Someone once asked me why I spend so much time and money watching football in Italy. The same person had called my loyalty to QPR into question as he felt that swerving an away fixture at Peterborough for a trip to Verona and Bologna was very poor form indeed.
We continued this conversation on the Monday morning as I sat in the sun outside a café in Bologna eating fresh peaches and drinking the best coffee in the world. The newspaper in front of me reported that the local basketball team had just signed someone called Fucka and the nearest bridge to my hotel had fallen down overnight resulting in most of Bologna being gridlocked. Michael Schumacher had won the Grand Prix on the Sunday and there were dozens of people waving Ferrari flags, on their way to work. A run of the mill Monday morning then. Somehow, missing 90 minutes at London Road didn’t seem too bad a thing.
So why Italy?
This after all is a footballing country bedevilled by constant scandal. False passports for important players (proven). Match fixing (proven). Doping (proven). Diving. Crowd trouble. Lots of crowd trouble. Large clubs in massive debt with transfer embargoes (Roma). Famous clubs being relegated for financial irregularities (Fiorentina and Napoli).
That the game in Italy should be in such a poor shape does not come as too big a surprise to those who are regular visitors to lo stadio. Rather, it has to be viewed in the overall context of the organised and elegant chaos of Italian life. A life governed by compromise. By mind boggling administration and red tape. By rule bending. By rule avoidance.
Even allowing for all its problems though there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that beats watching football in Italy.
It’s true that you’ll probably see better football in Spain and you’ll definitely see more blood and thunder in the UK but if you want the most inclusive, all encompassing football experience there is still only one place worth visiting.
It starts in immigration at the airport when you notice officials with pin badges of the local team. It ends when you return to the airport to go home and see besuited businessmen wearing football scarves and poring over the pink pages of La Gazzetta. In between you’ll see nuns on trains asking how their team has got on and punching the air if they’ve won. You’ll see octogenarians resorting to slapping each other over an argument about the relative merits of teams past and present. You’ll see carabinieri sexually harrassing women. And then your wife/girlfriend will get into the match for half price or less as a “ridotto”.
You see, it’s very easy to generalise about Italy.
The further North you are, the colder the people. The further South, the poorer the people. There are meaningful social divisions based merely on geography which massively outstrip our own “northern monkey vs shandy supping southern softy” stuff.
The North thinks it does all the work for “Italy” and that the South is lazy. Some parts of the North openly despise the concept of a unified “Italy”. The South thinks that the North is cold and haughty and fundamentally biased against it and its interests.
Meanwhile, complicating matters further, Rome sits in the middle overseeing the squabbling, trying to administer what many people regard as an ungovernable country. Rome, the administrational seat of the country has the highest percentage of white collar local government workers and is simply referred to as “Rome the thief” in many quarters.
Indeed, for many Italians being “Italian” comes a very distant second to their loyalty to where they were born and where they live. Apparently more than 50% of Italian men in their thirties live in the same post code as their mothers. This loyalty to one’s locale is called “campanalismo”, which roughly means being devoted to the area which can hear the local church bells ringing, and it is this which leads to some of the most heated local derbies in Europe.
Calcio Live - The Essentials
Pick a footballing city to visit. This is fairly easy given how much the country loves its Calcio. To my mind the seven places to see are (and in no particular order) Rome, Florence, Napoli, Verona, Milan, Bergamo and Genoa. I’ve deliberately left Turin (and Juve) off this list as I do not know one person who has ever come back from the Delle Alpi and not said that it’s one of most cold and soulless places they’ve ever visited.
Get all the season’s fixtures in advance from www.lega-calcio.it. For the diehards, it’s always worth picking a weekend with two games geographically close to each other and where one of the games will be put back or brought forward for television. At the moment, two games are normally held on the Saturday, one on the Sunday evening and the remainder on the Sunday afternoon. So, if you’re lucky you can go to two games.
Once you’ve got your weekend sorted then you can get a cheap flight from Ryanair into any one of the innumerable airports that it serves. Ryanair is one of the greatest companies of all time in my book. I know it’s not pleasant and that some of the orange faced “sit down, shut up” merchants masquerading as customer facing staff are poor, but for the love of God, what do you want for a tenner each way?
Unlike the UK, Italy has an excellent train service that a) runs on time and b) is about 66% cheaper than our equivalent. Tickets are bookable over the net before you travel, then all you have to do is swipe the credit card that you booked the tickets with and your tickets are issued. Highly recommended. The link is www.trenitalia.com.
As regards food, drink and language, well that’s all part of the fun. It really is worth learning a few Italian words and using them, especially football related terms. Making an effort goes down really well and whilst it takes the average Italian a couple of seconds to decode the brutalised version of his language that I normally come out with, most warm to any effort no matter how lame.
Personal security in some of the larger cities can be an issue, especially in Roma and Napoli. Leave the bling at home if you’re having an unguided mooch and are not sure where you’re going to end up.
Police in Italy are split into three different forces. The first deals with matters of finance and lives in the shadows of Italian business and dark dealings. They only come out at night. The second walk around the streets dressed in capes and large white hats that make them look like they've just stepped out of an episode of Trumpton. Many are women who smoke fags and wear Ferrari red lipstick. Distressingly, I have to report that most of them are drop-dead gorgeous. As far as I could make out, they are held responsible for civic problems such as jay walking and illegal kite flying. The third are the Carabinieri. Predominantly from the South, these boys know one end of a teargas gun from the other. If you ever get yourself in a situation where a group of these fellas are coming towards you at a rate of knots, you really, really need to be getting out of their way.
Tifosi
Italian fans have long lead the way in Europe as regards passion, noise, colour and commitment. There have been times when I have been at games and been absolutely blown away by the sheer noise and exuberance of it all. Nothing is haphazard. The shows, the carefully scripted messages to their opposition and watching authorities, the fireworks and of course the spectacular “tifo” are in the main very well organised.
They take their football very seriously and a good starting point for reading more about them is the excellent www.tifonet.it. Although an Italian language site, there are plenty of pictures to look at as well as links to English speaking sites.
The Top 10 Games
Based on atmosphere and importance I would rate the following ten as being the games to try and get to see;
1. Roma v Lazio
2. Fiorentina v Juve
3. AC v Inter
4. Inter v Juve
5. Napoli v anyone at all
6. Atalanta v Brescia
7. Verona v Napoli
8. Fiorentina v Roma
9. Roma v Juve
10. Verona v Vicenza
The Top 10 Games (revisited)
While you’re there, you might like to play some of the following games;
1. Uniform count. Italy is a country where it would appear that the endless sub divisions of the police, army, navy etc wear a myriad of uniforms. Some chic, some camp. The record for a weekend is thirteen
2. Most sexist advert. My favourite thus far (obviously enjoyed in a post modern, ironic way) was the poster campaign for a brand of cigarette which featured a picture of a packet of 20 wedged firmly between a large pair of breasts.
3. Asking for a cappuccino after noon. The guidebooks say this is a no no and unbelievably it is. If you have a friendly waiter he/she will laugh and call you crazy. If not you will encounter a level of hostility hardly commensurate with ordering a hot beverage
4. Most exaggerated praying at game. At some of the bigger derbies and in times of need, many in the crowd will resort to the rosary beads and/or other forms of supplication
5. Best dressed man/Best dressed woman. Don’t even try competing on this front. Those of us from the UK/Ireland look like misshapen lumps of anaemic clay. Many in Milan actively look down their noses at those who they perceive aren’t making enough effort on this front. They also for some reason eschew the use of plastic bags when you have bought shopping. Goods must be placed in a nice leather bag that you have brought with you to the shops. You think I’m making this up don’t you?
6. Length of ban in the UK. When you have sat through 90 minutes where invariably you will have seen oranges, bottles, seats etc raining down on the pitch and where play may have been held up for non football related injuries, estimate how long English clubs would be banned from Europe if one hundredth of what you’ve just seen happened at say, Highbury.
7. Largest explosion in a ground. Leave your pets at home.
8. Single most foolhardy act by a fan. At some of the larger games the police will keep “sterile” areas either side of the away fans. Watch as one lone tifosi armed with a small stick takes on about 125 armed carabinieri.
9. Single best footballing moment. You will see something on the pitch that you have never seen before. I was there when Cafu (in the Rome derby) did this; www.asromaultras.it/Cafu%202%20(Roma).mpe
10. Highest number of TV replays. Calcio still attracts huge amounts of media attention. There are at least three dailies that are sports oriented and post match TV coverage is incredible. Controversial incidents are replayed again and again and again (ordinarily by a blonde wearing a backless sequinned dress). Our record for replays of the same incident is 16.
The next part of Tom’s guide will be coming to goalfood soon…
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