Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  The stadium is only a fifth full. Livorno was in Serie A only a few years ago but is now bouncing along, with Cosenza, at the bottom of B. The cherry-and-yellow seats aren’t shiny but aged, with grass and moss growing out of the holes in their middles.

  Behind our terrace, through the railings and the maritime pines, you can see the distant oil-tankers static on the sea. On the far side of the Livorno terrace are the butterscotch high-rises. The Livornesi have a banner celebrating their lowly rank. ‘Ultimi si’, it says (‘yes, last’), which could be taken as both the team being bottom or the ultras being dispossessed, ‘but with honour and dignity’.

  Livorno ultras are known for being the most ideologically left-wing of all their peers. Unlike the anarchic, egalitarian autonomists of Cosenza, the Livornesi have often been proudly Leninist or Stalinist, creating a yellow hammer-and-sickle choreography or even replacing the Italian tricolour (on a ferry to Palermo, much to the captain’s annoyance) with the Soviet flag. The group that cemented this reputation was BAL, the ‘Autonomous Livorno Brigades’, active from 1999 until the 2003–04 season. For years the portraits of Che, Castro, Stalin and Lenin fluttered in the Tuscan wind.

  A neat game is going on. Boozy Suzy and I are queuing for another beer in the middle of the first half, albeit still singing along. Claudio is here. Despite his stadium ban, Chill is suddenly among us, being complimented on his camouflage. The singing is repetitive and hypnotic, with One-Track banging out the rhythm on the drum: ‘For the love of the shirt, Come on Cosenza, score a goal’.

  But they don’t. Livorno nudge one in from a corner. Tutino, the Cosenza striker, is sent off. Livorno score a penalty. 2–0. There are groans but you sing through it. If anything, it’s more raucous now, as the only way to rescue the afternoon is to make it into a memorable party. We stay for an hour after the end singing, ‘We’re not leaving here’ to the tune of the chorus from Bobby McFerrin’s ‘Don’t worry be happy’, until the police are almost begging us to move on. Another Sunday afternoon has slipped by and Cosenza are being sucked back into the relegation zone.

  2017–18, Fermo

  They’re selling scarves saying ‘Amedeo is with us’ under the steps of the terraces. One old man mutters something to the lad behind the rickety counter. The lad doesn’t like whatever he’s said and tells him to fuck off, bouncing his fingertips up and down at waist height. A ‘Free Amedeo’ sticker has been pasted up, crooked, next to the fire hydrant. They think he’s a victim of a repressive state. There’s a concrete bog in the corner of the stadium. Inside is the usual graffiti: ‘Live aflame but never getting burnt.’ There are slap-dash Celtic crosses, a symbol not of piety but of anabolic right-wingery.

  The game is one of those harum-scarum matches between top (Fermana) and fourth (Vis Pesaro). It’s an end of season derby with all to play for. The midfielders spend plenty of time clutching shins or backs as they crash to the ground with a shout. The ball is moved side to side pretty neatly until the Fermana left-back slices it into the stands again.

  Fermo is a small city of thirty-five thousand souls clinging to the summit of the Girfalco hill (the place of ‘circling falcons’). The city’s name has an implication of stubbornness. It comes as recognition of the place’s reliability as an ally of the Roman Empire during the Second Punic War: ‘Firmum Firmae fidei romanorum colonia’ – ‘Fermo, Roman Colony of Firm Faith’. In the middle ages they used to say around here that ‘Quando Fermo vuol fermare, tutta la Marca fa tremare’ (‘When Fermo wants to be intransigent, all of the Marche region trembles’). The town’s name simply means ‘stop’.

  That solidity mixes with an exquisite civility. At sunset the Piazza del Popolo has groups of old men talking football and politics. Couples sit in bars with tall glasses of neon-orange or blood-red aperitivi. Toddlers race around in front of the Palazzo dei Priori, giggling as they chase each other. The mayor is a fanatic follower of Fermana football club. He’s worked as the defence lawyer to the ultras and now walks around the bars chatting amiably with anyone who calls him over. In one bar, he quietly pays for peoples’ drinks. ‘Ha pagato il sindaco’ is the shout from the barman half an hour later. ‘The mayor has paid.’

  To the northwest of the Girfalco, on the next-door hillock called the Colle Vissiano, is a seminary. It mixes Soviet-like architecture with twentieth-century Italianate materials of light ochre bricks and reinforced concrete, rising above the grey-green olive groves and cypresses like a hospital or prison. Its size is a reminder of decades past, when a common career choice for thousands of Italian boys was to become a priest. But by 2014 this place was almost empty. A few priests were hanging on, waiting for a religious revival that never came.

  But it all changed in April that year. There was one priest who was always filling beds. Don Vinicio had spent much of his life creating his Comunità di Capodarco and its satellite communities. The first one was on little hillock a couple of kilometres east of the seminary towards the sea. All the other subsequent communities had borrowed the name of that first group: Capodarco. Decades of working with the lesser-abled, with the addicted and those recently released from hospital or prison had made Don Vinicio both weary and commanding. He was always approachable and informal but no word was wasted. ‘Has this been done?’ ‘What’s happening about that?’ He took the calls and called the shots.

  In April 2014 Don Vinicio was sitting in his grand, high-ceilinged office in that original community. Surrounded by religious figures, cartoons, footballs, files, fossils and rocks, he was chain-smoking straw-thin cigarettes under a rectangle of light. His secretary came to the door and told him that the Bishop was on the phone.

  The Bishop explained to the priest that the Prefect had a problem. The Ministry of the Interior had decided that Le Marche had to offer shelter to fifty asylum-seekers. It was a tricky wicket for any astute politician. If you were too hospitable in this time of crisis, you would lose your electoral base. But if you appeared uncooperative with the Ministry of the Interior, your superiors might go sour on you and your career. So, the Prefect knew he had to go with the flow but he needed an ally on the ground who could accommodate the asylum seekers. The Prefect had turned to the Bishop who had turned to his old ally, Don Vinicio.

  According to legend, Don Vinicio said the seminary was the place. He got to work and two days later, he had beds ready for fifty souls. The seminary became an asylum, suddenly filled with those who had braved the deserts of North Africa and the waters of the Mediterranean to reach Europe. Over the following months the rooms of the building were painted in bright colours: pastel greens, pinks, oranges and yellows. Don Vinicio appointed a nun who was tough but gentle. Suor Rita was in her thirties, a tall woman who was part of a new order of nuns called the ‘Little Sisters of the Visitation’, founded in 2008 and inspired by the radicalism of a French priest murdered in Algeria, Charles de Foucauld.

  Over the next two years, Suor Rita and Don Vinicio learnt about human trafficking and its consequences. When migrants arrived on Italian soil, they had nothing – no documents, no money, no self-esteem. All they had was their story, full of suffering and, sometimes, bullshit. Suor Rita and Don Vinicio became expert at spotting the bull. But many didn’t need to embellish anything. They had thought home was hell until they tried to leave it and things only got worse. There were few who hadn’t witnessed first-hand rapes, robberies and even murders. If they were tetchy and needy when they rolled up on the elegant streets of Le Marche, it wasn’t surprising.

  The walls of Suor Rita’s office became covered with mugshots of asylum seekers: large, A4 prints of dark faces. She only had a few staff working with her and was overwhelmed by the documents she had to deal with. Just feeding fifty people was hard but over the years, the numbers grew to over one hundred. The rules began to take shape: no alcohol, no drugs, a midnight curfew and so on. The operation was constantly getting bigger, with more people being referred each month. Quite often, the young men would get voluntary work, endearing them
selves to locals and making friends. If all went well, some would be offered an apprenticeship. Other times, they would cause problems – rioting, throwing food, getting aggressive – and were quickly removed. Suor Rita, on appearances such a simple woman, had steel in her spine.

  Until late 2015 the asylum seekers had only been men. But then, in September that year, a couple arrived. Nobody knew quite how long Emmanuel and Chinyeri had been together. The story went that their house in Nigeria had been burnt by Boko Haram, killing Chinyeri’s parents and the couple’s daughter. She said she had suffered a miscarriage on the journey through Libya. The two of them lived as common-law man and wife in the seminary. Emmanuel was tall with a boy-next-door face, serious but smiley at the same time. Chinyeri was tougher than him, more astute, even though, at twenty-four, she was twelve years younger. She was the only woman allowed to live amongst what were now 126 male asylum seekers at the seminary. Don Vinicio married them on 6 January 2016 in San Marco alle Paludi. It was an elegant ceremony, a charming mixture of Italian style and African exuberance: flowers, high-heels, drums and dancing.

  But not everyone in Fermo was so accommodating. There was a man called Amedeo who was notorious for throwing peanuts on the cobbles outside the bar where he drank when the asylum seekers walked past. ‘You hungry, monkey?’ he would taunt as they walked on. Amedeo Mancini had a long criminal record for firearms offences, public affray and violence within the stadium, usually involving stone throwing. Over the years, he had received three Daspos.

  Worse than the peanuts chucked on the floor were the bombs placed outside various churches throughout the spring of 2016. They were rudimentary but still dangerous. There were explosions outside the Duomo, the city’s Cathedral, and outside the San Tommaso church in the Lido Tre Archi suburb. The entrance to San Marco alle Paludi had been badly damaged when a bomb exploded there on the night of 12–13 April. It was thought that the target was Don Vinicio, by now notorious for his work with migrants. In May an unexploded bomb was found outside San Gabriele dell’Addolorata.

  On Tuesday, 5 July 2016 there was a queue of immigrants waiting for the bus to the coast and the nearest railway station. The bus stop was at a semi-circle promenade by the side of the hair-pin bend in Via Veneto. It’s a stunning spot. The whole range of the Sibylline mountains are in front of you, their peaks covered with snow that looks impossible in the heat. There’s an angled map to help you identify which summit is which: Monte Vettore, Cima del Redentore and, of course, Monte Sibilla. Chinyeri had stopped to drink at a water fountain and her husband, Emmanuel, was looking at his reflection in the black window of a parked car.

  As Chinyeri straightened up, two men were walking towards her. She recognized one of them – that good-looking tough who hung out in the bar halfway between here and the seminary. He used to chuck peanuts at her. He was wearing a T-shirt of the far-right rock band ZZA, fronted by the CasaPound leader Gianluca Iannone. ‘Until the end’ it said.

  ‘Monkey,’ said Amedeo.

  ‘Who’s a monkey?’ Chinyeri asked, incensed.

  Then he walked over towards Emmanuel. ‘Why are you looking in the car? What the fuck are you doing, you black shit? You trying to steal our cars as well?’

  By now Chinyeri was shouting ‘Racist, racist.’

  Amedeo Mancini’s friend tried to diffuse the situation. ‘Amadé,’ he said. ‘Leave it, she’s a woman. Don’t react.’

  The eye-witness accounts of what happened next are conflicting. Some said that Emmanuel, angry at the abuse his wife was receiving, picked up a metal traffic sign – one of those temporary notices held in place by sand bags – and hit Amedeo Mancini with it, knocking him to the ground. Others say he wasn’t aggressive in any way.

  It seemed like the confrontation was over. Two traffic wardens, and others who had seen the scuffle, began to walk away. But Mancini was a trained boxer and didn’t like to retreat. He had been insulted by someone he considered his inferior and he was steaming. He walked over to Emmanuel and punched him hard. The Nigerian fell to the ground, hitting his head on the pavement. Mancini then waded in with kicks and punches.

  ‘Look how well I caught him,’ Mancini said in the local dialect. ‘Lo sò allungato.’ – ‘I’ve laid him out.’

  Emmanuel never regained consciousness. He had the appearance of someone who had been in a high-speed car crash. He had cranial fractures, his lips were so swollen that they looked like a bike’s inner tube, his jaw, ribs, legs and arms were purple.

  Suor Rita’s main concern was reprisals from her boys. The atmosphere in the seminary was tense. Everyone was talking about what had happened and quite a few thought it was time to take matters into their own hands. There were so many journalists around that Suor Rita eventually had to evict them all.

  Don Vinicio was incensed. Emmanuel was being demonized as if he were at fault. There was an attempt to create an equivalence between the two men, and Don Vinicio didn’t buy it. Emmanuel had been battered like a rug in a spring clean and Mancini didn’t have a scratch. For a priest in the provinces, Don Vinicio was well connected in Rome. He knew many of the famous names in the Italian media – Enrico Mentana at La 7 TV station, Carlo Rosella at Channel 5 – and he called them all, telling them he was going to hold a press conference.

  The day after the attack, whilst Emmanuel was still in a coma, Don Vinicio sat at a small desk, flanked by Suor Rita and a lawyer representing the Nigerian couple, and shot from the hip. ‘I don’t want this to be passed off as a black peoples’ brawl. There’s been a gratuitous provocation from some ultras, and I believe the thing can be linked with the bombs.’ They were part of the same ‘climate’ he said: ‘A container of magma formed of violence, aggression, frustration and exhibitionism.’ The people responsible weren’t organized, he said, but formed of ‘mad splinters able to coagulate if needed’.

  He went even further, accusing the city itself of indulging the activities of its local thugs: ‘There’s a cover-up which isn’t explicit but treacherous. I call it cowardly.’ He finished the press conference by expressing the hope that none of the nineteen Nigerians in the seminary would take revenge. ‘Hatred brings only hatred,’ he said. Shortly after the press conference, at half-past-three the day following the attack, Emmanuel was declared dead.

  A week after the killing, on 13 July 2016, the Curva Duomo ultras wrote on their Facebook page: ‘We want to applaud all the lads from the curva, especially the youngest ones, for the way in which they have managed the media pillory of recent days. From this story we will emerge with heads held high: Stronger! More mature! More united!… This is what being an ultra is about: not abandoning a friend in difficulty.’ In another post on 7 August 2016, addressed to Amedeo Mancini and entitled ‘Un mese senza di te’ (‘A month without you’), they wrote: ‘We feel your absence. In the paths of the centre, and especially Sunday in the curva, there on those steps where we have grown up together… you have always been and always will be the soul of Curva Duomo.’ As often happens, the rhetoric of the ultras eerily echoed religious phraseology. Instead of ‘God be with us, the new chant at the stadium quickly became ‘Amedeo Con Noi!’ – ‘Amedeo is with us!’ Later, the ultras set up a bank account to pay for Mancini’s legal expenses.

  Mancini was released under house arrest in October. Although he always denied any racial motivation to the attack, he subsequently plea-bargained, admitting ‘involuntary murder aggravated by racial hatred’. To many, the sentence handed down on 18 January 2017 was ludicrous: four years of house arrest with permission to go out for work during the day. He was freed from even that light sentence in May 2017 when his house arrest was lifted for good behaviour. Less than a year after the murder, the only obligation on Mancini was to sign in once a day at the local Carabinieri station. Meanwhile, Don Vinicio was still trying to raise the 5,000 euros necessary to repatriate the body of Emmanuel back to Nigeria. A tip-off from a young woman led police to identify two other Fermana fans as the authors of the rudimentary bo
mbs outside churches. Emmanuel’s widow, Chinyeri, was in hiding.

  But at the stadium, if you’re on the look-out for racism, you don’t see it. There’s a black girl with her man at the centre of the curva, watching the game. Plenty of mixed-race kids in their teens are clapping along to the constant ‘Amedeo is with us’ chant. In this imitative world, you often follow a lead without understanding its meaning. You’re absorbed into something greater than yourself, which is part of both the enchantment and the risk. The bliss of being bound together means that, sometimes, you’re also blinded.

  Ten minutes from the end, Edoardo Ferrante – a ginger-bearded central defender – bangs in a goal with his forehead right in front of the ultras. They sprint to the glass wall separating them from what is now a player pile-on on the other side. ‘You’re shit,’ they sing to the Pesaresi, ‘and you’ll always be shit.’

  The next quarter of an hour is bliss. The sun has come out and you can see the Adriatic, reminding you it’s almost summer again. Fermana seem certain to go up into Serie C and the whole repertoire of songs are yodelled. It’s as if the hope of promotion is lifting the whole city. On the way out, Paolo the mayor, just rolling up from a funeral, says hello. ‘As you see,’ he says, ‘it’s a tranquil place.’

  *

  Nobody knows why but, out of the blue, in 2016 the leadership of Lazio’s Irriducibili suddenly decided they liked the club’s owner, Claudio Lotito. The cynics suggested that some sort of deal must have been struck between the two sides. Some of the Irriducibili were so outraged by this volte-face that they left the group. Despite his house-arrest, Diabolik issued a communiqué in January 2016 inviting all Lazio fans to an open-air reunion. He lamented the ‘sad moment’ on the terraces and urged: ‘Come on, my friends and fans. Today is the moment to reunite, to see each other again, to go to away games together like the old days… all fans, let’s close ranks. It’s time to march!’