Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  Then we sing. It sounds uncannily like that old cowboy standard, ‘Red River Valley’: ‘The flags will flutter, the drums will return to sound…’ The singing goes on and on until you’re almost mesmerized, not conscious that you’re singing at all. You even forget quite how surreal it is to sing an American country song on the southernmost tip of Calabria. Being on the terraces with ultras is a bit like a crash course in popular and classical music: you end up singing Ettore Petrolini’s ‘Tanto pe’ canta’ or Patty Pravo’s ‘Il Paradiso’ (with the adapted lyrics ‘you don’t realize that we die for you…’). Then suddenly you’ll be eulogizing a team to the tune of ‘Libiamo’ from Verdi’s La Traviata or ‘Va, Pensiero’ from Nabucco, then a protest song before sliding into some cartoon theme tune (usually ‘Popeye’).

  Ten minutes into the second half, right in front of us, there’s a cross from the left. One Cosenza attacker dummies to play the ball but lets it bounce between his legs, so it comes to Ettore Mendicino with his back to goal. He flicks it up with his right leg, turns and, as he’s falling backwards, volleys the ball into the net. We away supporters go berserk: hugging, screaming, jumping. It’s the first time anyone has really noticed what’s happening on the field. 0–1 to Cosenza. Vindov is shouting in my ear: ‘You can write whatever the fuck you want about us, but you have to write this: “Cosenza is beautiful and Vindov loves Cosenza.”’

  ‘Lupi, Lupi, Lupi,’ we scream, arms over each others’ shoulders, facing the grass now. ‘Wolves, wolves, wolves.’ No other goals are scored and it is, finally, Cosenza’s first victory of the season, the first time in more than half a century that the team has won here. The police herd the Cosenza ultras underneath the steps as the home crowd shuffles off. For an hour we’re kept there, singing and taunting.

  *

  In a world where political and religious adhesion was on the wane, the terraces gave rootless youths that enchanting sense of being able to call somewhere home. The ultras seemed to be looking for that vanishing grail of modern life: belonging. In Catania, for example, there is an ultra group called Estrema Appartenenza (‘Extreme belonging’). It’s a concept equally treasured by hooligans, at least as portrayed in film. At the conclusion of Alan Clarke’s film about violent English fans, The Firm, one character repeats ‘It’s about belonging’ three times.

  That sense of rootedness encouraged ultras to believe that they were the infantry of their borgo (‘hamlet’ or ‘borough’) or contrada (‘district’). In later decades, this aggressive adherence would become a blast against both modern football with its rootless stars and against the ‘whereverism’ of globalization. But in the 1970s, the folkloric use of flags and pennants had something playful about it. Very early on, the aim of the ultra performance was the defence of the group’s ensign or herald and the attempt to snatch the enemy’s one. It was not unlike the English Boy Scouts’ ‘wide game’, in which young lads raced round trying to capture the rivals’ flag. The greatest shame that could befall an ultra group was for its herald to fall into enemy hands. The unwritten code of ultra honour said that if a group’s herald was ever taken, it should immediately dissolve. That was why the object was, without exaggeration, considered sacred. Without it, that beloved sense of belonging could go up in smoke. The group would disintegrate or else lose face for breaking the unwritten rules. It was a symbol of continuity with the past, a representation of the colours of your city or suburb, and of your presence. It was often hung upside down if members of the group were in prison or banned from matches (a phenomenon so common now that most are displayed the wrong way up).

  They were bulky though – imagine 30 square metres of linen or plastic rolled up – and so on away trips there’s usually someone with a massive backpack, guarded by other foot soldiers. If you want to steal another group’s ensign, you looked out for their backpack. There might be many decoys, of course: other ultras carry holdalls full of booze, flares, megaphones, scarves and drums.

  The battle over the heralds was the central pretext for the violence of the movement. Even though only 0.3 per cent of Serie A and Serie B games in the 1970–71 season saw any violence, it was clear that fights were an integral part of being an ultra. The lexicon of the subculture was littered with phrases like spranghe (‘bars’), chiavi inglesi (‘English keys’ or ‘spanners’), bastoni (‘sticks’), agguato (‘ambush’), bombe carta (‘paper bombs’) and legnate (‘woodenings’, as it were, usually with a baseball bat). Doubtless, boasting about the fights meant that their size, danger and frequency were greatly exaggerated (one loses count of the number of times one hears that someone was so badly beaten up that ‘the suture cotton ran out’). And many first-generation ultras romanticize those early years as times of healthy fisticuffs, which they portray as part of a consensual scrap between teenagers, and nothing more.

  The ultras have always been very frank about the centrality of violence. It was part of the founding vision of this world. One of the stickers of the Ancona ultras said bluntly ‘La nostra vita è violenza’ (‘Our life is violence’). In Gianluca Marcon’s short documentary, E Noi Ve Lo Diciamo, Frank (from the Ultras Avellino) says that fighting ‘is part of my way of being… it’s an essential part of my being an ultra’. Michele, from the Vigilantes Vicenza, says something very similar, that fighting is ‘the element that closes the circle of being an ultra. It’s something that whoever is inside [the ultra world] wants to be there.’ Imagining an ultra without physical violence, some of them say, would be like cooking without salt. That tiny element informs and flavours everything.

  Bocia is the eccentric leader of the Atalanta ultras in Bergamo and he has no hypocrisy when it comes to discussing fights. ‘Violence is in the very essence of being an ultra,’ he once claimed in a newspaper interview. ‘Fighting is our drug, all ultras look for a fight. It’s something you have inside you, that increases as the game gets closer. When you have to make yourself respected in a city which isn’t yours… or else when the enemy arrives on an away game, and at 10 a.m. you’re already there, in the piazzale in front of the stadium… It’s a defence of your territory to make the enemy understand that here you’re in charge.’

  Often the language used about such events downplayed the violence and turned it into something softer or more slapstick: ‘a few buttons flew off the shirt’, and so on. There was a tradition in many grounds that the turnstiles would be opened for the last fifteen minutes of the match to allow those who couldn’t afford a ticket to come in. For the ultras, however, it was an excuse to leave the ground and go hunting for their rivals. It was what they ironically called the ‘passeggiata’ – the ‘stroll’.

  Many of the memoirs of those early years offer little more than descriptions of one battle after another. In Una Vita Da Molosso, Aniello Califano wrote ‘when we lost, whether it was against Livorno, Latina or whoever, when we went out there were slaps for everyone we met along the street… even though we were a small provincial city, no one was able to move in a mass as we were, whether it was for numbers or turbulence… All the Adriatic,’ he wrote, ‘was our blackboard.’

  Often, the fights are all ultras want to talk about. When you listen to them, they all sound fairly similar: the prelude was almost always a brief dance at distance, a chance to big up your group and to belittle the enemy. You circled and studied, shouting insults. The fear gave you an unbelievable energy and focus. Until at a certain point contact became inevitable – a leader shouted ‘carica’ (‘charge’) – and the distance disappeared. You picked out your man and saw nothing else, rushing towards each other like lost lovers.

  For ultras, those fights had an almost sacred quality. They talk about the sensual intensity of them, an absolute clarity to life all of a sudden. The greater the danger and fear, the greater the adrenalin rush which makes you feel somehow superhuman. For once in life, you’re absolutely present. All other places and time zones have been obliterated, and now – as the enemy howls back, arms raised, and rushes your brothers – you
have complete focus, a concentration which is merely instinctive. Compared to this, everything else was false or ephemeral. But you felt nothing. Not even the blows. You saw blood, you heard bodies being pounded, the crack of metal on skulls, but you fought through it, focussed only on defending your brothers and attacking theirs. Because suddenly you’re a pack animal once more, speedy and brutal. It was a buzz you could get nowhere else, and for many it became as addictive as the finest pharmaceutical, something to be sought at all costs and at all games.

  It’s possible to watch thousands of hours of footage online from those fights. Often filmed from the stadium stands, or from high-rise buildings, the ultra groups look like shoals of fish, moving as one body. The anonymity of the fighters – hooded, scarves over the face, just dots in the distance – is matched by the blue helmets of the police, like bubbles, which move into the midst of the shoal. There is a bizarre beauty to it, just as captivating as watching a murmuration of starlings: the group is suddenly dark and dense, then pulls apart, dispersing so much you can see individual dots before it quickly regroups.

  The ultras claimed to have an ethical code. Fights took place, so they said, only between ultras, not with ordinary ‘scarfers’ and run-of-the-mill fans. Numbers would be more or less even. No one ever reported anything to the police. There weren’t supposed to be blades or other weaponry. When someone asked for mercy, you were supposed to give it. Il Bocia fondly calls the code ‘genuino’, true or honest, and in some cases the fights were strangely stylized: one ultra from the 1980s says ‘the encounter was very beautiful and correct, like a nineteenth-century duel.’

  It’s a language echoed by many others who portray the fighting as something knightly. ‘… first comes the group,’ wrote one Brescia ultra, ‘the colours which represent the history of the city, of our territory and the traditions of our people… a medieval or chivalrous concept.’ He, like all ultras, felt that the fights were part of the values ‘which should represent the dignity of every man: loyalty, solidarity, confrontation, seriousness, humility, transparency, sincerity, territoriality and tradition.’

  There was rarely anything overtly political about the fights. If a notoriously left-wing curva came up against a right-wing one, it added a nice edge to proceedings but it was never the ignition. Yet it was inevitable that the regularity of these fights attracted those who were prone to violence, and the groups – needing as many fighters as they could find – actively sought to recruit through both charm and intimidation. Those who glimpsed something ‘spiritual’ in the fights were often from the same wing of extremist thought.

  If there was, as they said, a ‘code’, it was often broken. One ultra memoir remembers how an Opinel blade was a ubiquitous accessory: ‘all the lads of the group went around armed with knives, more than anything to cut hash, but also to have a psychological guarantee.’ That was in the 1980s but it’s the same today. Carrying a knife is the street version of a nuclear arsenal: a deterrent for the good guys in your crew. It was a grey area that many ultras bluntly acknowledge. As Massimo, from the Ultras Cremona, says, ‘there is a limit, but where is it written? You don’t get yourself killed to say “I’m honest”.’ Another ultra memoir talks incessantly of knifings without, eerily, any agency: ‘… in the struggle two Atalantini were reached by knives…’ The use of knives in fights was, he writes, ‘spreading like an oil slick’. The Inter ultras once even held up a banner saying, ‘In fights the only rule is that there are no rules.’

  Despite the rhetoric, then, it was rare for fights to be merely with fists. Many ultra memoirs give loving accounts of encounters with iron bars, rods, flagpoles and screwdrivers. Flagpoles and women were used to smuggle in weapons. One ultra calls the preparation of weapons before a fight ‘laying the table’. Maybe the songs were just taunts and boasts but they were also hymns to weaponry. ‘Hidden amongst my school books,’ one song went, ‘I’ll bring a pistol.’ By the mid-1970s, many ultra groups were already playing with flare pistols. The stab in the buttocks was common, and even those stabbings had a code: the backside was so far from the vital organs that in the unlikely event anyone was arrested for it, they would never be done for attempted murder. The fact that the stab was in the backside had the added advantage of suggesting that the rival was running away and thus a coward.

  Many older ultras are nostalgic for those old days in which the fights were even creative, like a violent version of upcycling in which anything to hand – coins, stones, pipes, bricks – could come in handy. At least in the retellings, there was a strange playfulness to the encounters, as if most didn’t want to take it too far. ‘He asked me if I could swim,’ remembers Beppe, ‘before chucking me off the bridge.’ On one occasion, the leader of Bologna’s Total Chaos group, il Giustiziere (‘the Executioner’) lost a tooth in a fight with Cosentini, and they all stopped to look for it. Another ultra recalls the early days in which rivals were humiliated rather than wounded by having dried cod placed in their clothes and mouths. Juventus ultras once placed manure on the Torino terrace, having gained access by bribing the stadium custodian with two chickens.

  Often it was more serious, however. In December 1973 a seventeen-year-old Neapolitan fan, Alfredo Della Corte, was celebrating his team’s away victory over Roma in what was called ‘the derby of the South’. He was waving a large flag and shouting ‘Forza Napoli’ at a Roma fan. The man pulled out a gun and shot him twice in the face. The bullets knocked out nine teeth and it was only his molars that saved Della Corte’s life. That same year, the fifteen-year-old capo-ultra of Roma’s Boys, Antonio Bongi, remembers the Torino ultras storming the curva ten minutes from the end of a game. Wearing motorbike helmets and armed with chains and baseball bats, they duly captured the Giuliano Taccola Primavalle banner. ‘That was the first time I had contact,’ says Bongi. ‘Until then I didn’t know football could be so violent.’ There was often, though, a strange graciousness to the ultras too. The Torino ultras knew that Giuliano Taccola was the Roma player who had died aged only twenty-five so they cut the painting of Taccola’s face from the captured banner and sent it to the Roma ultras via mutual acquaintances as a sign of respect.

  Everyone agreed that it was in the metaphysical furnace of a fight that a group truly became brothers. In Giuseppe Scandurra’s Tifo Estremo, twenty-five-year-old Minos says: ‘When you have beside you twenty or thirty people who, in that moment, you trust more than anything else in the world, you’re greatly united… It’s something which reinforces evermore the bonds which link you to the group and the people who are a part of it.’ The bonds forged in a mass brawl were profound. You saved each others’ lives, or else – tender as well as tough – you visited mates in prison or hospital. Perhaps it was attractive because, in an increasingly bloodless, relativist world, men finally felt like warriors again.

  That’s not how the ultras see it, though. Most are very weary of questions about violence. It’s all people ask about, they complain. ‘It’s just there,’ they say, ‘it’s what this life is.’ Often, they’ll offer a street version of that Brechtian line: ‘The rushing river they call violent, but no one calls the banks that channel it violent.’ In other words, we’re violent because society is restrictive, pressing in on all sides. Gruppo d’Azione, one of the best books on the ultras and concentrating on one gang from Spal, speculated that ‘violence was the only reply to give to personalities like Andreotti, Craxi [considered corrupt politicians] and all the putrescence that was flowering around’. It was a response to existential pessimism.

  Critics always said that the violence was pointless but that, say the participants, is precisely why it is so pure. As one of the characters in Nanni Balestrini’s sensational novella, I Furiosi, says: ‘Violence is beautiful because we have it in our blood and there’s beauty when you smash everything. It’s an exultant moment when you see the flames or the police running away or when the armoured vehicles arrive and you’re in the middle of a merry-go-round, when you hear falling glass, the smell of
tear-gas, the flames of the Molotovs, people who are running, the shouts… stadium violence is more of a drug than political violence because it doesn’t have any objective. It’s an end in itself.’

  Many couldn’t, of course, accept this meaninglessness and sought to understand what one ultra calls the ‘demented aggression’. Sociologists guessed that it reflected despair about unemployment, or that modern rootlessness was creating an exaggerated need to belong. Hannah Arendt, talking about violence in post-war society, believed that it was caused by the bureaucratization of modern life: ‘In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances.’ We never manage to face-off with those who appear to have power over us.

  But most ultras, like the hooligans, found such intellectual speculation faintly ridiculous. In the Alan Clarke film, The Firm, Bex’s crew are watching some pompous presenter attempt an analysis of the hooligan phenomenon. One of the lads cuts through the guff by turning to his mates and asking: ‘Why don’t he just tell ’em we like hitting people?’

  Anyone who has studied progressive radicalization, however, would notice that many of the ingredients for an escalation were present: a group of people often without hope or direction but finding profound meaning in each other had developed a concept of the sacred. The representation of that sacredness was to be defended at all costs if the affections and bonds of that group were to survive. Just as the footballers were representing the colours of the city, so too were these ultras. They had a sense of sacrificing themselves for the cause. And it wouldn’t be long before the blood of martyrs was creating a longing for revenge.