Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  Ultra banners have often played with the gladiators’ pledge to the dignitaries in the arenas of ancient Rome: ‘Those who are about to die salute you.’ One of the earliest mottos of Roma’s Boys was ‘beyond death’. It’s as if the ultras are reminding everyone, absurd as it sounds, that they are prepared to die for this creed. Sacrifice is constantly invoked. Those who are scornful of the ultra world have often perceived a fascistic death cult on the terraces, but maybe being an ultra is simply another way to commemorate our ancestors, to tell their stories and sacralize the spaces where they, and we, used to come together.

  It’s a truism to say that the stadium is a temple, but it consciously functions as such. More people pray on the terraces, or at least plead with fate, than in the pews. The funeral processions, of both ultras and iconic players, always pass around the athletics track. When you see those funerals, you remember that it’s called a ground, that a terrace is to do with the earth. The rotundity of the curve isn’t only fertility, but a barrow. With the coffin there in the stadium, with the coloured incense and the rowdy hymns of the terraces, it begins to make sense.

  When tragedy befalls a city, it’s now the stadium, more than the cathedral, that marks the moment. In August 2018 Genova’s Polcevera Viaduct (better known as the Morandi Bridge) collapsed, killing forty-three people and making 566 homeless. Long before the footballing authorities decided that the two matches involving Genoa and Sampdoria should be postponed, their ultras announced their absence. ‘Our city is in mourning,’ the Genoa ultras wrote in a press release, ‘and for dignity, respect and sorrow, the Genoa fans will not be present at Sunday’s match at the San Siro Stadium. Our sector will be completely deserted.’ It was another example of how ultras saw football, in certain circumstances, as a desecration. And their language was, intentionally or otherwise, religious: ‘La Superba [that nickname of the city] is wounded but will rise again.’

  From Cosenza, Drainpipe wrote an open letter to the city, calling it ‘a magnet of tragedies’. He wrote about his admiration for the Genovese, particularly their bluntness, speaking ‘without frills, without finery and lexical twirls’. His letter, using the word ‘love’ sixteen times, showed how much leaders on the terraces had taken on the role formerly assigned to priests of publicly marking a tragic moment, of accompanying and consoling. At Genoa’s next game, the ultras decided to remain silent for forty-three minutes to mark the forty-three dead. There, too, the religiosity was recurrent: ‘We are proud and always will be of our beloved Genova, which will know how to resurrect herself.’

  Although police insist that the ultra world is an ‘adhesive’ for criminality, it’s also a much deeper form of social glue. Ultras are always frustrated with those who don’t see the good they do. Cosenza is maybe an extreme example of the goodness but many terraces do something similar. After the Aquila earthquake in 2009, dozens of ultra groups moved in, clearing ground, bringing tents, cooking meals. The Mayor of Amatrice later said that ‘the ultras have done more than thirty years of politicians’. One Christmas, Spampinato’s group in Catania raised €3,000 and filled four vans with Christmas presents for kids who wouldn’t get any otherwise. One Torino group sent money to a Napoli group in order to replant Vesuvius with saplings after a forest fire. When Livorno or Genova were hit by severe flooding, the ultras – including from rival cities – helped out. Phonelines and lifeboats and ambulances and braille-printers have been financed by them. Many scoff that this is mere ‘metapolitics’ (that cultural persuasion that the far right borrowed from Gramsci) but actually this charity often comes with no agenda. It is just an extension of being attached to place and to people.

  I recently went to see a friend who had been in a motorcycle accident. He had always lived his life as an ultra, not just in the sense of the terraces but in terms of excess and passion. He had played bass in a hardcore punk band and every time I played football against him (he was a chunky central defender) he gave it, and you, everything he had. He was a Torino obsessive but is now in a coma, only his huge eyes moving.

  There, in the room, were cherry-coloured scarves and a man was talking to him about recent results. By his bedside was a book about Torino and, maybe because I couldn’t understand how this bull of a man could now be immobile and emaciated, I read the closing pages: ‘Toro is severely religious, even mystical. If Juventus didn’t exist, Toro fans would have had to invent her, to suffer more and to feel more tense and sharp and inferior, an inferiority of an evangelic type: sacred, saintly, poor…’ Maybe that is what fandom does. It habituates you to loss and creates the occasions to share it with other people.

  *

  It’s the last day of the Serie B season. Because there are only nineteen teams in the league, Cosenza isn’t playing. But the team is safe from relegation following recent victories against Spezia and Salernitana.

  Left-Behind, Boozy Suzy, Chill and I are walking up to the Svevian castle to toast the end of the season. The castle is perched on top of the Pancrazio hill, a beehive of lanes, narrow staircases and petite piazzas which make up ‘old Cosenza’. There are artisan workshops – cobblers, coffin-makers, luthiers – but nothing has been gentrified. This is a place of rugged survival; where people live at such close quarters there are few secrets. You can hear every argument. Skinny kittens scamper up steep paths which disappear into front rooms. Weeds grow out of the cracks. Many buildings are empty or have got a belly, and cement has been slapped here and there to patch up the ancient stone.

  There are great murals everywhere. Yellow cartoon faces, monkeys giving birth, wiggly nudes, buccaneering horses, seascapes, tributes to the Faraca cyclists from this city. ‘CZ merda’ it says everywhere (‘Catanzaro is shit’). When you wander around it’s like half the curva is here. By chance, Egg comes out of a dented metal door, asks what we’re doing, and joins the walk up the hill.

  The view from the castle is stunning: olive groves, wooded mountains and narrow bridges crossing the city’s rivers. But Suzy is scornful. ‘There’s not a patch of land they haven’t built on,’ she says. Blocks of flats spill across the valley as far as the eye can see.

  ‘Never-ending palazzi,’ shrugs Left-Behind, ‘and not one for us.’

  The Curva Sud has recently been evicted from its squat, the Casa degli Ultrà, and is homeless. Those who most express belonging now have nowhere they belong. But that sense of exclusion makes them feel even more integral to, or rooted in, the city: they’re not in the corridors of power, but in the streets, the ditches and the gutters. They know the lie of the land better than anyone. And although their way of life is a constant expression of love for their city, they’re also eloquent critics of its corruptions and crimes.

  Chill is unscrewing the lid of a tall bottle. He slops the Silan liqueur into small plastic glasses, lining them up on the fat wall of the castle. We each take one, and raise them to the red-and-blue shirt… then to the city… then to Denis Bergamini, and to Piero, and to each other, until by then we’ve drunk too much and Egg is talking shit again. ‘Next season,’ he grins, ‘Serie A’.

  Afterword

  In the spring of 2019 Ciccio Bucci’s body was exhumed for further examinations. In 2017 the body of Donato Bergamini was exhumed and a new autopsy conducted. Results seem to suggest he had been suffocated and strangled. The investigation is on-going.

  Pino Coldheart remains the undisputed leader of Juventus’ Drughi.

  At the time of writing Diabolik is under house arrest.

  Antonio Bongi and Grit still live and work in Rome.

  Puffer and Scotto continue to lead, respectively, Genoa’s Gradinata Nord and the Genova Insieme cooperative.

  Michele Spampinato is still chairing meetings between the petrol pumps in Catania’s Piazza dei Miracoli.

  The Inter ultras responsible for the ambush of their Napoli counterparts in which ‘Dede’ – Daniele Belardinelli – lost his life were convicted of ‘aggravated assault’. Although given stadium bans of up to eight years, non
e of the ultras received a custodial sentence.

  In February 2019 the Roma ultra who reduced the Liverpool fan Sean Cox to a coma received a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence.

  Ciccio Conforti has become a Buddhist and runs a Bed & Breakfast in his 16th century family home, Palazzo Conforti, in the hills outside Cosenza.

  Claudio teaches in a middle school and has written, and edited, many books about the ultra lifestyle.

  Gianfranco manages his ‘peoples’ gym’ inside Cosenza’s San Vito stadium.

  Paride is the director of the Lucana Film Commission.

  Drainpipe still lives in Cosenza and frequently takes his charity, La Terra di Piero, to Africa.

  The Curva Sud and Anni Ottanta are trying to get along.

  Padre Fedele is still sitting in a car in the city, offering to listen to anyone who needs.

  Plate Section

  1. Antonio Bongi (right) and Agostino Di Bartolomei at the Coppa Italia final, 1984

  2. Cosenza from the summit of Pancrazio Hill

  3. Cosenza support, 1980–81 season

  4. Cosenza Vecchia

  5. The extremist wing of Lazio support

  6. Geppo

  7. Matteo Salvini, Deputy Prime Minister of Italy, with the boss of Milan’s Curva Sud

  8. Nuclei Sconvolti – Luca (far left), Ciccio (second left), Piero (white jacket), Paride (white hairband), Padre Fedele (red and blue hat), Drainpipe (far left front)

  9. Pastachina with Bergamini, Padre Fedele behind

  10. Piero, Drainpipe and Paride in Africa

  11. Police and ultras clash again

  12. Juventus’ Curva Sud

  13. The Lazio Irriducibili give Roman salutes to honour Mussolini on the anniversary of liberation from fascism, 25 April 2019

  14. “You Haven’t Done Anything to Us”

  Acknowledgements

  I am, above all, grateful to the ultras of many different terraces for their hospitality, patience and generosity. The list of people to thank in Cosenza is too long to mention everyone but I owe a particular debt to Marco, Simona, Francesca, Olga, Gianluca, Alberto, Emmanuele, Arturo, Gabriele, Marcellino, Ciccio, Danilo, Silverio, Robertino, Achille, Marco, William, Piero, Claudio, Gianfranco, Vincenzo, Pietro, Francesco, Barbara, Luca, Sergio, Katia, Mena, Paride and Padre Fedele. It’s been a blessing to have met Monica Levantino and Vincenzo Reda.

  Every time I write an essay or a book about Italy, I’m amazed by the generosity of Italian journalists. I’m greatly indebted to Massimiliano Peggio, Jacopo Ricca, Marco Grasso, Massimo Calandri, Jacopo Forcella, Giuseppe Scarpa, Mario Salvini, Pierluigi Spagnolo, Gianluca Marcon, Marco Di Mauro, Raffaele Vitali, Andrea Luchetta, Simone Meloni and Timothy Ormezzano. I’ve benefitted from the expertise and contacts of Richard Hall, Luca Hodges-Ramon, John Foot, Max Mauro, Guido Polini and Sergio Sinigaglia. Mattia Fossati, Antonio Broso, Pasquale Ancona and Sacha Malgeri helped with legal documents and dialects. Matteo Galloni and Filippo Ziveri have constantly lent me their books and their ideas. I’ve been very lucky to have alongside me Daniela Calebich, Laura Lenzi and Matteo Diena, and am grateful to Francesco Pedrona and il Vascio for introducing me to all the fine ‘calciatori distrutti’.

  The Society of Authors gave me a generous grant to finance moving back to Italy, and without the heroic Mark Loveys we might never have made it. Mary Massey, Bob Jones, David and Vandana Jones, Paul and Marija Jones, Andy and Marion Street, Richard and Sheena Brooke, Andrea and Russell Hartley and Steve and Susannah Baker all put their trust in us and kept Windsor Hill Wood alive. I’m very grateful to Christopher Somerville and Pete Dennis for their visionary generosity. Huge admiration to Chris, Katharine, Josh and Natty Thompson, who understand the agonies of playing, and watching, football. Thanks, too, to Shaun Wolff, Franco Tomasi, Costanza Gambarini and Guido Bizzarri for being such good neighbours; and to Gildo Claps, Andrew Wigley, Paolo Mortarotti, Glen Alessi and James McConnachie for being so giving.

  Jonathan Shainin, Clare Longrigg and David Wolf of the Guardian’s ‘Long Read’ kindly published my essay that became the genesis of this book. I’m grateful, too, to Rob Yates and Paul Webster at the Observer for continuing to commission my work. Ben Donald has been constantly supportive.

  I’m in awe of the editorial skills of Neil Belton, who mysteriously helped me finish a book that seemed never-ending.

  Thanks also to Anthony Cheetham and everyone at Head of Zeus. Walter Donohue and Enrico Basaglia have, as always, offered invaluable advice. Georgina Capel, Irene Baldoni, Rachel Conway and Simon Shaps at GCA have offered continual, and concrete, encouragement. Thank you.

  Francesca, Benedetta, Emma and Leonardo have put up with months of absences and have indulged my notion that drinking beer at football matches is actually work. Everything I’ve learnt about belonging, love and rootedness is thanks to them.

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