A Season With Verona Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Tim Parks

  Map

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Facci Sognare

  Giove Pluvio

  Rigore

  La Partita delle Fede

  Aborti

  I Magnagati

  Al Vincitore

  Numbers

  Il Verdetto del Campo

  Incanto

  Calendario

  Lecce

  La Befana

  Scaramanzia

  Magic

  Insulti

  I Più-mati

  Puliero

  Moo-too Moo-too

  Paranoia

  Latin Lover

  Protests

  San Siro

  Qwerty

  CD Rom

  Caporetto

  Credere, Obbedire, Combattere

  Elections

  Napoli

  ‘Abandon all hope …’

  Commedia dell’Arte

  Il Giorno del Giudizio

  Complications

  Reggio

  Postscript

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Is Italy a united country, or a loose affiliation of warring states? Is Italian football a sport, or an ill-disguised protraction of ancient enmities?

  After twenty years in the bel paese, Tim Parks goes on the road to follow the fortunes of Hellas Verona football club, to pay a different kind of visit to some of the world’s most beautiful cities. From Udine to Catania, from the San Siro to the Olimpico, this is a highly personal account of one man’s relationship with a country, its people and its national sport. A book that combines the tension of cliff-hanging narrative with the pleasures of travel writing, and the stimulation of a profound analysis of one country’s mad, mad way of keeping itself entertained.

  About the Author

  Born in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks moved permanently to Italy in 1980. Author of novels, non-fiction and essays, he has won the Somerset Maugham, Betty Trask and John Llewellyn Rhys awards, and been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His works include Destiny, Europa, Dreams of Rivers and Seas, Italian Neighbours and An Italian Education.

  ALSO BY TIM PARKS

  Fiction

  Tongues of Flame

  Loving Roger

  Home Thoughts

  Family Planning

  Goodness

  Cara Massimina

  Shear

  Mimi’s Ghost

  Europa

  Destiny

  Judge Savage

  Rapids

  Talking About It

  Cleaver

  Dreams of Rivers and Seas

  Non-Fiction

  Italian Neighbours

  An Italian Education

  Adultery & Other Diversions

  Translating Style

  Hell and Back

  Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics and Art in Fifteenth Century Florence

  The Fighter

  This book is dedicated to the boys who travel on the Zanzibar bus

  Infame, i nomi non si scrivono!

  1°FEBBRAIO/=87

  (Worm, you mustn’t write their names!)

  In line with this sensible precept, all names of fans have been altered.

  Facci Sognare

  Proud to be among the worst …

  McDan, Verona, Veneto

  FACCI SOGNARE, SAYS the banner. Make us dream! Please!

  We’re in the Bentegodi stadium, Verona. My son and I are sitting on the edge of the famous Curva Sud. The South End. Ten minutes ago, hurrying with the throng up the stairs, our path was suddenly blocked. Somebody thrust a plastic stick across the steps. Tightly wrapped around it was a blue and yellow flag. I agreed to a ‘donation’ of a thousand lire. So now the whole curva is a rising tide of flags, of shiny blue and yellow plastic, mass-produced, fiercely waved, and from beneath that flutter comes the slow loud swell of ten thousand voices chanting: ‘Haaaayllas. Haaaayllas. Haaaayllas!’ Because the team’s official name is Hellas Verona. At the bottom of the curve, draped over the parapet where the terraces look down on the goal, a huge and beautiful banner proclaims 19/=3, indicating the date when the club was formed and the little ladder, symbol of the Scaligeri family, ancient masters of Verona. The fans know their history.

  Hellas – Homeland. Fan, from fanatic, from the Latin fanaticus, which means a worshipper at a temple. ‘CIAO CAMPO!’ somebody has written in spray-paint on the concrete of the tunnel that leads us out into the stadium – Hello Pitch! – and then beside this, in English, since everything is more solemn when written in a foreign language: I LOVE YOU. As if it were the place rather than the team or the game that was important, this temple, the Bentegodi stadium. Certainly when you push out of that tunnel after a choking switchback of dusty stairs and corridors, when you emerge into the sunshine or the floodlights, the head lifts and the heart expands quite marvellously. The sense of occasion, with the crowd now ranged in slanted tiers and the pitch hugely green beneath you, is enormous.

  The football stadium is one of the few really large constructions that turns its wrong side out. The oval bowl excludes the world, reserves its mysteries for initiates. The TV cannot violate it, cannot even begin to catch it. It’s a place of collective obsession, of exaltation. Even a grumpy misanthrope like myself can feel the lift of communal delirium. Even I am chanting, Haaaayllas, Haaaayllas, Haaaayllas, waving my plastic flag. It’s the first home game of the season. Verona face the daunting Udinese, already well advanced in the UEFA cup. Please don’t lose. A chant starts up. ‘Verona, Verona segna per noi!’ Verona, score for us. It spreads round the curva. ‘Verona Verona, vinci per noi!’ Win for us. It’s a liturgy. Hellas Verona, facci sognare! Make us dream.

  But not all dreams are happy, and even fewer untroubled. My own season actually began two weeks ago. For years I have been a regular at the Bentegodi, but this season, for the first time, I have decided to go to all the away games too. And to write about them. Partly, the writing is an excuse. How can I explain to my wife that I am going to be away every other Sunday for nine months if I’m not writing about it? If I’m not making money. It’s such a mad indulgence: to watch Verona play in Rome, in Naples, in Lecce and Reggio Calabria. ‘It’ll be a travel book,’ I insist. ‘At last I’ll write a real travel book.’ I can’t wait to see those games. I can’t believe I’m going to do this.

  But at the same time, I want to get my mind around it too. I want to think and think long about the way people, the way Italians, Veronese, relate to football, the way they, we, dream this dream, at once so intense and so utterly, it seems, unimportant. And the way the dream intersects with ordinary life, private and public. For years now I’ve had the suspicion that there is something emblematically modern about the football crowd. They are truly fanatical, in the Curva Sud, but simultaneously ironic, even comic. A sticky film of self-parody clings to every gesture of fandom. We cannot take ourselves entirely seriously. Or perhaps this is the serious thing, this mixture of delirium and irony, this indulgence in strong emotions without being burned up by them. When the Haaaayllas chant ends everybody claps in self-congratulation and lots of them burst out laughing. Forza Hellas! We know we’re ridiculous.

  But to go back a step; the first game being away from home, the season began, for me, one evening towards the end of September, when I stopped the car outside Bar Zanzibar, rendezvous of the notorious Brigate Gialloblù, the Yellow-Blue Brigades, the hardcore. In the cluttered window a handwritten announcement said that the coach trip to Bari would cost a hundred thousand lire return. Thirty pounds. Bari is about
five hundred and fifty miles away and since the game is at three in the afternoon, fans are invited to meet for departure outside the Zanzibar at midnight the evening before. It’s a baptism of fire.

  I push through the doors, produce my hundred thousand, ask for a ticket. The pair behind the bar are middle-aged, man and wife, straightforward and gruff, bent over the sink. They are clearly surprised not to know a face. Everybody here knows everybody else by name, by nickname, big boys and old men vigorously slapping down cards on chequered tablecloths and shouting at each other. You’ll never understand whether they’re arguing or not. They’re arguing without being angry. Or they’re angry without arguing. In any event the bar booms with noise. The TV has been turned up to deal with it. I have to repeat myself: I want to go to Bari!

  And now the couple are surprised again that they can’t place my accent. Why would I support Verona if I wasn’t Veronese? Verona are not Juventus.

  I’m handed no more than a torn-off scrap of grubby paper with the biro scribble BARI, PAGATO, on it. Paid. Nothing is rung up on the till. But now a full sheet of A4 is produced and smoothed out on a copy of a magazine that shows celebrities bare-breasted on their yachts. At the top, somewhat laboriously, her hands damp from a sink full of glasses, the woman writes: BARI. BUS. And she asks my name. ‘Tim.’ At once I know I should have said Tino. ‘Like the phone company,’ I explain. ‘TIM – Telefonia Italia Mobile.’ She shakes her grey hair and writes. 1. Tim. Pagato. Five days before departure I am actually the first fan to sign up.

  And as it happens, I’m the first to sign up for what is, in absolute terms, the very first game of the Italian season. Most league games in Italy are played Sunday afternoon, but for the sake of pay TV each week one game is moved forward to Saturday at three, another to Saturday evening, and one is shifted back to Sunday evening. The evening games, at peak viewing hours, involve the big teams: Juventus, AC Milan, Inter Milan, Lazio, Rome. One of those five will win the championship. Nobody doubts it. The Saturday afternoon games are strictly for the ‘provinciali’, the also-rans, us.

  So I am the first person to sign up for what is perceived to be the least-important fixture of the weekend. What can Bari and Verona ever do but try to keep their miserable heads above the dark waters of the relegation zone? Serie A and the company of the elite will always be a luxury for the likes of us. Serie B is always there with open arms ready to draw us into the abyss of provincial anonymity. And immediately, even before the innumerable refereeing aberrations that will doubtless mar the season at our expense, this decision to move the match forward to Saturday afternoon becomes the occasion for that most common of Italian emotions, small-town resentment. My son, Michele, is furious. He wants to come with me to the game – what an adventure to travel through the night to Bari! – but he can’t, because Saturday is a regular school-day: eight until one, six days a week. ‘This would never have happened if we were Juventus.’ He shakes his head bitterly. ‘Bastardi!’ Every small town footballing dream is dreamed despite the bastardi, against the bastardi; every victory is achieved in the teeth of the bastardi. Apart from the referees, we have no idea who they are.

  In any event, it’s late September now and everybody is desperate to see a game again. Everybody is yearning for that stupid excitement of waiting for a goal, for or against, trembling on the edge of our seats, on the edge of euphoria or disappointment. The season has been delayed a month so as not to clash with the Olympic Games, with that intolerable mix of noble sentiments and growth hormones. Needless to say, this is a television-driven decision. Nobody who goes to the stadium would ever dream of missing a game for a long jump competition, or the prurient pantomime of synchronised swimming. What tedium! I swear to God I have not watched a single event of the Olympic Games on TV, not one, and would not travel a single mile to watch them live. How could any of that grim athleticism and loathsome armchair nationalism compare with what is at stake when Verona play Inter, when the familiar players stream out on to the pitch and come to salute the curva and your heart is in your mouth at the thought that the five reserves they have on the bench are worth more than our whole twenty-five-strong squad put together.

  ‘Cazzo di Olimpiadi,’ someone has written on The Wall, the club’s internet ‘guestbook’. Fucking Olympics. I couldn’t agree more. ‘And then the bastardi go and put the first game on Saturday,’ Michele says. Saturday! He has two hours of Latin, he complains, and I at least twenty-two, there and back, on the coach. Or do I? When I drive by the Zanzibar at ten to midnight Friday evening, the place is closed and the street empty.

  There is a general belief that away from the busy downtown, the suburbs of our modern cities Europe-wide are all the same. It’s not true. So fine at creating a generous and thriving muddle around the noble monuments of their ancient centres, or again a charming languor in the skewed piazzas of their knotty hillside villages, the Italians ran out of imagination when it came to modern suburbs. In the modern suburbs they have achieved the last word in desolation and dull conservatism.

  So the periferie of Verona have neither the blowy luxuriance of the English garden suburb, nor the gritty romanticism of the spectacularly depressed area. Here block after six-storey block of featureless flats string amorphously either side of wide, straight, featureless roads. In inevitable reaction, the late-night drivers hurtle at junctions which are often just large empty asphalt spaces with not much indication as to how you’re supposed to behave when you get to them. And if the original plan was at least sensible, maintenance is desultory. The coarse grass on the verges is cut only when it reaches knee height. There are no pavements on the side-streets, only expensive cars.

  Perhaps, it occurs to me, locking up the old Citroën, perhaps since it was built round the stadium, the whole purpose of this suburb was to design a place of such spiritual emptiness as to more or less oblige everybody to go to the game on Sundays. In which case they could hardly have done it better. To show the full extent of their imagination, or as a clue to their undeclared brief, they called the suburb Stadio. Why not? Giving up on the Zanzibar I walk, disconcerted, back to the main square outside the Bentegodi, and find that there is just one bar open.

  Or half-open. It already has its iron grille pulled down a little, to threaten closing time. I slip under and ask for a beer. The only two customers are kissing, not passionately perhaps, but certainly determinedly. In any event they are not thinking about Bari – Verona. And at this point – you don’t need a glass, do you? the barman asks – I suddenly see myself travelling down to the southern seaport on my own. Yes, I will be the only passenger on an empty coach. I will stand alone on the hostile terraces, the only supporter of la squadra gialloblù. The cameras putting together the evening’s highlights will focus on me for one split second. I’m shrieking with anger as the referee refuses to grant us a penalty.

  But it’s impossible to support a football team on your own. Can we imagine a fan on his own? It would be like being the only worshipper of a god, the only speaker of a language. You’d be incomprehensible to everyone. Fandom, like family, is a destiny you do together. At ten past midnight a slim figure ducks under the grille and orders a beer. He’s thirtyish, shy, sad, broken-nosed, and he has a blue-and-yellow scarf round his neck. ‘Bari?’ I ask. ‘Bari,’ he confirms. It’s begun.

  The troops gather on the corner of the square. It’s twelve forty-five. The bar has closed, but everybody has supplies of beer or spirits. They’re carrying them in those little pinky, yellowy backpacks Italian children use to take their books to school. The night is cloudy. The summer is suddenly over. After two months without rain, it has started to drizzle. Football weather. We stand under a concrete portico, waiting for the coach. There are about twenty youngish boys, three or four girls and a dozen men. One boy seems to suffer from a mild case of phocomelia. With his short arms he arranges his yellow-blue cap crosswise on his head, glad to be part of the group.

  ‘Dio boia!’ the boy next to me suddenly shouts. ‘Exe
cutioner God’, it means, a strictly local blasphemy. For some reason Italians find the expression particularly foul, perhaps because of the way the boia is pronounced. You begin with an explosive ‘b’, popping your lips as if you were a big fish, then you swallow the ‘oi’ in a long, slow adenoidal sound, lingering on a sort of ‘y’ deep in the tonsils, before snapping the word shut with an axe-blow, ‘a!!’ ‘Dio bboiyyya!’ he repeats, apropos of nothing. Then he starts shaking his head. ‘Abbiamo fatto una figura di merda. Dio boia!’ He tips up his beer can. The beer dribbles down his chin. ‘Covered ourselves in shit,’ he protests. ‘We covered ourselves in shit.’

  Nobody is talking about football. Nobody is interested in discussing the team, at least half of whom are new this year, some of them the merest kids. Nobody is reflecting on the fact that we have lost Cesare Prandelli, the brilliant coach who got us back into Serie A and then took us up to ninth place last season, the coach who brought us victories against Juventus and Lazio. Nobody mentions that the hated owner of Hellas F.C., Giambattista Pastorello, has put the club up for sale, a disastrous move because it now turns out that nobody wants to buy it. Nobody mentions the fact that the official sponsor, Marsilli Salumi, suddenly withdrew its support two weeks ago, announcing that it was pointless attaching the image of its excellent sausages to a team that sold all its best players as soon as anybody waved any money at them, a team that was thus sure to be back in Serie B by the end of this season.

  For me all these developments are fascinating. I’ve spent half my summer reading about them. Every day the Arena, the local paper, has at least a half-page dedicated to the city’s football team. Every single day, summer and winter alike. Often it’s a whole page. After a game it’s three pages. I have read oceans of accusations, denials, rumours. That space has to be filled. I have sworn to myself that I will understand the mechanics of football finance before the year is out. I want to know if the dream element distorts the figures, if investments are made in football that no one would dream of making in any other business. Or if it’s as merciless as Marsilli’s meat-packing. Are we really destined for Serie B even before the season starts? Has Pastorello given up on us? Is he a genius or a fool, well-meaning or a shark? And is it or is it not ominous, given the recent disastrous performance of Nasdaq, that we are the first Serie A football team to be sponsored by an internet company, the hitherto unheard-of Net Business? Suddenly I want to know what is really happening. I want to know who really possesses the team: the supporters, the players or the businessmen? I want to know if we’re going to get thrashed down in Bari, or whether we can give the bastards some kind of a game. Who is the new striker we’ve just bought?