The Dark Heart of Italy (9 page)

Then the
colpo di scena
. Siciliano goes missing. Since his arrival from Colombia, he had been staying in a hotel on the outskirts of Milan. All that’s left in his hotel room is a book entitled
Little
Money, Much Honour
. His brother claims that Siciliano, who had previously provided hundreds of pages of interviews, had lost faith in the state, having been ‘treated like a tramp’. It’s unlikely that those interviews, conducted by Salvini, will now be admissible as evidence. None of which goes reported in the press. During the weekend following his disappearance, journalists are on strike. By the following Monday, the press are more preoccupied with Italian gold medals in the Sydney Olympics and the weekend exploits of Ferrari, the so-called
cavallino
rampante
(the ‘rampaging little horse’) than with the disappearance of another witness.

A little later
Panorama
, a weekly magazine owned by Silvio Berlusconi, finds a bizarre scoop. Martino Siciliano, the
AWOL
pentito
, hadn’t actually been receiving millions of lire from the official slush fund for that purpose. He had been receiving money directly from Guido Salvini, the investigating magistrate to whom he had made his confessions; a financial collaboration which seems at best unwise, and certain to cast doubt on the veracity of the
pentito’s
confessions. Another scoop for the defence is that Carlo Digilio, the infirm
pentito
in a Lake Garda clinic, has identified a photograph of the man he claims was his CIA contact. Defence lawyers, though, track down the man, and claim the CIA
agent is actually an old American in a small town in Kansas, and reveal that he wasn’t even in Italy when the alleged meetings with Digilio, in Venice’s Piazza San Marco, took place.

The case against the Fascists seemed to be collapsing. I wasn’t even particularly disappointed. By then, my flat was strewn with thousands of documents, each one promising amazing revelations, but in reality only referring me to another document. I had begun to understand why the mysteries sire endless court cases and scoops, but never reach convincing conclusions. I had begun to understand why ‘understanding’ in Italy is often impossible: everything is too politicised, there’s no objectivity anywhere and there’s no difference, in terms of personnel, between the past and the present. I decided to give up on my commuting to Milan. Piazza Fontana, which had fascinated me for months, was becoming just too exasperating.

There were other reasons, though, to leave the court case behind. Writing about Italy’s long list of ‘illustrious corpses’ gives a sense of the country as nothing more than an arena of murderous intrigue, whereas in reality I had never felt, since moving to Parma, either happier or safer. If the country does occasionally appear incredibly violent, it’s more often blissfully peaceful.

A few days after deciding to give up on the Piazza Fontana trial, I was in a
trattoria
with Filippo. For months he had been a kind of cerebral tour guide, pointing me towards interesting places or people. We were sitting at a bare wooden table with a chipped jug of wine between us. He was squeezing lemon juice onto his mince of raw horse meat and capers. I had a plate of steaming polenta topped with wild boar.

‘So now you understand why we say Italy is a brothel?’ he asked at the end of our conversation about Piazza Fontana.

‘I think so,’ I said. ‘Or at least, I’m beginning to get the idea. But …’ I was trying to explain why I wasn’t convinced by the metaphor anymore. ‘But it seems all too pejorative. I’m blissfully happy here, I don’t feel like I’m in a brothel. I want to write about something simpler. I want to write about …’ I was looking over his shoulder, looking for inspiration. I saw the row of
garish yellow-and-blue Parma shirts hanging up behind the bar. ‘That’s it. I’ll write about football.’

Filippo began laughing. He put down his fork and guffawed for about a minute. When he had finished, he leant towards the next-door table and shared the joke. ‘He says,’ he was pointing at me, ‘he says he wants to write about something simpler, something more complimentary about our country …’ He paused for dramatic effect. ‘So he’s going to write about football!’ They, too, started laughing. For another minute there were yelps of amusement all round.

‘Zio Tobia,’ he said eventually, slapping me on the back, ‘if you write about football you really will understand that you’re living in a brothel!’

Comparing Italian and British football (not necessarily at the top level, but down the divisions) is like comparing snooker with darts. One is cerebral, stylish, slipping the ball across the smooth green felt; the other a bit overweight, slightly raucous, throwing the occasional arrow in the right direction. The more you watch Italian football, the more you realise why Italy, having been introduced to the sport by the British in 1893, has won three World Cups: Italians are simply very good at the game. They play the most beautiful, cultured and skilful football imaginable.

Talk to any Italian about the strengths of the Italian game, and they will always mention the two vital ingredients lacking in Britain:
fantasia
and
furbizia
– fantasy and cunning. Fantasy is the ability to do something entirely unpredictable with the ball. The British, I’m endlessly told, will always try to pass through a defence, or run past it, but they never actually outwit it. That’s what Italian fantasists do: they produce a nanosecond of surprise that springs open a defence. It can be a back-heel, a dummy, a pretence of being off-balance. It’s the one side of football that can’t be taught. It has to be instinctive, suddenly inspired, which is why the
fantasisti
are so admired: they are touched by an indefinable genius. The fantasy on the pitch is clearly infectious. Watching a game on television, or even with friends, is like listening in on
some serious literary criticism:
un
passaggio
sopraffino
,
filigrana
(‘an extrafine, filigree pass’) or else
un
passaggio
sincopato
, che
splendore
ritmico
(‘a syncopated passage of play, what rhythmic splendour’).

The other side of the fantasy is the
furbizia
. It’s the ability to tilt the game in your favour through slightly sly, but perfectly legitimate, tactics. When a player falls over, he instinctively grabs the ball with his hands, as if to bounce the referee into giving him a free-kick. Players will beg the referee to book opponents. A goal is never, ever scored without a handful of defenders raising their arms in hopeful protest to the linesman or referee. Watch young, amateur Italians and they will already have learnt all the guile from their favourite players. I sometimes go and watch a teenage student of mine, who plays in a semi-professional league. He’s a tall central defender called Francesco. Towards the end of one game, when his team was hanging on to a one-goal lead, he doubled up and raised his hand just as an attack was on its way. The game stopped for five minutes as Francesco wobbled around, staring at the grass. He was pointing at his eyes. The parents around me started muttering: ‘Good old Francesco, always so professional.’

As the seconds ticked away, it slowly dawned on me that he was looking for his contact lenses. The game eventually restarted but only for a couple of seconds before the final whistle. At the end, I congratulated him on the win. ‘I didn’t know you wore lenses,’ I said.

‘Of course I don’t,’ he laughed.

The players are, though, strangely dignified. Many opposing players will kiss on both cheeks before kick-off. If one scores against his old team (cause for exultation in Britain), in Italy he refuses to celebrate. To do so would be an affront to his former employers and fans. Sometimes, they not only don’t celebrate a goal against their former team, they actually break down and have a little weep. (Gabriel Batistuta is a long-haired Argentine who played for Fiorentina for almost a decade. When, having signed for Roma, he scored a vital goal against his old friends, he scrunched up his face in a grimace of pain.) All of which is
described by gushing commentators as
un
gesto bellissimo
, ‘a very beautiful gesture’, which it often is. Another beautiful gesture is the way the players, whenever an important match is won, strip off to their underpants and throw their dirty shorts to excited fans.

I once met the Parma and Italian national captain, Fabio Cannavaro, after a game. He was an example of pure class and politeness. He stood up when I came to the table and pulled out a chair for me. He wanted to know what the game looked like from the stands. He asked whether I thought they should have played 3-5-1-1 instead of 4-4-2. The whole game was dissected as if it were a game of chess: the opening gambits, exposed flanks, the endgame and so on. You quickly realise that the national stereotypes of Britain and Italy (the one reserved, the other impetuous) are actually reversed when it comes to football. Italians play such a calculated game that they are usually astonished by the unregulated passion of British football. And the reason they can be so tactical is the other key word of Italian football:
tecnica
. No one ever needs to hoof a ball into the stands, because the players actually have the skill to put it exactly where they want: they can juggle it, dribble it, spin it. They can trap a speedy ball dead on the spot, or play it off with a perfectly weighted pass using their collarbone or their studs. And like the white ball in snooker, in Italy the ball only leaves the green when absolutely necessary, when a defence needs to be prised apart.

The nobility of the players is often reflected by the fans. When someone who is a genuine footballing legend plays against your team, he’s as likely to be applauded as whistled. When, after two years of injuries, Ronaldo finally returned to the Inter Milan lineup, and moreover scored a goal, the Lazio supporters (seeing his goal announced on the big-screen of their stadium hundreds of miles to the south, in Rome) instinctively applauded for a minute. Thus the theatricality of the pitch is matched by the grand gestures of the fans: fantasists are occasionally given a minute’s standing ovation and the stadium suddenly feels, rather than
thuggish, like a large theatre at the end of an emotional scene. (Enrico Chiesa or Francesco Totti are the usual candidates for such adulation.) When the players do head off to pastures and pitches new, they’re greeted not with hatred and sneers by their former fans (as in England) but given standing ovations, again, for what they’ve achieved.

Compared to their British equivalents, the intelligence of Italian fans is often extraordinary. I’ve spent hours on the terraces listening to fans arguing heatedly about the adjectives which could best capture the beauty of particular players: ‘He’s so rococo!’ someone will say about a long-haired midfielder with muddy knees. ‘Rubbish, he’s more pugnacious than that. He’s rustic, a noble savage.’ ‘No, I repeat, he’s rococo. So deft, slightly one-sided.’ Even the best English players from years ago are still lovingly recalled: David Platt, Ray Wilkins, above all Graeme Souness. Talk football with any fan of Juventus (the team from Turin, called the ‘Old Lady’ of Italian football) and they will recall the best goals scored by John Charles, the Welshman the Italians nicknamed ‘The Good Giant’.

And if Italian journalism usually looks like a press release from the President, Italy’s sports journalism is – like the football – just about the best in the world. It’s as withering and straight-talking as political writing is sycophantic. No one is pardoned anything. There’s even something called
La
Pagella
, where each player is given a mark out of ten for their performance. (The only 10 I’ve ever seen awarded was for a player who gave mouth-to-mouth to a collapsed colleague; an 8 is normally considered the top conceivable mark even for a fantasist.) Football journalists are almost as famous as the players; one of the country’s longest-running TV programmes is called
Biscardi’s
Trial
, where three or four men shout simultaneously at each other in an atmosphere of epic indignation. It sounds ridiculous, but is actually riveting. There are also the high-brow programmes hosted by the country’s ‘philosophers of football’. Hours of television are dedicated each week not just to the matches, but to long documentaries about the history and culture of
calcio
(football). If you didn’t know they were
talking about football, you would think it were a war documentary: weeping men pouring over sepia photographs, unfolding letters from fifty years ago. Football, it’s very obvious, is more than just a sport: it’s an inheritance, the nation’s sacred heirloom.

Only slowly, and only after that conversation with Filippo, did it dawn on me that there’s a very large cloud hanging over the game: the lack of transparency. As with rumours about people with terrorist pasts or Mafia associations, there is always a merry-go-round of accusations, of conspiracy theorists and their deny-all adversaries, arguing about whether it’s all a stitch-up. I’ve often spent long evenings in old wine cellars as someone explains in intricate detail a vital goal from the 1950s which was scored from offside, or a referee who suddenly became very wealthy upon his retirement from the game. If you ever appear sceptical about such paranoia, you’re told that you’re naïve and that, even though (despite being British) you understand football, you don’t understand Italy.

The extraordinary thing is how much the football-fixing debates mirror, almost word for word, discussions about Mafia or terrorist association: some brave observer puts their head above the parapet, suggesting that all is not quite as it seems, that there’s something dodgy going on. To which the reply is first a dismissive ridiculing of the idea, followed by increasingly threatening noises if the accuser continues with his accusations. By far the most intriguing personality in Italian football is the man whose job is exactly that: to defend Juventus against weekly paranoid accusers. His name is Luciano Moggi, a man with drooping, reptilian eyelids and who seems like something straight out of a
Godfather
film. He’s always sardonic, unruffled, but he’s often (especially when he smiles) ferocious. He cut his very sharp teeth at Napoli during the glory days with Diego Maradona, since when – at Torino and Juventus, the two teams from Turin – he has become the
eminence grise
of Italian football. (The TV parody of Moggi is a man who, when he captures an opponent’s chess piece, calmly crushes it with a hammer.)

* * *

It is, then, only a suspicion. There’s nothing to go on in terms of evidence. But it’s enough to look at the facts to know the score: it’s 1-0 to Juventus and it’s quite obviously going to stay that way. Nothing’s going to change that scoreline, not even a goal. In the dying minutes of the crucial, penultimate game of the 1999–2000 championship, Parma’s Fabio Cannavaro jumps, almost folds his body in half at the waist as he heads the ball. It bounces against the inside of the bottom of the post, and into the net. In the caged pen for away supporters, Parma fans go beserk, waving blue-and-yellow flags and letting off smoke-flares.

But strangely the score remains 1-0. The goal is disallowed. All around me indignant
Parmigiani
start screaming abuse at the referee: ‘You’ve earned it today alright’, ‘You’ve been bought by Agnelli’, ‘You’re a cuckold’. Not allowing the goal seems particularly perverse since the action began with a corner, and there could have been no off-side. Cannavaro had a free header, and clearly hadn’t elbowed any defender. The referee, examined after the game, can’t remember or recall quite why he didn’t allow the goal. There’s no explanation. Fans of Lazio, chasing Juventus for the title, duly riot in Rome. A mock street funeral is held for Italian football and the cover of the
Corriere dello Sport
announces on its front page: ‘Sorry, but this is a scandal’.

It’s not the first time something of the sort happens. At the end of the 1997–1998 season, Inter Milan were denied a blatant penalty against Juventus which could have given them the title. A few minutes later the referee Piero Ceccarini awarded Juventus a penalty. They duly won their 25th
Scudetto
, the league title. Talk to statisticians about that season and they’ll tell you, with eyebrows raised, that Juventus had been the most ‘fouling’ team all year (814 fouls) but with the fewest yellow (65) and red (3) cards. The referees are obviously, the rhetoric goes, on the side of Juventus.

In most places such criticisms could be dismissed as the whinings of bad losers. Here, though, there is serious suspicion that referees aren’t always as independent as they should be. After all, if all the magistrates, newsreaders, newspaper editors and industrialists are obviously politically aligned, why shouldn’t referees throw in
their lot with one side or the other? Even the normally sober
La
Stampa
(owned by the same man who owns Juventus, Gianni Agnelli) remarked that the 1997–1998 title would be a bitter trophy given the lack of credibility the club now had: ‘One can’t remain indifferent when confronted with certain coincidences which are so singular and, let’s say it, so “nutritious” … there’s the suspicion that the rules aren’t the same for everyone …’ The editor of the
Gazzetta dello Sport
even wrote that it was ‘an open disgrace’, and that the refereeing had been ‘one-way’.

It may be true. During another Juventus–Parma encounter (at the Tardini stadium during that 1999–2000 season) there was another extraordinary refereeing display. I am standing on the terraces next to Ciccio who, like most Juventus supporters, is from the south, about a thousand miles from Turin. He’s very short, coming up to chest height, but makes up for it with his aggressive defence of anyone in a Juventus shirt. We are drinking slugs of the coffee liqueur sold underneath the stands, enjoying the partisan banter of the terraces. All around us fans are lighting up large spliffs, doubtless another reason for the rampant paranoia surrounding Italian football. It’s an incredible scene: smoke mixing with coloured flares, flags flapping between banners, the weak winter sunshine of a Parma January. A lot of southerners from Sicily and Puglia are in bomber jackets supporting the team from Turin. Most of them, students from Parma university, have bought tickets for the terrace for home fans and so mingle with the sedate, muted Parma crowd who are dressed as if they were going to the opera.