Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  Most ultra communiqués are issued solely in the name of the group. There are no names. But this was highly personalized. The word ‘Irriducibile’ was singularized. It was signed by that playfully devilish moniker, Diabolik. And there was a subtle edge to it, hinting at what might happen when his house arrest was over: ‘I swear I feel like a lion in a cage… and more than that, hungry. Sooner or later this will end, and my place will return to being the same as it always has been – amongst you, amongst my people, my group, my terrace.’ It sounded strangely like the threatening growls of an ageing dictator who suspected a coup.

  Within a year, his group had retaken control, hanging their banner in the centre of the Curva Nord once more. Almost immediately, the grim, familiar stunts returned. Three mannequins, dressed in Roma shirts, were hanged in the city centre, with a message: ‘No offence, just advice: sleep with the light on.’ At one training session prior to a derby, the ultras screamed at the mute, almost scared players: ‘This is more than a battle for us, this is ethnic warfare.’

  In 2017 the Irriducibili distributed style guides for Lazio fans. With two fans side-by-side – one from Lazio, the other a generic alternative – orders were given about how to dress: the baseball cap had to face forwards, the only sunglasses allowed were Ray-Ban and Persol, shoes had to be New Balance or Clarks. There was even advice about the height of the crotch on trousers. It expressed disdain for the long-haired types from ‘Brescia and Bergamo’ and the ‘gypsies’ from Pescara. There was nothing ironic or tongue-in-cheek about the orders. This was an attempt at sartorial despotism expressed in mangled prose.

  The flier eloquently expressed the essence of the Irriducibili: the arrogance of imposing on thousands of people how they should dress, the fogeyish dismay at some imagined cultural decline, the idea that there was a rigid hierarchy in which the front row was for the bosses, and the back rows for the slobs. Instead of the exuberant rebellion of the ultras from decades before – a rebellion implying the rejection of Italian sartorial homogeneity – the Irriducibili were now demanding conformity. It twisted the famous ultra mentality into mannerism, and there was, as always with the Irriducibili, a crude capitalistic agenda. If tens of thousands of Lazio fans assumed a uniform, those who controlled the merchandising could make a lot more money.

  In July 2017, shortly after taking repossession of the terraces, the group released another communiqué: ‘We want to clarify the following: for some months the little group, Lazio Hit Firm, has not existed. It won’t exhibit either flags or banners any more. To the lads of the terraces, and to the youngsters who will come, we remind and clarify that in our Curva Nord the line to follow is, and remains, that of the sole group…’ Not for the first time, the totalitarian tendencies of the gang were evident: no opposition or rival would be tolerated.

  A few months later, in October, Lazio fans put up stickers of Anne Frank wearing a Roma shirt in the Curva Sud of the Stadio Olimpico. It was a reiteration of the old, tasteless joke that your rival was Jewish and destined to die young. The same had been going on for years. Back in April 2001 a Lazio banner had taunted Roma fans with the line: ‘Team of niggers, terraces of Jews.’

  To redress the antisemitism, the Italian footballing authorities decided that passages of Anne Frank’s diary should be read at all grounds, followed by a minute’s silence, the next weekend. Maybe it was laudable in its intentions but in reality, it was surreal, with stadiums becoming like schoolrooms for those in detention and needing re-education. No ultra likes to be lectured, especially by the footballing powers, and Juventus ultras turned their backs and sang the Italian national anthem. Whilst the Lazio players wore white T-shirts with the familiar face of Frank and ‘No to antisemitism’ written below, its ultras – in the Bologna stadium, the Dall’Ara – chanted that old Mussolini slogan ‘Me ne frego’ (‘I don’t give a shit’). Ascoli’s ultras deliberately only entered the ground after the minute’s silence, issuing a statement that said: ‘We don’t want to be complicit in a media and institutional theatre which forgets earthquake victims and our elderly but which is always ready to exploit ten stickers.’

  The minute’s silence, often used at the beginning of matches, was always an open goal for ultras. In October 2013, after an estimated 368 refugees had drowned near Lampedusa, stadiums were again asked to observe a silent sixty seconds. During the silence, the Juventus ultras sung the national anthem, while Lazio’s chanted ‘Forza Lazio olé’. The Lazio ultras’ opinions on immigration were very clear. Another of their banners read ‘To the ultras stadium bans and prison, to immigrants safe spaces to deal drugs and rape. This is your Europe.’

  Any kind of commemoration was becoming an excuse for ultras to parade their politics. When, in November 2017, the ninety-eight-year-old Dante Unti, a Tuscan survivor of the Holocaust, was presented with a pennant of the local team, Lucchese, on the pitch prior to a local derby, the notoriously far-right ultras avoided the occasion. At the end-of-season party for the Curva Sud of Hellas Verona in the summer of 2017, Luca Castellini (a Forza Nuova bigwig) was on the microphone: ‘Who allowed this party, who paid for everything, who was the guarantor? He has a name: Adolf Hitler.’ It would be easier to dismiss his words as the rantings of a lunatic if the crowd hadn’t started laughing and cheering, breaking into that old rhyming song that Hellas Verona was a ‘squadra fantastica’ made with the ‘swastika’.

  Now that the Irriducibili had retaken the terraces, they imposed their ideology. Another flier, left on seats all over the Curva Nord in August 2018, banned women from the front ten rows. ‘The “North” represents, for us,’ the flier said, ‘a sacred place, an environment with a non-written code to be respected. We have always lived in the front rows as if they were trenches. Within them, women, wives and girlfriends are not admitted, so we invite them to position themselves from the tenth row back.’

  As yet another media storm engulfed the terrace Talibans, the Irriducibili replied by issuing a prolix communiqué that seemed almost deranged. It railed against ‘drunk, unsteady’ women who lost sight of their children for the sake of a selfie, against ‘freaked out feminism’, against ‘paedophilia’ and ‘short-sighted ideology’. But amidst the meandering nonsense, there was a very sober threat. The group warned Lazio’s PR spokesman (who had attempted to distance the club from the group’s men-only imposition) not to ‘separate himself from lads who might also be friends with his own daughter’.

  Other ultra groups backed up the Irriducibili. The Siracusa terraces boasted, without irony, that ‘there’s no sexism or discrimination towards women who occupy the back rows’, because those women had been brought up ‘with order and discipline’. The group’s female section, Le Aretusee, promptly disbanded in protest. ‘We distance ourselves from this way of thinking,’ they announced.

  The expulsion of women from the front rows was symbolic of the Irriducibili’s territorial occupation. For a group that had staked out their drug-dealing turf in the Italian capital, taking control of the curva was simple. But many fans, even plenty of ultras, were dismayed by that occupation. Groups like We Love Lazio bravely denounced the idiocy of the Irriducibili. ‘There’s no possible justification for the repeated debasement,’ they wrote after the Anne Frank stickers had appeared. ‘It’s not a prank, it’s human misery.’ There’s a ‘Lazio and Anti-fascist’ organization, which battles against the stereotypes of the ‘Lazi-fascist’ label.

  A few months later, I met one of Diabolik’s lieutenants at a Lazio game at the Stadio Olimpico. An enormous, muscular man in his mid-forties, Franchino isn’t the sort of person you can just walk up to. You have to work your way through his entourage of heavies, filters, fixers and friends. When you eventually get to him, you’re granted a few minutes as if it’s an audience with a feudal lord. I asked him if there wasn’t a huge amount of arrogance in this group. He smiled coldly and shook his head. ‘It’s very unlikely that a Lazio fan would dare to raise their voice… who is arrogant will be automatically marginali
zed because we are very hierarchical and very militarized.’ He was unwittingly confirming arrogance by saying it was unthinkable: it didn’t exist because everyone knew their place.

  *

  What was once inconceivable outside the terraces was now becoming normal. Twenty bronze cobbles commemorating victims of the Holocaust in Rome were ripped up and stolen. The sign for the Anne Frank school in Pesaro was spray-painted with a swastika and the ‘dogs forbidden’ sign was changed to ‘Jews’. Skinheads from a neo-Nazi organization called Veneto Fronte Skinhead, all wearing black bomber jackets, interrupted a meeting of the Como Without Borders association, accusing the volunteers of plotting the substitution of the European peoples by helping immigrants. One of those skinheads was a Piacenza ultra who had previously served six years for knifing two people in 2009. A beach resort in Chioggia was revealed to be a fascist theme park, a self-styled ‘anti-democratic zone’ with Mussolini memorabilia on sale and ‘no entrance’ signs replaced by ‘gas chamber’ ones.

  Each instance was, in some respects, only a minor news story but the constancy with which these things happened persuaded Il Tempo newspaper to call Benito Mussolini its ‘person of the year’ for 2017. It wasn’t being facetious but factual, because the Duce barged into the news agenda every week. What was noticeable was that it wasn’t just a few rogues who were nostalgic about the ventennio, but often those with institutional positions. A neo-Nazi flag was hung up in a Carabinieri barracks in Florence. A teacher in Rivarossa boasted about being fascist. Another teacher, from a secondary school in Massa Carrara, published a photograph of himself waving an RSI flag (from Mussolini’s Repubblica di Salò) on top of the Monte Sagra in the Apennines.

  Every political party on the right always defended the nostalgics. The alarmist left, they said, was deliberately creating a spauracchio, a ‘bogeyman’ because – other than anti-fascism – the left had no ideology left. It was honourable, they said, that neo-fascists from CasaPound and Lealtà Azione were marching to the Campo X, in Milan’s cemetery, to remember the fallen from the RSI. The organization of a pilgrimage to Predappio by Lazio ultras (€50 a head) was no longer even news.

  The shooting of black bystanders in Macerata by Luca Traini was an almost inevitable result of this atmosphere of hatred. Traini was a troubled man: his father had abandoned the family when he was young and he had been brought up by his grandmother. He had been excluded from a local gym because he used to give a Roman salute on entering. He was nicknamed Wolf because he had the ‘Wolfsangel’ rune (a symbol used by both the SS and Italy’s ‘Third Position’) on his forehead. Despite that evident signalling of extremism, he was on the fringes of Lega politics, having met Matteo Salvini once at Corridonia. On 3 February 2018 he took his Glock pistol to his Alfa Romeo 147 and drove around town shooting at migrants. He hit six blacks before going to a war memorial and, draped in an Italian flag, gave a Roman salute.

  The aftermath of that shooting showed that mainstream politicians on the right blamed immigration, not Traini: Berlusconi spoke of a ‘social bomb’ created by foreigners. Italy, he said, needed to repatriate 600,000 illegal immigrants. In an atmosphere that felt akin to the American Deep South in the early 1960s, Establishment politicians blamed the victims: Matteo Salvini said that ‘it’s clear and evident that an immigration which is out of control… leads to social conflict’.

  Traini’s legal fees were paid by Forza Nuova and the Lazio ultras hung a banner at Ponte Milvio saying ‘Honour to Luca Traini’. Those two worlds were, by now, one and the same. A parliamentary report, published before the shootings in December 2017, had said that ‘the presence of ultras in all the recent cases of political demonstrations by the far right creates concern’. On 24th April 2019 the Irriducibili paraded in Milan, doing Roman salutes, behind a banner which read: ‘Honour to Benito Mussolini’. When a handmade bomb exploded days later outside the Irriducibili’s HQ in Rome, Diabolik said: ‘If they want the terrorism of the 1970s to come back we’re ready. In fact, I can’t wait. Of course we’re fascists, we don’t renounce anything.’

  Perhaps the key question regarding the ultras is how far there is an overlap not just with political extremism, but with organized crime. Daniele Segre, the documentary-maker who made the Stadium Kids documentary in the 1970s, said in an interview in 2007: ‘I’ve followed them over the years, and many of them have become criminal labourers… There was [in the 1970s] a large entanglement between organized crime and the extreme fringe of fandom.’

  In many ways, that entanglement happened because both sides were doing something very similar. The ultras had always been about the territory, and that devotion to the streets obviously brought them into contact with mafiosi whose power is based on territorial control. A 2017 report from the parliamentary anti-Mafia commission studied this ‘infiltration, or better contamination, of organized fans by organized, Mafia criminals’ and, not surprisingly, found many examples. Particular fan groups had become the public representatives, the boots on the ground, of specific clans. They were used to exert influence on both players and presidents: to throw games, to provide more tickets, to disrupt matches and so on. But perhaps those ultra groups’ most important service to the mafiosi was simply persuasion. The fear ultra groups could instil in the public was a crowd-controller for Mafia families, a ground-level intimidation that could escalate if someone was messing with your business. One police chief interviewed by the commission spoke of the Mafia seeing the terraces as ‘an opportunity to increase not only the field of illicit dealing and the recycling of dirty capital, but also to insinuate itself in a creeping and pervasive way into the social fabric’. It was as if certain ultra groups were being turned into a public relations operation for criminal clans.

  But perhaps the true overlap between ultras and organized crime is a way of being. Ultras protest continually and since there’s plenty to protest about, many groups bravely bear witness to injustices. But ultra protests throughout the peninsula are often intimidating. They can be manipulated. The show of muscle sometimes replicates criminal threats. Even Osvaldo Pieroni, who wrote – without condescension – about the Cosenza ultras’ ‘simplicity of spirit’, also noticed that some would ‘point their fingers with an air of the mafioso.’ There’s no generous mellowness to being an ultra. Even someone who loves the football and the insider-status it offers, who relishes the partying and singing, who can even understand that men like fighting, struggles with the sheer arrogance of this world. When you’ve seen enraged men screaming at everyone around them (demanding a player’s shirt which has been caught by a kid, punching a fan who is singing their own song, pushing a woman down the stairs because she has the wrong tattoo), you tire of it all. There’s just too much straffottenza (‘attitude’ or ‘arrogance’).

  Present Day: Another Game

  It’s mid-winter, mid-week, and a 2,000-kilometre round trip to watch a cup game that is nothing more than tidy and perfunctory.

  We haven’t come for the football though. Antò died yesterday and this is our way of showing this Northern town that we remember our own. ‘Antò è qua, e canta con gli ultra’ – ‘Antò is here and is singing with the ultras.’

  In Italian the ‘here’ (‘qua’) rhymes with ‘ultrà’ but the rhyme isn’t the only reason we’re chanting the word again and again. The hypnotic repetition of ‘qua’ and ‘ultrà’ reminds you of where, and who, you are. You are here, and you are ultra, so you’re present but you’re also beyond. All the old paradoxes flood back through that simple chant: an individual’s name is only chanted when they’re not with us. And, Left-Behind says, Antò is far more important that those ‘shits’ – he chins towards the players in the gleaming away kit – who are borrowing our shirt for a season or two.

  We unfurl a banner 2 metres high and 6 wide. It just says ‘Antò’. Someone lights a red flare beneath it, which smokes hard in our faces as we’re chanting: ‘Antò is here and is singing with the ultras.’

  The banner catches lig
ht and two firemen rush towards us. We close ranks around it and stamp out the flames. The firemen back off. Any pyrotechnics are banned from stadiums but you have to smuggle in something when there’s a death, because the colours have to smoke up into the dark December skies like a funereal pyre.

  That insistence on the presence of the departed chimes well with everyone. Because the absences aren’t just due to death, but because of all the Daspos too. ‘The mistrusted are always present’, we chant occasionally, clapping our frozen hands. It reinforces the idea that there’s honour in being distrusted, that you’ll be remembered the more mistrusted, or dead, you are. You get the feeling that any scorn that comes our way is uplifting. Because we’re here and we reckon we’re sticking it to the authorities by being here.

  In many ways, the terraces are now spaces to eulogize and memorialize the dead. Banners showing the names of late fans or players are held up at games. The list of those who have gone is obviously long. Exactly ten years to the day since Roma lost that iconic cup final against Liverpool, the Roma captain, Agostino Di Bartolomei – depressed at his exclusion from the game since his retirement and, given the date, clearly still mourning that loss against Liverpool – shot himself in the heart. Both Giorgio Chinaglia and the Taxi-Driver died in 2012. The great Cosenza striker Gigi Marulla passed away in 2015. Their faces are spray-painted onto concrete walls outside the stadiums. Sometimes, those remembered are former club owners or favourite players but normally it’s the ultras who are inscribed onto the stadium. Parma’s Boys renamed the Curva Nord the Matteo Bagnaresi terrace after a twenty-six-year-old who was crushed by a bus. Many websites have long dedications to brothers and sisters who have fallen. The ‘AsRomaUltras’ website even has a page of threnodies under the refined Latin heading of Sit Vobis Terra Levis (‘May the earth be light on you’).