Meglio tardi che mai

Ciao a tutti

Mi dispiace se siete venuti per trovare qualcosa sulle vostre squadre nel ultimo periodo.... Avevo perso la voglia di scrivere un po, ma ero andato avanti con la 'ricerca' (partite).

Ora sono quasi finito la scrittura, e spero di essere a posto entro il fine di giugno. Quindi, tra oggi e luglio metterò online estratti degli altri capitoli.

Spero che siano in grado!

Grazie
Michael

Match 13 - Chievo

The third match of a busy month, and my thirteenth away day of the season, saw me going back to Verona. Back to the Bentegodi, this time to see Chievo, who in the words of Tim Parks, author of ‘A Season with Verona’ are: 

“ [A team from] a miserable working-class suburb overflowing into declining semi-industrialised fenland. On a generous count there are a mere 3,000 souls; pigeons, water rats and stray dogs included”.

If you get the idea that Mr Parks perhaps isn’t overly enamoured with Chievo, you’d be right. He seems insulted by their very presence (as limited as that may be), and their exposure in the media. Unhappy that the previously discussed reputation of the Veronese isn’t applied to Chievo fans, but only to those who follow Hellas, he said: 

“Chievo are popular because they don't represent everything that other Italians want to quarrel with when they think of Verona. That job is left to Hellas. They steal our colours but 

decline our enemies.”

I wondered what a Chievo fan’s impression of Parks would be, so I spoke to Michele, a member of the Mussi Volanti group: 

“To be honest, I’m not 100% about what he’s said about us, but if I remember right, it was something along the lines of us being “a by-product of modern football”. For me, sporting merit’s more important than money. Chievo weren't promoted to Serie A because we paid someone, we got here by playing, and when we went down in 2007 we bounced right back up again with a points record that equaled Juventus’ [and subsequently, Sassuolo’s]. I don’t know why there’s a need to justify the ‘Chievo phenomenon’ - we’re talking about sport! Win the games? Cool, stay in Serie A. Lose them? Ok, down you go like our cousins from Hellas who were in the lower leagues for twelve years.”

They might want to be friends with everyone, but I guess some digs are just too easy to let pass by.

Another thing to bear in mind, is that bless their synthetic cotton socks but barring their miraculous early years in the league, Chievo just aren’t very good nowadays. They’ve had a few decent players, along the lines of Simone Perotta, Michael Bradley and current star striker, Sergio Pellissier. He’s a bit of a fox in the box is old Sergio, and I’m not being unnecessarily ageist either - he is getting on a bit. Give him half a sniff of goal and he’ll pop the ball in the net though - those instincts don’t go with age. The rest of the team is generally made up of journeymen pro’s and decent-enough younger guys, and as bland as that cliché may be, so is Chievo’s squad.

One player who I feel would be of note in Chievo’s history is Luciano. Or should that be Eriberto? A Brazilian midfielder, he played in the Brazil Under-20 team along with Ronaldinho, Julio César, and Matuzalém that took bronze at the Coppa America in 1999. By this stage the name on the back of his shirt read Eriberto, as three years earlier, due to a lack of interest in him on account of his age, he bought a fake identity from a fixer. Thus, Eriberto-nee- Luciano was signed by Palmeiras in his home country before coming over to Italy, first to Bologna, then to Chievo which is where he would play the majority of his career. In his time with Chievo he played more than three hundred matches, and was part of the team that came to be known as the ‘Miracle of Chievo’. 

In later years he would say that he had adopted his new name and age because he was poor and hungry; the name that he would subsequently publicly reveal was not his. When he came clean about it all, he said that it was because of an identity crisis and so that his son could take the real family name. This kind of deception wasn’t tolerated, and although he risked going to prison, in the end he was banned for six months and given a fine.

After his ‘big reveal’, Luciano-nee-Eriberto-nee-Luciano’s team mates were reported to have taken the mick out of him, saying that he didn’t look his age. The suspicion that a player may not be as old (or young, as the case may be) as he claims to be resurfaced around the time of my trip to the Veneto, with the Lazio youth team player, and former ‘hardest-paper-round-in-the-world’ record holder, Joseph Minala. 

After he was promoted to the first team, quotes by him (that were swiftly rubbished) surfaced suggesting that he was actually 41. Minala is officially seventeen, and after a few days of tittering in the papers, Lazio lost patience with people suggesting that not everything was above board, and subsequently threatened legal action against anyone who questioned the young lad’s age. And I can sympathise with him. After all, he’s been putting up with allegations like this for decades. ...................

Match 12 - Fiorentina

My ongoing odyssey of Italian football took me down to Florence in February to catch Fiorentina. Here's a bit of what I've scribbled down about it all.

Football’s origins are vague, but a somewhat primitive form of the game was played in Florence as early as the fifteenth century. Thought to be a take on the Roman game of Harpastum, this calcio storico fiorentino was played by the aristocracy, and it’s said that even Popes took part. In that savage time, before gyms and football stadiums arrived to allow men (for it was always just for men) let off some steam, this game, with rules that allowed head-butts, punches and chokes let people’s inner demons escape without turning into a disorganised riot. Rucking in a sandpit in a piazza, referees watched over what was in essence organised civil disorder between teams that represented different neighbourhoods of the city fighting for bragging rights. 

What seems to be a more violent mix of rugby and the footballs both regular and Gaelic, is still played every year in June. While the rules are unchanged and players from the teams wear their respective colours, their strips now bear sponsorship, or at least do so for as long as the players keep them on - playing such a physical game in June means it gets pretty hot so the shirts are often quickly discarded. 

Thankfully, we tell ourselves that we’re much more civilised nowadays, what with playing on grass and commentators always sounding disappointed when there’s a bit of handbags between players (even though I’m sure some of them must be yearning for a proper scuffle to break out), so I guess we must be more enlightened. Plus, of course, football players aren’t allowed to take their strips off, no matter how hot it gets, for fear that the sponsors might be deprived of exposure. That’s progress, of a sort.

While calcio fiorentino can be traced back centuries, this match’s focus, Associazione Calcio Fiorentina, were founded in 1926. From my early days of watching Serie A on Channel 4, I always found Fiorentina an intriguing team. A combination of the striking purple strips, the goals of Gabriel Batistuta and the unusual back-story of Moreno Torricelli (not to mention the club’s fantastically exotic-sounding name to my teenage ears) meant that Fiorentina always stuck out for me. Of course, being one of the sette sorelle (seven sisters - the seven dominant clubs of the 90’s) they’ve also done reasonably well, trinkets-wise. That said, despite often having a relatively strong team, they’ve won Serie A just the twice, the last time being in 1969. They’ve had more luck in the cups, having won the Coppa Italia six times. They’ve also won the Italian equivalent of the Charity Shield and the Cup Winners’ Cup. 

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Match 11: Napoli

Fabrizio: 

“Napoli isn’t only a football team. It’s a part of me, my family and my culture. It’s a way for me to communicate with my dad and to make me feel connected to my roots and my city, which can be both terrible and fantastic at the same time. I’m Neapolitan because I support Napoli. I’m proud because, despite not having won much in our history, for ninety years we’ve always been an important club, capable of stirring up emotions and giving drama to everyone, not only to our fans. Napoli isn’t a team like any other, because Naples isn’t a city like any other.”

Valentina: 

“When Napoli play the city stops. It’s like the night before New Year’s Eve - the calm before the storm. It’s a countdown. You check your watch as the minutes pass and you wait for the rumble of a goal.”

Luigi:

“Something that I always tell my partner is that in my priorities, Napoli is first, my mum is second, and that third place is open for her to fight for!”Naples is at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, the dormant volcano which famously destroyed the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum. It last erupted in 1944, and these days 600,000 people live in the city’s red zone (i.e. the area most at risk in case of eruption). Presumably living in the shadow of what is basically a massively ticking time bomb must have an effect on the population’s psychology: 

Nicola: 

“Sure, living in the shadow of Vesuvius isn’t easy and you know you can’t relax, but it’s a part of us, of being Neapolitan. From one moment to the next our lives could end just like that, but if you stop and think about all those negative things then you won’t live…. So our reaction is to take one day at a time, thinking about all of the good in our lives. Then, when we admire Vesuvius looking down on us from up there, we just see a beautiful landscape or a postcard to send to the rest of the world. And we think our city’s the most beautiful in the world thanks to it!”

Annachiara: 

“I don’t think it does [affect our daily mentality]. In my opinion, we think of it just like we do the sea - it’s an element of the landscape that characterises our city and makes us famous. Of course, if you think about it rationally then you know it could be lethal, but during the day you don’t stop to think of it that way. You think of its enormity and power, but it’s always there and doesn’t change your day. Or maybe it’s so subconscious that we don’t notice anymore.

“I think the way we Neapolitans enjoy our lives comes more from our history and from the countless foreign powers that have taken turns to rule the city. Every one who has held power here has left us something, whether it’s in our language, cuisine or way of being. These rulers eventually moved on, but the city was always there, and poverty and hunger forced us to get by every day. Stressing out about [Vesuvius] is a waste of time because everything else is temporary but Naples is permanent.”
Over the centuries, Naples has been under the control of Greeks, Romans, Spanish and French, to name but a few. Two of Italy’s stereotypes hail from Naples, as both pizzas and mandolins originate from that part of the country. Meanwhile, for any history trivia buffs out there, the first railway line in Italy was built in Napoli, despite the Catholic church’s fear “that dark tunnels could pose a threat to morality”. 

Regarding what Annachiara said about those foreign powers’ influences on the city, the language really stuck out for me. Dialects are quite common in Italy, and I can usually understand a wee bit of them just by listening out for any Italian words that sneak into them. Case in point: when I went to see Hellas Verona, while standing outside the pub, Davide, my interviewee there, asked his friend: “che ora qualcosa qualcosa?” (“what time blah blah?”) Checking my watch, I told him, at which he asked me incredulously if I spoke Veronese. No, of course I don’t, but if you start a question with ‘what time’, it’s likely to end with ‘is it?’. But Neapolitan is no longer technically a dialect - UNESCO now recognises it as a bona fide language. Their accent is quite unlike that which I hear on a day-to-day basis up in Genoa, and I’m afraid that if you wanted a taste of Neapolitan, I could only reply: “nu sacc caggia di pe fa n’esempio” (“I don’t know what example to give”).

Neapolitan was so common in the past that it was used in court papers, while in 1799, Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel, a poet and journalist who was destined for the gallows, called for it to be used in speeches: “to spread civic instruction to that section of the population which has no other language”. Through a combination of the strong accents and the use of Neapolitan, everyone around me might as well have been talking in Japanese for all I could understand. A most unusual sensation.

.......

Match 10: Lazio

Lazio’s home stand is the Curva Nord of the Olimpico, and according to research by the newspaper, La Repubblica, they are the sixth-most supported team in the country. Their most famous Ultras group is gli irriducibili Lazio, and so as is normal, in the weeks before the match I set out to find myself some fans to interview. Going about this in my normal way, a quick Google search found me some forums to join. Joining them, however, was not as easy as liberating confectionary from infants as it 

normally is. Now, normally, in order to sign up for a forum you need to fill in an online form with your details, before the final step in which you need to write a randomly-generated code that pops up on screen. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. The Lazio forums, I guess, get trolled quite frequently and/or they’re deeply paranoid. This manifests itself in requiring aspiring forum members to answer a very specifically Lazio-themed test as the final step, rather than the typing-of-the-random-code norm.

So, on one of the forums, after filling in my username etc, I was presented with the statement:

Giorgio Chinaglia è: ………..

(Giorgio Chinaglia is: ………..)

Who he was exactly, we’ll come to soon, but in reality, he is only one thing: dead. Without wanting to be a pedant (but really, I spent days trying to find out the answer, so I’m going to be a bloody a pedant about this), there is only one possible and correct answer. But the computer refused to accept that ‘dead’ was it. Philosophically speaking, at least for me, all that we are ceases to be when we shuffle off to wherever and whatever’s next. Unless, in an effort to psychologically shield themselves, the Lazio fans deny the reality of Giorgio Chinaglia’s death. Either that or they’ve interred him somewhere in a Schrodinger’s Cat-style experiment (which, as they arranged his corpse into the box, I imagine would still have hammered home the fact of his passing), but nonetheless, the correct answer to the question remains: dead.

After a few days of repeatedly trying various adjectives, nicknames and things of that nature, all that I was able to achieve was to get myself locked out of the site for exceeding the number of permissible incorrect answers in single sessions. I was almost at the point of investigating all of the various idioms in Italian for ‘dead’, à la the Monty Python dead parrot sketch, when a friend came through for me with the answer! Eureka! (There’s that Greek-influence again). I won’t tell you what it is so as to preserve their much-valued privacy, but needless to say, it was something that only a laziale would know. And it had bugger all to do with death.

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Match 9: Livorno

The Italian word for ‘twin’ is gemello. Most teams have other clubs with whom their fans are friendly, and these relationships are known as gemellagi (twinships, like there are with towns). For me, with my Scottish brain, I can’t quite get my head around having any feelings for opposing teams and their fans other than dislike and a strong hope they get humped on match days, but hey, maybe I’m in the minority. It always helps when the other team isn’t in your league or even country, so that then you don’t have to see their fans’ gurning faces twisted in joy as they score another goal against you. Livorno’s fans are in luck then, because thanks to their political leanings they have an international network of supporters, from France through Greece to Turkey, with gemellagi with Olympic Marseille and AEK Athens, among others. One of the most prominent of their foreign-based supporters’ groups is based in Germany, where its members don’t seem to check or reply to their emails, but no matter. I checked out their website which all seems very earnest and well-minded, so they get ten points for effort, but less so for their mastery of the English language.

As you might imagine, Livorno’s fans aren’t bosom buddies with teams whose supporters are more right-minded, so supporters of Inter and Verona can expect a spicy welcome. Lazio too, and famed peacemaker and level-headed chap, Paolo Di Canio, once made a fascist salute during a game between the two teams. 

Away from football and politics, the city rivalry between Livorno and Pisa is famed for its strength. This manifests itself in numerous examples of graffiti around Livorno of: “PISA MERDA” (“FUCK PISA” - their capitals, not mine). There are a couple of expressions they use to bicker amongst themselves with: “Meglio un morto ’n casa che un pisano all’uscio” (better a death at home than a Pisan at the door) snapped back with: “Le parole le porta via il vento, le biciclette i livornesi” (words are whisked off by the wind, and bikes by the Livornese). 

Now, without wanting to offend citizens of either of the cities, neither one of them is anything to really write home about, and yes, I’ve seen the Leaning Tower and the hundreds of tourists all pretending to either prop it up or push it over while grinning for a photo.

This rivalry is classic campanilismo. This is something that if you’ve ever read about Italy before you’ll surely have already come across, but for the uninitiated, campanile means bell tower or steeple. If you’ve been here you will no doubt have noticed just how many churches there are, and so campanilismo is a love of or pride in your local area (i.e. the area in which you can hear your church bell tolling). In a country where many people are born and live most of their lives in the same house or street (certainly in previous generations, although the current financial crisis and high-youth employment is forcing some younger people to venture further afield for work), and often with family members next door or in the building round the corner, the idea of ‘home, sweet home’ runs deep. And one thing that people love more than home comforts is someone or something to mistrust. How could you go wrong if your enemy was an entire town just down the road? Nothing like a common villain to build town unity and identity. And I certainly wouldn’t encourage the people of Pisa and Livorno to unite, hold hands and sing songs, because life would be boring without a bit of a grudge and bile, no? Plus of course, the resulting burglaries and bicycle thefts would overstretch the respective police departments to breaking point.

Match 8: Atalanta

Atalanta supporters have a reputation for being a little, let’s say, prickly. They had one of the most respected Ultras groups in Italy called the Brigate Neroazzurre (BNA), which itself branched off from another organised fan-group, the Atalanta Commandos. The BNA wasn’t averse to clashes with rival teams’ supporters, which found a great deal of popularity with the younger members of the group, but which also caused friction between themselves and other groups in the Curva. This mentality led to confrontations with supporters’ groups of Genoa, Torino and both the Milanese teams, and over the years their reputation as being somewhat calda was exacerbated and spread across the nation. 

Not content with the way things were going, in the eighties another group splintered off from the BNA: Wild Kaos. This new group’s reasoning was much the same as the BNA’s reason for separating from the Commandos: troppo poco casino (not enough trouble).

Most football teams and/or their fans bear a grudge against one or two other teams, but check this out for a roll call of enmity: Brescia, Juventus, Milan, Inter, Napoli, Roma, Genoa, Lazio, Fiorentina, Perugia, Torino, Verona, Reggina, Como and Vicenza can all expect a feisty reception at the Stadio Atleti Azzurri d’Italia. Of these, one episode well worth noting happened in the summer of 2013. During a celebration for the club in the centre of town organised by the fans’ groups, a player, Giulio Migliaccio, rode a tank over two cars, crushing them; one in the colours of Brescia, and the other in Roma’s. Pow! Take that! A tank! A bloody tank! Those guys know how to effectively get across their message, as long as it doesn’t require any subtlety.

I got first hand experience of their supporters’ prickishness prickliness in the days before this match when I was trying to get in contact with people for interviews. Using my normal method of signing up for their forums and then writing a wee introductory note explaining who I was and what I was doing, I got almost nothing but abuse in return. I’d written my little message, then settled down to watch a film, and barely fifteen minutes in, my phone pinged to tell me that someone had replied. Excited by their efficiency, imagine my disappointment when said message instructed me where to go and what to do to myself in somewhat colourful language. There followed a string of other messages questioning whether I was genuine or a troll, with most people apparently deciding that I was the latter despite my protestations that I don’t now and indeed have never lived under a bridge. That evening, the discussion topic I’d started was taken down, and the next day my membership was deleted. Thanks! 

There are only two reasons that I can think of that would explain why this happened: 

1. Someone said something really inappropriate and against the rules in the discussion, but as that wouldn’t affect my membership, what I reckon is more likely was that: 
2. Someone reported me as being a ne’er-do-well and I was booted out. As I said, I had replied to someone who’d accused me of the same thing in order to deny it, but they didn’t believe me for the most laughable of reasons: they said my Italian was too good. Almost suspiciously good. 

Ladies and Gentlemen of the court, I’d like to counter this point in two parts: First, I have been living here for more than five years, but thanks, that’s kind of you to say that my Italian is good, however with particular regard to my written Italian which certainly isn’t the best, please don’t piss in my pocket and tell me it’s raining. 

Secondly, what?! Only Italians are allowed to learn the language?! They say that there isn’t  a wall that a Bergamascan can’t build (they’re famed for their building skills), however this particular muppet seemingly found the language barrier too great an obstacle, thinking as he/she did that a foreigner couldn’t learn their language to a passable level. 

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