by Tobias Jones
In the 1970s there was no separation of opposing fans. Visiting ultra groups rolled up en masse to buy tickets and then huddle together in the same tribuna or curva as the home fans. There were no police escorts or stadium security. You could bring almost anything into the stadium and compliant club staff would often open up gates from one sector to another if the home fans wanted to impel ‘respect’ from the visitors.
By 1979, Cosenza’s Commando Ultrà Prima Linea had quite a following for home games at the San Vito Stadium. Lello and Piero gathered an unruly crowd that made incessant noise through the games. Any insult to the honour of Cosenza was punished. In March that year – in a match against Calabrian rivals, Vigor Lamezia – the visiting fans taunted the Cosentini with the chant ‘ripescati, ripescati’ (‘fished out, fished out’ – Cosenza was only in the division because it had been ‘fished’ from a lower league by a bureaucratic procedure). The Cosenza ultras charged, using their flagpoles and fists to persuade visiting fans to leave the stadium.
Despite the dangers, there was something magical about away games. Ciccio and Nunzio, just thirteen, found themselves in the company of tough, older men as if they were part of an army. Blokes they might have been scared of in Cosenza were now slapping them on the back and passing them a flask of wine or a joint. (Years later, one of the favourite songs of Ciccio’s group would start: ‘I was thirteen and was smoking weed…’)
It was the first time, apart from summers by the sea, that those young men had gone so far from home. Every other Sunday they would leave the city behind on long train journeys across the South and it made them feel like old-fashioned adventurers. All the arguments and personality clashes in the group were forgotten when you were singing and fighting side by side. Far from home and outnumbered, the brotherhood and the bonds just seemed to deepen. And every Sunday night, the dishevelled gang returned to Cosenza with black eyes, bruises, and stitches, as well as stolen food, scarves and sometimes wallets. Their stories would race round the city and more people would want to join the group.
That year, a film directed by Walter Hill called The Warriors was released. Adapted from Sol Yurick’s novel, itself based on Xenophon’s Anabasis, it was the story of a street-fighting gang crossing New York to get back to their own neighbourhood. It entranced Italian ultras. More than one group now called themselves ‘Warriors’. The Cosenza crew went to see it at the cinema again and again. Several tried to copy some of the looks, the slang and the insults. Ciccio was growing up fast and school seemed suddenly somewhere that just taught you – as The Clash song went – ‘how to be thick’. One night, Ciccio and Nunzio broke into their school, stole all the registers and burnt them. It didn’t take much to work out who was responsible and the two youngsters were expelled.
28 October 1979: Roma v. Lazio
As often happened in the curva, no one knew his real name. He was simply known as Lo Zigano – ‘the Gypsy’ – because of his rag-like clothes. He was eighteen and had been going to watch Rome at the Stadio Olimpico since he was eight.
Zigano was from one of those struggling Roman families eking out a living any way it could. His father was an unemployed welder who sometimes sold fruit in Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, where the family lived. Zigano had dropped out of school and was helping to support his family with odd-jobs as a waiter, mechanic and, sometimes, as a mugger.
Roma football team was the only thing that gave his life much meaning. ‘In whom or in what should a youngster of eighteen believe?’ he once asked. ‘What goal are adults holding up for the new generations? My ideal is Roma.’
One of his friends from Roma’s red-and-yellow terrace was Geppo, the long-haired poet who wrote songs for the ultras. A few months before, in March 1978, the two boys had stormed into the offices of a Roman newspaper, Il Messaggero, because they were angry at the depiction of the ultras. There, Geppo and Zigano explained what ultras were: ‘We’re the true fans… we give blows and we receive blows.’ The boys explained the escalation of hatred between Romanisti and Laziali. In a previous derby, the Laziali had unveiled a banner saying that the rival Roma ultras would ‘end up the same as Taccola’ (the player who had died aged twenty-five). The Romanisti replied with a banner hoping for ‘tens, hundreds, thousands’ of Re Cecconi (the Lazio player who had been shot dead in 1977). They revelled in that death with another banner: ‘Tabocchini [the jeweller who accidentally shot Re Cecconi] has taught us that killing a Laziale isn’t a crime.’ The Stadio Olimpico was the first stadium to have a players’ tunnel to protect them as they jogged onto the grass and, in October 1977, CCTV was introduced too.
Given all this, the atmosphere for the Roma–Lazio derby of October 1979 was tense. The walls of the capital were sprayed with death wishes for the opposing side. ‘It wasn’t just rhetoric,’ one aged ultra insists to me. ‘We really did want to read about our enemies being knifed or shot.’
The day before the game, Zigano bought three high-powered nautical flares in a shop in Piazza Emporio. They cost 15,000 lire each. He, Geppo and their mates smuggled them into the ground, along with an aluminium pipe to act as a launcher for the flares, inside a rolled-up banner. Tensions increased when the Laziali realized that the Romanisti had somehow broken into their lock-up in the stadium, taking all their flares. The Romanisti, in turn, were aggravated when the Laziali unveiled an insult to the Roman captain who was struggling to come back from injury: ‘Slobbering Rocca’, it said. ‘The dead don’t resuscitate’. Another banner said ‘red-yellow holocaust’.
At half-past one, Zigano loaded one of the naval flares into the tubing and let it off. It flew over the Curva Nord, where all the Laziali were gathered, and out of the stadium. Everyone around him applauded and cheered. It was one of best flares they had seen. Zigano loaded up another and let it off. This time it flew across the whole stadium, landing directly in the crowds on the Curva Nord.
Vincenzo Paparelli, a thirty-three-year-old mechanic, wasn’t even supposed to be there. The season ticket belonged to his brother but he had given it to Vincenzo for this big match. He was sitting there eating pumpkin and sunflower seeds with his wife, Vanda, and their two young children. Vanda suddenly heard a thud.
‘Did you hear that?’ she asked, turning to her husband. The flare was sticking out of his left eye and he was collapsing away from her. Instinctively she tried to pull it out, but burnt her hand. He slipped to the ground. People all around stood up, screaming for the emergency services, but Paparelli was already dead.
On the Curva Sud, the Romanisti didn’t even know what had happened. They saw some movement on the far curva but nothing more. Encouraged by the others, who were allegedly singing ‘Morirete tutti’ (‘You’re all going to die’), Zigano let off the third flare but it banana-ed this time and ended up on the empty athletics track around the pitch.
The Lazio fans – many in their hand-knitted blue-and-white beanies – took down their banners. A lot left the stadium to confront the Roma fans on the other side. Some screamed at Pino Wilson, the Anglo-Italian Lazio captain, that the game should be called off (it wasn’t). By then, even the Romanisti realized something had happened. Zigano heard the shouts of ‘assassins’ from the remaining Lazio fans and slipped out of the stadium, hoping not to be recognized.
He was on the run for the next fifteen months, moving between Bergamo, Milano, Brescia, Pescara and even Switzerland. He occasionally took trains but normally hitch-hiked and found odd jobs where he could. Zigano had been literally playing with fire without any real understanding of the consequences. Whilst on the run, he phoned Paparelli’s brother to express his horror at what had happened and saying that he would turn himself in. He was even interviewed in Switzerland by two journalists, telling them: ‘I’ve ruined my life with that junk… that tragic man has died but I’m a wretch too because I continue to live with this weight on my conscience.’ On 25 January 1981 he did hand himself in. He was tried, found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to seven years and eight months.
That match was the first real darkening of the ultra world. ‘Before that day,’ remembered Grit in his memoir, ‘it was a game, a fashion, a phenomenon of youth, whereas now for me and so many of my friends it wasn’t a game any more but a daily battle… everyone had the same hatred as me inside them.’
For years there continued to be cruel graffiti in the capital invoking the hope that there would be ‘ten, a hundred, a thousand Paparellis’, or else taunting the Laziali with memories of ‘flares in the face’. Well into the 1990s, Vincenzo Paparelli’s son Gabriele had a brush and bucket of paint in the boot of his car to cover up the taunts in case his mother saw them.
The Roma fans, meanwhile, were banned from using the CUCS banner, with its mention of ‘Commando’. Kettle drums and any mildly military paraphernalia were banned. Yet because of that, one of the most evocative songs of the ultra movement was born, now sung in almost every terrace in one form or another. It’s the same ‘Red River Valley’ adaptation that the Cosenza ultras sing. With its musical triplets and wistful hope that one day the flags will again fly and the drums return, it sounds like the rousing hymn of a revivalist awaiting the return of the Lord and the Promised Land. The tempo changes as the lines are repeated again and again, suddenly slowing right down so you relish every beat and become hypnotized into a kind of blissed-out reverie: ‘When to the sky the flags are lifted / the kettle drums will return to sound / only one shout will be raised, /Roma win again for the ultras.’
What was notable by now wasn’t the yearning diction but the way in which the word ‘ultra’ itself was creeping into the songs. Worship often slips from one idol to another and even before that first decade of the ultra movement was over, it was clear that they were beginning to sing not only about the team but about themselves. Their secular god of the shirt had been replaced by a god incarnated in the group itself (called demotheism). Like so many cultish movements in which the congregation replaces the numinous with something much closer to home – themselves and their own leader – so some ultras began to insist that their group, not the team, was now an entity that couldn’t be insulted, teased or touched.
Present Day, Cosenza
There are seven striscioni, each about eight metres long and made of blank wallpaper. We’re waterproofing them with Sellotape, running it across the width of the banner to protect them against rain. The tape is only five centimetres wide, which means a lot of runs to do eight metres, seven times.
All the crew are singing songs as they work, short bursts that last two or three seconds. Others join in and laugh. Then it goes silent until the next one begins. Mouse pulls the Sellotape so fast that it roars. He stabs his blade into one end to break it, paws it round the back of the banner and then pulls again, passing me the loose end.
It looks like he’s let himself go a bit. His beard is scratchy and his moustache is long. It makes him look the wrong side of rogue. He’s put on a paunch and his flies are broken. But he’s constantly shouting, arguing, joking, pretending to be furious.
Each person who turns up brings a few rolls of Sellotape. ‘All in order?’ they ask as they come in. They cock their heads to read the banners: ‘No to expensive tickets’ one says in huge, red-and-blue letters. Another pleads with the club president to offer cheaper tickets. In a way, it’s part of the ongoing battle with the tribuna. At the moment the curva costs 10 euros and the tribuna 12, so many families go for the calm, safe second option where you also see the game better. That means that the rival ultra group – Anni Ottanta – has an easier job packing the seats. Mouse wants to attract troops back to the ‘peoples’ option’ by getting prices dropped in the area behind the goal. The curva has, after all, always been the place of cheap standing – the only seating is flat concrete steps – and the greater the price difference with the tribuna, the more foot soldiers roll up in the curva.
It takes a long time to tape up eight metres. Once one banner is done, there’s another to get on with. People decide we need a break and we pile upstairs where’s there’s now a fridge illuminating the darkness. We pull out beers, throwing coins into the empty fag packet acting as a till. ‘It’s been a strange season,’ says SkinnyMon. ‘But we’re always here. That’s what counts.’
After the brief hope provided by that away victory at Reggio Calabria, things went downhill again for Cosenza. They lost to Monopoli and, worse, to Catanzaro. But in the January transfer window, Braglia, the new coach, did some smart business. He got a Nigerian on loan from Spezia, David Okereke, and bought an attacker from Ascoli, Leonardo Perez (who had a habit of celebrating goals by giving his fascist fans a Roman salute). The excitement and suspicion about these new signings is so great that anyone in the city with a foreign accent is thought to be another new player for the Wolves. ‘Ma voi,’ someone asks me, using the second person plural, ‘siete qui per giocà?’ (‘Are you here to play?’)
That winter Cosenza won five games in a row. A bald Frenchman called Baclet scored a double. The brilliant striker on loan from Napoli, Gennaro Tutino, also scored a few. There was something of a family feel to the club when it was winning. Kevin, the son of the late club legend, Gigi Marulla, was part of the staff, while the manager’s son, Thomas Braglia, had joined the squad.
The stadium is opened before lunch so we can hang out all the banners. Police and club officials watch on from afar: Cosenza Siamo Noi (‘We are Cosenza’, with the subtext that no one else is), Lo Sballo Continua (‘The buzz [or trip] continues’), Quote Rosa Cosenza (‘The Pink Quota’, a gathering of female ultras). The white paint is cracking off the cloth on a lot of them but that adds to the sense that this is a place that treasures tradition. As it says around the smiling face of Denis Bergamini, ‘Our Curva, Our History.’
We go to hunt for lunch but it’s Sunday and everywhere is closed. It takes half an hour of jovial shouting to decide that we’ll go to the supermarket. The check-out girl sees a crew of ultras and asks us all to hand in our bags since, she charmingly says, ‘there might be more of you’. Then they quickly decide to close, so we grab our bags and traipse out. Dozens of others are rolling up now but a disconsolate Mouse says wearily, ‘It’s closed, it’s closed.’ An argument starts about which idiot decided we should come here.
We drive around trying to find a bar foolish enough to take us in. The convoy goes on and on, laughing out of the windows at mates and old men. We end up in a pizzeria at three. By now everyone is hungry and only Egg is keeping the crew going, singing, shouting, banging. He breaks a glass and a few of the Sunday diners clear out pretty quickly once we get settled in.
We drink and eat and drink and sing. By the time we get back to the stadium, the winter sun is clipping the sandy hillock behind the empty north end. In a corner pen are eighty or so Aretusei, which is what erudite papers call the fans from Syracuse. Their section, from this far end, is a small triangle with blue-and-white flags. On the left is the tribuna, the Anni Ottanta and the ordinary fans, the rump of Cosenza’s support.
The game kicks off. Men chase a ball. We sing ‘Cosenza’ to the tune of ‘Volare’. Nothing happens on the pitch except that Half-a-Kilo is out there on the track, his green bib and camera showing his professional side. ‘Half-a-Kilo is one of us,’ the chant goes, telling everyone that the press photographer down there is an ultra too.
It’s rare for Italian pitches not to have an athletics track around the rectangle. For an English fan, it makes
the game seem distant. Maybe that distance from the action is a metaphor for the distance between Italians and their government. But those athletics tracks make you feel like you’re watching the game the wrong way through binoculars, and so in the end it’s more fun to watch Egg screaming in the winter dusk.
You’ll always meet someone you know in the curva and someone you don’t. You’ll usually know all the songs, although this Sunday there’s a different one. At one point, bored by a game that is drifting towards a dull nil–nil, we start singing ‘We are children of Telesio’. There, in one unexpected chant, is another aspect of the ultra world – just when it looks utterly thuggish, it’ll surprise you with its learnedness. Probably few of these ultras will have read the sixteenth-century philosopher but he is one of the sources of their pride in Cosenza. Their boast isn’t just that they’re tougher than the Sicilians from Syracuse, but more cultured. It reminds me of another chant from a few months ago, when Torino ultras sang at the managing director of Juventus not that he was a son-of-a-bitch, but that he was a son of Polyphemus, the one-eyed monster with giant sheep from the Odyssey. It’s hard to imagine English hooligans name-checking David Hume or Greek mythological figures in their insults.
Early 1980s, Cosenza
In the 1979–80 season, Cosenza won Serie C2. The football itself wasn’t exactly gripping. The Italian game back then was all about catenaccio, ‘chaining’ shut the defence. At one point, the team played out five nil–nils in a row (a result that the great sportswriter, Gianni Brera, once called the perfect game of football). But the promotion to Serie C1 meant that the club was now facing some serious teams, and its ultras were up against some major-league ultras from Reggina, Salernitana, Nocerina and the rest. ‘We definitely never went anywhere to break anyone’s balls,’ remembers Ciccio. ‘But we weren’t non-violent. If we had to defend ourselves, we did, and pretty well too.’
