out of place.’ The result was that, as Pierluigi Spagnolo wrote in his book, I Ribelli degli stadi, ‘you find a graduate next to the kid who lives on his wits, the dentist and the mechanic, the schoolteacher and the unemployed, the son of a banker and the son of a smuggler, the health-freak and the drug addict, the scion of the well-to-do families and criminal recruits…’ The egalitarianism of that space was so profound that Grinta (‘Grit’ – later founder of Lazio’s Irriducibili) remembers the men who gave his father the formal ‘lei’ address in his office would, on the terraces, give him the ‘tu’ and use his first name.

  The variety of people gathering behind the goals was reflected in the astonishing array of dress codes. There’s a livery to rebellion, it is often said, an orderliness and uniformity. But perhaps because Italy is a country in which fashion is often uniform, in which there’s an instantaneous, chameleonic imitation of the latest trend, the ultras’ stylistic rebellion – at least in the 1970s – was about randomness. There wasn’t one look, but thousands of them.

  In the photos from that decade, there’s a great hotchpotch of Wrangler T-shirts and the curly, three-lined lettering of the Adidas insignia, of berets and balaclava caps, of parkas and jackets with team badges, of sideburns and long hair and no hair. There was no iconic livery that united the ultras, and almost nothing in their dress that would have astonished or frightened the well-to-do. There’s a photo of Geppo, one of Roma’s most idealistic, if doomed, ultras, with long hair and topless but for his denim dungarees. He looks benign, not shocking.

  Therein lay the romance of being an ultra: it was crazily, zanily, unfathomably various. ‘The curva was the only place where you could be whoever you were,’ explains one man now the wrong side of middle-age. ‘It was where you seemed, briefly, in control of your own life.’ And it seemed revolutionary because the curva was sucking in the soul of the streets. Suddenly, the same man continues, ‘the lad with two-inch shoe soles who limped around town was shouting his heart out… the damaged girl who everyone knew had been treated very badly was now protected by a few thousand friends.’ The curva became places of genuine companionship for thousands of young men and women with psychiatric illnesses. Their numbers swelled in late 1978 when the country’s asylums were closed. Of course, quite a few people with mental conditions could be handy in a fight, and it’s doubtful that their exploitation by others had ceased. But many terraces became spaces that celebrated their insanity and exclusion. There was even a Cremona ultra group called Sanitorium and one in Ragusa called Manicomio (‘asylum’). The words of the Roman ultra, Geppo, sound almost scriptural: ‘I am in the streets, in the protests, in the schools, in unemployment, in the syringe: I am in the rejected.’

  Many anthropologists talk about choreographic rituals through which primitive groups reintegrate a sick member into a community. In the Mediterranean basin, it was called Maenadism or Tarantism, and in Latino-African cultures Candomblé or Shango. The ultras always bang on about choreographies (the organized displays of banners and flags) but perhaps their most important choreography is the unconscious one of welcoming disturbed minds into their midst, into what one Cosenza fanzine memorably called mamma curva, the mother who loves you whoever you are. During the drugged, frenzied and furious singing, during all the dancing and shouting and hugging, outcasts became part of a fellowship. One of the common slogans was ‘last in society, first on the terraces’.

  *

  Antonio Bongi decided he wanted to start an ultra group when he went to the old Stadio Comunale in Turin and saw the Ultras Granata (the ‘maroon ultras’) incessantly hammering their kettle drums. He was fascinated by the noise and the energy, by the roar of distant voices in unison, and he yearned to create something similar for Roma.

  Antonio had only lived in Rome, on and off, for a few years. His real name was Anthony. He had been born in Santa Monica, California, and was the grandchild of Herbert Stothart, the Hollywood composer known for The Wizard of Oz underscore and the song made famous by Marilyn Monroe, ‘I wanna be loved by you’. His father, a Tuscan architect, had fallen in love with Stothart’s daughter in his home city of Florence and the couple moved to California.

  Anthony was their oldest boy. He grew up speaking Italian and English at the same time. He wasn’t always sure where he was from and became uncannily good at imitating those around him, doing accents, picking up songs and aping pompous adults. With his dark hair and dark eyes, he was immediately recognizable in those proud family photos in the Californian sun of the late 1950s.

  From the age of six he started spending more time in Rome, where his father had found a job in an architect’s studio. Anthony reinvented himself as Antonio. He was living in the posh part of town, on Via Cassia, where many of his neighbours were Laziali. But Antonio was fixated on the red-and-yellow of Roma. The stadium became a way for him to integrate, to be accepted as a local. He found a world where nicknames emerged from surnames or faces or habits. One guy with an ear ripped off was called Tazza (‘Tea-Cup’). Another slurped bottles of pop all the time and ended up being called, for the rest of his life, Coca-Cola. There were hardcore left-wingers like Roberto Rulli and Valerio Verbano, but also figures from the far right, like Mario Corsi and Francesco S
torace. They were all just teenagers, many of them from the rougher suburbs to the south.

  It was demographically appropriate (and imitative of Inter’s Boys), that Antonio Bongi’s new ultra group was called ‘Boys’. Their full name was ‘the Red-and-Yellow Furies’. They had a spot in the north terrace and various leaders were given free entry by the Roma management. Their first away game was to Bologna, on 15 October 1972. Bongi, the leader, was only fourteen and suddenly found himself having to defend the honour of Roma, his herald and his foot soldiers. It was always a good sign if the team won the game when you first hung out your herald on foreign soil, and that day Roma triumphed, scoring three goals. In the early to mid-1970s, Roma was supported by various other ultra groups as well as the Bongi’s Boys: the ‘Guerrillas’, the ‘Panthers’, ‘the Pit of Wolves’ and the ‘Fedayeen’.

  The team in those years was often a disappointment. Although fans called it la Magica, it was also called Rometta, ‘little Roma’. It could never hope to compete with the rich teams of Italy’s North. The only scudetto the team had ever won was way back in 1941–42. Roma had a few decent players but not enough class to challenge for the title. A twenty-one-year-old Claudio Ranieri (later a much-travelled manager) was amongst the reserves. There was a tall, quiet teenager – a box-to-box midfielder – called Agostino Di Bartolomei who was breaking into the team. But sporting highs were hard to come by. In an Anglo-Italian Cup match in the spring of 1973, Roma was beaten by Newcastle United, Oxford United and Blackpool.