Fino alla fine

On three years of Italian football “trainspotting”…

Like many good Italian things, it all started in Tuscany: a balmy, midweek late summer evening at the Stadio Artemio Franchi (Montepaschi Arena) in Siena, and a Coppa Italia tie with Ternana. Aesthetically, the Artemio Franchi itself is nothing to write home about – three sides are temporary constructions – but the setting is one of the most beautiful I have ever watched sport in. Lying at the bottom of a tree-lined gulley, framed by views of the Duomo and Basilica Cateriniana di San Domenico at the top of the hill, special doesn’t do it justice, especially for a game at sunset in August. And it was only €2 to get in.

Stadio Artemio Franchi (Montepaschi Arena), Siena

Many of my friends probably suspected my decision to move to Italy for a few years was motivated to a large degree by my love of Italian football and desire for access to a rich seam of new grounds to tick off. To a large degree, they are probably right. My interest in the country, like many of my generation, was piqued by the Italia ’90 World Cup, and subsequently Channel 4’s coverage of Serie A from 1992.

The Italian football landscape I wandered into in 2010, however, was one blighted by corruption; the embers of Calciopoli barely having a chance to stop smouldering before Calcioscommese ignited. My 2010/11 season ended on a particularly sour note as I was present at the infamous AlbinoLeffe v Siena fixed game, which earned current Juventus head coach Antonio Conte a 9-month ban for his colluding part. There was also the supporter unrest triggered by the introduction of the Tessera del Tifoso. This ID card essentially compelled fans to record themselves on a police database just to be able to buy tickets to watch their team, and understandable caused uproar among the more passionate elements. I wrote a couple of pieces for When Saturday Comes on this* at the time so don’t want to get into it here, but suffice to say it cast a shadow over the period and occasionally affected my ability to get in to games.

So, back to Tuscany. I had barely a month of the season in the region, but managed to get in six grounds, and some wonderful games in predictably glorious weather. Possibly because of this and the fact it was my first residence in the country, some of my best football memories are from this short period. I will, for instance, never forget the passionate and unwavering support of the 30-odd L’Aquila ultras at Prato. Despite being baked in 34° heat, and their team being baked 3-0 on the pitch, they never let up for a minute. I had seen my “Channel 4 team” AC Milan both home and away on previous trips to Italy, but this was my first experience of the frenzied type of support any British fan of calcio hopes to witness.

Red Blue Eagles, L'Aquila ultras

The heat could actually be a bit of an issue at times. Those fascist era roofless concrete bowl stadiums that trap and intensify the heat are really not the most sensible design for a country where it does tend to get a bit warm. Poggibonsi and Viareggio, two more grounds oddly tucked away in pine woods, were notable examples of this. How the old guy with the walrus-like moustache roused himself to lead the Viareggio chanting as they closed out their victory over Virtus Lanciano, I will never know. I was ready to pass out.

From here it was something of a shock to the system to hit the cold and damp north following my move to Milan. If I thought I was leaving all possible beautiful viewing locations behind in Tuscany, I was wrong. Lecco’s Stadio Rigamonti-Ceppi, painted almost entirely in vivid sky blue and yellow inside and surrounded by mountains, is really something to see. Their ultras Gruppo Psycho with their Homer Simpson x-ray logo are highly entertaining too. I found another true oddity on a trip to see one of the most famous old names of Italian football, Pro Vercelli – trees being allowed to happily continue growing inside the ground. You wouldn’t get that in the Premier League.

It’s not that I was only trawling the lower leagues for my football fix though. A significant driver of my desire to live in Milan was to fulfill something of a dream to be a regular attendee at San Siro. On this front, I struck gold, as AC Milan won their first championship for a while in my first season there. Along the way I got to see my first Champions League game, and most gloriously, the derby. The time, effort and money that goes into the ultras’ pre-match displays at these events is unimaginable. The results are truly spectacular, and in most other contexts would be considered genuine works of art or artistic expression. At the Juventus game that season, I even got to be in the middle of one. As much fun and enjoyment I got out of the small games, ultimately this was why I was really out there.

Getting heated at the Milan derby

Frustrated by the über-zealous security arrangements in the professional leagues associated with the Tessera del Tifoso (nobody should ever need THREE attempts to get in to see Pro Patria), I found myself slipping further down the tree and investigating non-league. Serie D, like in England the highest level of non-league being the fifth tier of the overall structure, was  a particularly happy hunting ground. Also as in England, you find a number of ex-league clubs fallen on hard times, and with entry prices never usually more than a tenner and no ID required, it can be a more enjoyable experience than going to games in the Lega Pro (equivalent of English Leagues One and Two). My geographically most local club Pro Sesto were stuck down there after a brush with bankruptcy, and provided a nice easy afternoon out when I lacked the motivation to venture further afield.

My Italian football odyssey ended in 2013 on a suitably high note as I met my friend Matt, a fellow obsessive of the Channel 4 generation, in Rome for the final of the Coppa Italia. Not only a cup final, but a Rome derby to boot. Arriving in the area of the stadium a good four hours before kickoff, we found a wild street party already underway. Distress flares, smoke bombs, stun grenades; a passerby would have thought that Lazio had already won. Or that war had broken out. As it happened Lazio did win, and celebrated with ultras on the pitch and a live eagle being paraded with the cup. The oddities it seems do make it to the top level after all.

Those three years living in Italy contained as many high and low points as you would expect from a period living abroad, and were well reflected by my experiences with Italian football. There were certainly lows: being locked out of several games due to the ludicrous bureaucracy, the afternoons in murderous heat or brutal cold and rain when I doubted my sanity, some unnecessarily epic journeys on the idiosyncratic railway network. But the memorable moments always made up for it: the sound of a massive stadium falling utterly silent in an instant as Napoli’s did when Torino equalised with the last kick of the game, the entire Pro Vercelli team swallow-diving into a giant pool of standing water on a barely playable pitch, an aged Seregno club official getting into a physical fight requiring police intervention after instructing the ballboys to waste time during a relegation play-off. It may have its defects, but ultimately it is still the beautiful game. Fino alla fine, forza ragazzi.

National anthem and pre-match displays by the Roma and Lazio ultras before the Coppa Italia final

 

*Italian fan ID card gets off to a bad start

The Italian fans' ID card system is still not working

 The Spectre in Italy - grounds visited:

Atalanta 

Brescia

Caronnese 

Chievo Verona

Como

Cremonese

Empoli

Fiorentina

Lecco

Monza 

Napoli

Novara

Pergocrema

Pizzighetonne

Poggibonsi

Pontisola 

Prato

Pro Patria

Pro Sesto

Pro Vercelli

Real Milano 

Renate

Rondo Dinamo

San Siro (AC Milan and Internazionale)

Sandonatese

Seregno

Siena

Solbiatese 

Stadio Olimpico (Roma and Lazio)

Torino

Varese

Viareggio

Forgotten Fields

On the melancholic beauty of abandoned football pitches...

What is it that attracts us to decay and dereliction? Urban Exploring, or Urbex, is expanding as an interest and is being well documented by its participants. Think about the quantity of images you see of abandoned and dilapidated buildings and installations relative to new and beautiful things. It’s a popular subject of professional photography, a common setting for music videos, an edgy and visually appealing backdrop. This ratio must be significant to say the least. What do you find more evocative and romantic, a photo of a shiny London skyscraper, or a crumbling Scottish castle? There’s something in that sadness, abandonment, ruin, sad but striking; melancholy can be beauty. 

Freelance photographer Simon Bray recognises the appeal, writing that “...as photographers, it’s up to us to document the world around us. In the case of dereliction, it’s important that we capture it while it is still there, to preserve it in time. In the majority of cases, the location will have seen much better days, so in that case, the point of interest is in how and why it has ended up this way.” I would agree that this is the case – the sight of a broken-down building naturally activates our imagination in a way an operational edifice is unlikely to; what happened there? what was it used for? who was there using it? what sounds and smells were present? why was it deserted and allowed to fall into disrepair? In most cases we don’t know, so we invent. Humans are the most curious of creatures; we have to fill any gaps in knowledge, and if we can’t do that with facts, we create a story for ourselves.

For me, it’s not just buildings that pique my interest, but also open spaces and I refer in particular to football pitches. My love (ok, obsession) with the game is such that while out and about absolutely anything related to the game will attract my attention – a set of floodlights glimpsed over or between buildings, an actual stadium, any kind of sports facility. But it isn’t even required to be a well-maintained and in-use amenity; just that flash of a white, perpendicular structure will do it, with net or without. Football happens there in some form, and that’s what makes my heart jump (yes, really, it often jumps). There is another feeling though which is much harder to define, and that is the feeling provoked when I see an abandoned football pitch, somewhere where football used to happen. There is some fantastic imagery out there documenting ‘dead grounds’ – the terraces hidden amongst the trees of Cathkin Park in Glasgow where Third Lanark once played being a particularly striking example. However, because I am only viewing them second-hand they don’t stimulate in me the same feelings I get when I see a disused pitch for real, and I am talking particularly about ones that were never used at anything close to professional level. 

When I see a set of goalposts emerging from an overgrown field, the beauty of dereliction should be there but somehow it is tempered with sadness: this melancholy is not entirely beautiful. But why? Perhaps because unlike with a lot abandoned buildings, you know what happened here, no imagination is required. People played here; it was a place of fun and recreation, and now nobody comes to enjoy it anymore. Why? What made them stop? Was there a club that closed down? Did the local kids grow up and move on, and not have their places filled by a new generation? Could it even be an indication of some societal change in that people simply don’t want to play as much these days? Whatever the reason the sight is sad, to me at least, because people should want to play and use these facilities.

Considering the purely aesthetic appeal of an abandoned pitch though, it should be said that there is at least something of that derelict beauty there. In his book for youngsters, Keeper, Mal Peet captures a delightful description of a pitch in the middle of a jungle slowly being reclaimed by nature: “The woodwork was a silvery grey, and the grain of the wood was open and rough. Weathered, like the timber of old boats left for years on a beach. It shone slightly. The net had the same colour, like cobweb, and thin green plant tendrils grew up the poles that supported it.” ¹ I used this book with a young student during the time I spent teaching English in Italy, and it seems that Italy is a goldmine for such sights. Perhaps this is not surprising given that two things that Italy is particularly famous for are football and old ruins. Sadly I didn’t capture many photos, as I often passed these places on trains, but the images are still there in my mind – goalposts put up between olive groves, at the bottom of cliffs... anywhere where there is a bit of flat ground Italians will try to play football on it. 
 

 

An improvised pitch that I spotted at the foot of the walls of Città Alta, Bergamo

With such a high number of pitches being created it is not surprising then that many get abandoned as people discover better places to play. Thinking this way, maybe seeing a disused pitch should not be such a vision of sadness, but the initial twinge is always still there. On a journey to Naples I saw several overgrown football fields, and of course your eyes are drawn to the goals as the objects that announce the presence of the former playing area. Creeping plants climb the posts, the net and stanchions if present, assimilating the pitch back into nature. One of the pitches I saw on this particular journey had goals that looked so new as to be possibly unused. The posts were brilliant white and the netting was also conspicuously clean, yet the vegetation had already reached the crossbar. This raised even more intrigue: this was obviously a decent facility fairly recently now discarded. Why had it been abandoned? In Italy it’s probably best not to ask. In this case the sadness was infused with a little anger – what a waste of a good ground. 

Whatever all this says about my personal obsession, it cannot be denied that these sights of abandonment are evocative and emotional on some level, and that should be the case for anybody who sees them. Even if you are not a football or sports fan of any kind, you should be able to appreciate the enjoyment it generates, the social aspect, bringing people together. On this basis the unnecessary loss of any pitch should be a cause for sadness, but we can still appreciate the visual appeal of a ground merging back into the landscape from which it was created. Next time you are on a train and spot a lonely set of goalposts being strangled by shrubs, take a moment to imagine the fun that was undoubtedly had there in times past. I know my emotions will always be tweaked by a glimpse of any place where once skills were grown, but now grow only weeds.

    Photo © Copyright Nigel Davies and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence. Available at http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/1481044

¹ Peet, Mal (2003). Keeper, London: Walker Books