Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  Born in November 1937, the oldest of four boys, there was a rough edge to Francesco. His mother had died when he was five. Once in a while, Francesco took a stick and pretended to be the executioner killing Alaric’s slaves. He was like that when he was in the mood. He could only remember two things about his mother. The first was her white face in the coffin. It was all wrong: she was dressed up in finery, whereas in life she had only ever worn rough clothes. Any whiteness came from flour and wool, not lace and silk.

  The other thing he remembered was that she used to kiss him after communion, as soon as she came back from that silent queue at the altar. She said she wanted to give him the flavour of Christ. All these bones in the riverbank reminded him of her, of what she must have become.

  When they weren’t in the rivers, the boys always played football. For the ball, they would creep up on the flock of sheep grazing outside the city. Francesco, the strongest, used to hold the ram by its horns as the other lads pulled wool off the animal. Often it had maggots and shit in it, but it didn’t matter. They would steal socks from home and stuff them full of the wool. The balls eventually fell apart and, come the next spring, the boys began chasing the sheep again.

  Francesco had three younger brothers. He played soldiers with them. They had a flag, some rag they had found in a stable. It was ripped apart in a fight, so now they had two halves of a flag. Without a mother to keep the peace, it was often a loud and melancholy house. Sometimes Francesco got into trouble for jumping into orchards and stealing the figs and mandarins. ‘Every night,’ he remembers, ‘my father had to beat me for something.’

  Once a week, Francesco’s father brought home unsold pastries from his shop: cannoli, sfogliatine, torrone, pignolate, susumelle or piparelle. In their spartan home, those luxuries were a glimpse of another world where glistening cream oozed from soft pastries. The ones his father brought back had cream turning hard and yellow, so the children battled each other for the least stale offerings.

  That year Francesco was sent to the orphanage. His father felt he needed direction and discipline, and the grand building – peach-coloured with wide, white vertical pillars over its three storeys – looked like the place to find it. Francesco still played with his friends but he missed his suburb, Laurignano, and the long, idle days with nothing to do. Now he had to practise handwriting and make his bed every morning. He escaped once, running back home, but his guilty, grieving father brought him back.

  That summer, the war was getting closer. On 25 July 1943, two weeks after the Allies had landed in Sicily, Benito Mussolini was arrested. He was imprisoned on the Gran Sasso mountain in Abruzzo. On 8 September Italy announced that it was joining the Allied forces in the fight against Germany. Four days later, on 12 September, Mussolini was rescued from his mountain-top prison by an elite team of SS and parachute troops. As the Allies worked their way north up the Italian peninsula, Mussolini was installed by the Germans at Salò, a small town on the banks of Lake Garda. His regime there became known as the Repubblica di Salò, or RSI. For the next year and a half, until the end of the war on 25 April 1945, Italians fought a brutal civil war: German troops, and those fascists loyal to Mussolini and his Republic, battled the Allies and the Italian partisans. The furious debates in post-war Italy, which took place on the terraces as much as in academic circles, were about who could be considered the traitors in that civil war – the partisans or the fascists?

  At the end of the war, there was no equivalent of Germany’s denazification. Whether because of Catholic notions of mercy, or because of a conscious revulsion from the reprisals that took place in the immediate post-war years, Italy deliberately avoided any widespread prosecution of fascist war criminals, or even cleansing of its bureaucratic personnel. General Rodolfo Graziani, the Minister of War in the RSI, only served four months of a nineteen-year prison sentence. In Mussolini’s Italy, R. J. B. Bosworth notes that out of 128,837 civil servants in Naples, only twenty-three ex-fascists were removed from their posts. The figure in Palermo was five out of 26,636. In 1950 only five German ex-soldiers were held in Italian prisons compared with 1,300 in France and 1,700 in Yugoslavia.

  The problem was that almost everyone was compromised to some degree and the realists were, in Bosworth’s words, ‘appalled at the idea of a thorough-going critical legal examination of the relationship between Italian banking, business and law and their political masters under the dictatorship’. Better, it seemed, to look to the future than reopen the wounds of the past. One Italian sociologist, Paolo Treves, returned to Italy and wrote an essay called ‘The Conspiracy of Silence’ about this wilful amnesia. One young woman complained in her diary about this ‘moment of chameleons’. The result was a post-war settlement that seemed, to idealists on both sides, founded on a squalid compromise. ‘The Republic,’ wrote Christopher Duggan, ‘failed to define itself – and be defined by the outside world – clearly and openly in relation to fascism.’ Both the fascists loyal to Benito Mussolini and the partisans loyal to anti-fascism felt betrayed.

  The country’s new constitution forbade the resurrection of the Fascist Party ‘in any form whatsoever’. But in December 1946, a new political party emerged: the Movimento Sociale Italiano. Its usual abbreviation – MSI – deliberately recalled the RSI, Mussolini’s ‘social republic’. The Western powers and the Vatican regarded the party as less dangerous than the much larger PCI (the Italian Communist Party) which sometimes appeared ambivalent towards parliamentary democracy. In 1952, the Scelba Law made the denigration of the ‘values of the resistance’, and the celebration of ‘the exponents, principles, achievements or methods of fascism’, illegal. That law was never applied to the MSI. The former general and war criminal, Rodolfo Graziani, became the party’s Honorary President. The party’s unofficial slogan was that old regime favourite, ‘Boia Chi Molla’ (‘the executioner for quitters’). Soon the party had a newspaper, Il Secolo d’Italia, and youth wing, Giovane Italia (which later merged into the Fronte della Gioventù, the Youth Front). Every time an Italian government required the support of the MSI during the post-war years, small concessions were made to the rump of unrepentant followers of il Duce. The most symbolic, perhaps, was the burial of Mussolini’s corpse in the family crypt in Predappio (on 1 September 1957), thereby making the small Romagna town a site of pilgrimage. The post-war settlement, however, was no more satisfactory for fascists than it was for partisans. They felt that men and women who had been courageous patriots were now being derided as traitors, and that they were the abiding loyalists in an era of hypocrisy and democratic cross-dressing.

  The lingering bitterness, on both sides, about the compromises made by Italy’s First Republic (1948–92) would find eloquent expression on the terraces. It was as if, a generation after the end of the war, the historical debates were revisited by extremist fans who chose ideological as much as sporting sides. Treves had written that there was a post-war ‘conspiracy of silence’, but the vociferous and countercultural ultras – loud loyalists, ever averse to fudging – would smash the conspiracy. They re-enacted that period of civil war in Italy’s stadiums, taking inspiration from the names and emblems of those bloody years.

  *

  There’s an extraordinary flexibility to an ultra group, almost as if – like a football team – it can change shape according to the situation. In one sense, it is very open and its boundaries extremely porous. If you’re on the terraces, you’ll be able to wander amongst its members and feel at one with them through the contagion of the choreographies and the songs. They don’t merely welcome you, they scream at you, demanding more involvement and participation. But their headquarters in the suburbs are forbidding: a metal door, informal bouncers, access permitted only to an established in-group. The group is transformed from a very public to a very private organization.

  That alteration is also structural. An ultra group invariably boasts about its egalitarianism and the fact that anyone is allowed to become a participant. It’s true that there is
a genuine and sincere inclusivity. And yet the group is profoundly hierarchical, structured like a company, with well-defined responsibilities and rewards. It’s not unusual for the leader to call himself Presidente or Capitano. Often, in a large ultra group in a big club, it’s harder to arrange an audience with that leader than a government minister. Much of the diction is similar to a political party: there is invariably a direttivo (the ‘board’), the tesserati (the ‘card-carriers’ or ‘members’) and so on.

  That mutability of the group is also evident in what it actually does. Being an ultra is both incessantly active but also eerily passive. There’s non-stop singing during the game – a lot of hand-clapping and jumping and vocal straining – and the week is filled with meetings, bookings, choreographic preparations and uncomfortable journeys. But actually, the ultra is a largely static observer. The role is really about spectatorship of – and not participation in – the sport.

  Because there’s such an ambiguity about the group, an uncertainty about whether it is egalitarian or hierarchical, profoundly open or secretive, it seeks definition in other ways. There’s a never-ending ‘mirror-stage’ in which the group studies itself and its moves: the incessant photographing of the terraces, and of each other dressed up in the colours, is an attempt to understand itself. And since the group is constantly changing – there are always retirees, those who are banned from stadiums by the authorities and then new recruits – that mirror-stage is actually not a passing phase but a constant.

  What would be considered vanity or narcissism in an individual setting (plastering the walls of a bedroom with photographs of oneself) is instead an assertion of the tribe. Go into any ultra HQ and the walls are covered with snaps of the assembled masses on the streets and the terraces. In any game, there are hundreds of phones raised to take photographs but almost all are recording not the game, but the group’s own moves, songs, banners and faces. It’s a self-absorption that has reached new levels with the advent of social media.

  And the same happens with rival ultra groups: we stand opposite them in the stadium, studying them, listening to them, imitating them, responding to them. It’s remarkable that although every ultra group will boast about how unique they are, almost all do exactly the same things. The perception of the curva as a mirror is a common metaphor: ‘Reflect yourselves in this marvel’ the Catania ultras wrote on a banner to their rivals, Palermo, in April 2000. Often the notion of reflection is rather more coarse, like the time Inter ultras held up a banner to their Milan rivals just as the game started: ‘the spectacle begins… look in the mirror’, and thousands of fans turned round and dropped their trousers.

  Talk to any older ultra and they will lovingly remember the childish excitement of trading photographs through the post with far-off fans from other groups, via the marketplace in the back-pages of sporting publication, Guerin Sportivo. Nowadays, they stalk social media accounts.

  That mirroring doubtless takes place on an individual level too, as ultras, like Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver, practise their lines in the privacy of their bathrooms: ‘You talkin’ to me?’ And it may be that the violence for which the ultras are so notorious is actually a symptom not of hatred at something superficially different (the rival city or colours) but something profoundly similar. Maybe the anger is aimed also at ourselves, our situation, and the failings we see in that mirror.

  Torino

  There are certain football teams that just seem to have more history: not in terms of trophies, but of tragedies that only make the fans more devoted.

  In the 1940s Torino won five consecutive scudetti. At that time, ten of the eleven players in the Italian national team were from the club. But on 4 May 1949, a plane bringing the team back from a friendly match in Portugal crashed into the Basilica of Superga, the burial site of the House of Savoy, the former ruling dynasty of Italy. Thirty-one people lost their lives, including all but one of the ‘Grande Torino’ players (a single injured first-team player hadn’t gone to Lisbon). Among the dead was an Englishman, the then-coach Lesley Lievesley.

  At the funeral, Giorgio Tosatti remembers a city ‘mute and dumb and breathing pain. I will never see again such a huge and quiet crowd, I will never see again a city suffer as much as Torino suffered that day.’ The loss was so hugely felt not just because they were sensational players, capable of beating the mighty Roma 7–1. In the words of Franco Ossola, those players ‘represented a series of values which the people had forgotten or lost along the way: dignity, honour, pride’.

  Superga is now a place of pilgrimage, a shrine to loss and loyalty. There are scarves from all over Italy, and Europe, placed on the rails around the site. But far outnumbering all the others are the maroon (‘granata’) ones of Toro. There’s a metal bull, the club’s symbol, covered with stickers from fan groups. Photographs of players line the wall: large posters of all the victims, then a huge group shot.

  The view from up here is magnificent. You can see the meeting of the two rivers, the Po and the Dora. You can see the long, straight boulevards, the white curves of the campus and the huge industrial warehouses. It’s a city in which Juventus Football Club wins more medals but Toro embodies the deeper meaning of fandom. Fans of Toro suffer in ways that are almost uncanny. Gigi Meroni, their carefree sprite of a midfielder, used to move inside and outside defenders like a weaver’s shuttle. He was killed at the age of 24, in 1967, when he was crossing the road. The coincidences between the Superga and Meroni tragedies were spooky: the basilica of Superga is where the members of the House of Savoy were buried and Meroni was killed on Corso Re [King] Umberto. The name of the pilot of the plane that crashed nineteen years before, in 1949, was also Meroni. The man who accidently killed the player as he was crossing the road was a teenage proto-ultra who had furiously protested against his hero’s proposed sale to Juventus. That teenager, four decades later, became the President of the club, leading it to a near-fatal bankruptcy. The loss is still so deeply felt that when Torino wins, certain fans still go and pay homage to Meroni at the place where he died. There’s a bronze shrine to him with a raffish photo. Above the photo is an angled football pitch with a huge football in the corner.

  When thinking about fandom, it’s impossible not to pause in Torino and ponder what it means to have martyrs. Their loss sacralizes a sporting cause. The melancholy around your team matches your personal sorrow, and therein lies the symmetry and satisfaction of fandom: you no longer feel alone in your state of bereavement. Your underdog team loses on the pitch, just as you do in life. Glory is evasive, but that in itself makes your commitment somehow glorious. In a secularized, rationalized, atomized world, that gathering around a single colour of loss, Toro’s colour of blood, takes on an almost insane transcendentalism.

  That explains what, to a non-ultra, is often incomprehensible: the sense of outrage when a player doesn’t honour the maglia, the shirt, or the colours. Players are representing something far greater than themselves and will only understand how deep their mission is by listening to fans and hearing their stories. Sacralising the sport makes fans, and not footballers, the high priests of the lucrative game. As a Sampdoria banner once said: ‘Sampdoria is a faith, her ultras its prophets.’ A flier from Milan’s Red-and-Black Brigades once boasted: ‘We are the true moral masters of Milan.’

  Even though it’s a truism by now, it’s especially clear in Italy that football has a religious dimension. The great Genovese singer-songwriter Fabrizio De André said fandom ‘is a sort of lay faith’. Pier Paolo Pasolini said it was ‘the last sacred representation of our time’. The stadium now seems a better place to ritualize and remember the dead, because while the church is supposedly universal, the cults initiated by the ultras are devoutly local. It’s as if they have instinctively guessed that there’s a profound link between a specific place and social bonds.

  *

  After the war, the frenzy common at football matches continued to spill over into insults and stone-throwing, punches and gunfire. In 19
50 there was a pitch invasion in the game between Salernitana and Genoa. In February 1952, the referee of a Legnano–Bologna game was beaten up at Milano railway station. A few months later, seats were thrown onto the pitch in a game between Milan and Udinese. A year later, a referee disallowed a goal in the game between Pro Patria and Sampdoria, and fans pelted him with stones.

  The violence was invariably aimed at the referee, who was the only non-partisan person in the stadium. Every year there were furious riots against refereeing decisions. In 1955, when Brescia won away at Salernitana 1–0, a thousand supporters heckled and threatened the referee. A penalty awarded by the referee in the Napoli–Bologna match of November 1955 led to a hundred people being wounded and eleven hospitalized amid ‘shots fired between the crowd and the police’. All of those disturbances made the national papers, with photos of small mounted police units facing thousands of furious supporters. Sometimes the Sunday papers would publish charming panoramas of the riots as seen from above.

  A sense of injustice was at the root of many of the riots after refereeing decisions. Provincial towns that felt ignored and overlooked suddenly exploded when they perceived that one man had been corrupted in order to penalize them yet further. There’s a long history of referees accepting bribes, and many rioters – if they were anything like contemporary ultras – felt that they were defending local honour against corrupt outsiders.

  Often the suspicion that the arbiters of the sport had been bought was well-founded. In 1955 Catania was relegated to Serie B because a referee called Scaramella had been paid 5,000 lire to give Catania a helping hand in their home game against Genoa (the final score was 2–0). The bribery was discovered when, on the ferry back to the mainland, a club official handed the referee the money but one of the notes flew into the sea and an argument occurred about whose fault it was. The scuffle came to the attention of police and Catania paid the price.