Calcio: A History of Italian Football. John Foot
the setting for these commemorations was a football pitch.
The most violent calcio-related moment of the whole post-war period was connected to football, but was not really about football. Viareggio’s ‘red days’ of 1920 reflected the spirit of the times. In this dramatic case, football was more of an excuse for, and not the cause of, the violence.
Revolution. Viareggio’s ‘red days’ of 1920
‘Revolution, well before it is a “thing”, is an emotion’ – Avanti! (Socialist Party newspaper) comment on the ‘Viareggio days’, May 1920
Viareggio is a sleepy, elegant seaside town in Tuscany, famed for its long beaches, its February carnival, its liberty architecture and its bagni; institutionalized strips of beach where the rich and the semi-famous can bathe in relative privacy. The town has twice in its history had an impact on the history of calcio. In 1926, the new ‘fascist’ football federation constitution – known as the Viareggio Charter – was drawn up there and in the post-war period a celebrated young players’ tournament was organized (and still takes place) in the town. In 1920, however, at the height of the biennio rosso – Italy’s ‘two red years’ – a football match in Viareggio was enough to spark a kind of local revolution.
The story begins in Lucca, the beautiful walled city just inland of Viareggio, where the local team took the field against Sporting Club Viareggio in April 1920. According to reports, the away fans were greeted with ‘hostility and violence’. They vowed to get their revenge in the return match, planned for May. Worried about possible trouble, the authorities and the club advised all Lucca fans to stay at home. Only a tiny number made the trip to Viareggio. The referee was from Lucca, and he ‘failed to appear impartial’, according to press reports, during the game. As if to balance things up, a war hero called Augusto Morganti, from Viareggio, ran the line. Lucca came back from 2–0 down to draw level towards the end of the game, and this result was ‘blamed’ by the local fans on the referee. With the match drawing to a close, an argument erupted between the linesman and a Lucca player. The referee decided to end the game early, but Morganti was not of the same opinion. Both sets of players took the opportunity to settle some scores, laying into each other. This was the signal for a mass pitch invasion, and an ‘enormous fight’. The few carabinieri (military police) who were present managed to rescue the Lucca players from the hostile crowd, and pushed the Viareggio fans back outside into the street.
News reached the nearby carabinieri barracks, and more men were dispatched to the scene. They arrived to find the crowd attempting to re-enter the stadium, and were greeted with whistles and threats. At this point, the facts are unclear. One policeman, it appears, lost his head (he claimed he was threatened) and shot Morganti – the locally-born linesman – at close range in the neck, killing him immediately. This tragedy enraged the crowd, and the carabinieri were chased away. Meanwhile, Lucca’s players and their fans slipped out of a back door, and left town – they were forced to walk for twenty kilometres to the next station. In Viareggio the crowd turned its attention to more serious matters.
Arms were seized (including at least 100 rifles) and the railway lines blocked. The crowd surrounded the barracks and tried to get hold of the man who had shot the linesman. Barricades went up and telephone and electricity lines were cut. Viareggio was isolated, and in the hands of local subversives. Anarchists from local towns arrived on the scene: it felt and looked like a revolution. Three military columns were soon dispatched to quell the protests, some by sea. With some difficulty, and only after a couple of days, 200 soldiers took control. The taking of the town by local subversives entered into local mythology as Viareggio’s ‘red days’.
Football tried to draw a veil over the events of 1920. In 1921 a ‘Peace Match’ was organized in Viareggio and passed off without incident. However, in the 1921–22 season, violence was again on the agenda. Viareggio won the first derby, but the Lucca fans attributed their defeat to the intimidating atmosphere in the stadium which revived unhappy memories of 1920’s riots. The return match, in the claustrophobic city of Lucca, was extremely tense. Viareggio’s fans were escorted by the police, and after losing 2–0 they proceeded to smash up (according to the version provided by Lucca fans) anything they could find. Here politics, local rivalries (the Tuscan derbies, and in particular Pisa-Livorno, are perhaps the most emotional of all Italian derbies) and the social upheavals of the time, allied to protests against match officials, combined to produce an explosive situation.
Early Games. Ropes, Nets and Fields
What were early games like? Much football writing extrapolates back from contemporary soccer, assuming that matches were similar to those we see today. Yet, apart from some of the rules, the pitch, the numbers of players and the goals, very little of what was called calcio or foot-ball resembled today’s game. The players were not athletes, they rarely trained and they were, at least for the first 20–25 years, nearly all amateurs. It was only in the 1920s that the professional game, and the idea of football as a business – as a full-time occupation – really began to take root. Skill and tactics were rare, play was slow and often violent.
Games took place on impromptu fields, which were not designed specifically for football and were hardly conducive to skilful ball play. Neither was the mud that was far more common than grass in the rainy north of Italy. For some time crowds just gathered around the sidelines, or a simple rope held them back from the pitch itself. For the first ten or so years, football matches failed to attract significant crowd numbers. It was only with the birth of the national team in 1910 that the masses began to turn up to games. Four thousand people – a big crowd – attended the first ever Italian game in Milan in that year. In 1911 Italy’s first football stadium was opened, in the Marassi zone on the edge of Genoa. The stadium had a capacity of 25,000 and was bordered on one side by a large stand with seats. Genoa’s stadium was designed with dressing rooms and even a special room for the referee.
Genoa’s ground was one of the first to give a team ‘home advantage’. Just next door was the more intimate ground used by their city rivals, Andrea Doria (who would later become a part of Sampdoria). Here the crowd was so close to the pitch that a claustrophobic atmosphere was created. This ground was dubbed La Caienna, after a French prison camp. Other stadiums, usually consisting of one stand and some terracing, were constructed by Milan and other clubs before and during World War One while Venezia built a stadium on an island in 1916.
In the years before World War One, fan numbers multiplied. Away fans began to turn up to games, and groups of supporters awaited their team’s return. By the 1920s, the strongest teams had groups of organized followers, and special trains were commissioned for away games. A 1923 photograph shows a group of Genoa away fans on a station platform. They have flags, banners (viva Genoa Club) and have scrawled graffiti on the train itself – including Fan Carriage and the rather poetic and self-deprecatory phrase: Foot-ball, acute mania. These were the first groups of obsessive, faithful fans, the grandfathers (and they are all men, in the photo) of the fanatical ultrà of the 1970s and 1980s.
Were there any tactics? According to some books, early teams tended to line up in a kind of inverted pyramid formation – a sort of 2–3-5 – with emphasis on attack and on kick and rush. It was only with the professional-style training methods of the first and second decades of the twentieth century and the modern coaching of foreign managers that the game began to resemble what we see today on our screens. The various alterations to the offside rules were also important in imposing change, and players did adopt specific positions on the field, right from the beginning (although tactical discipline was slow to take root). The birth and growth of the sports press, sports writers and football correspondents boosted understanding of calcio. Certain clubs began to be associated with specific styles of play, and with particular attitudes to the game, as with the aggressive reputation of Pro Vercelli, or Inter’s association with elegance.
Amateurs and Professionals
Early Italian football, as with the game in England, was strictly an amateur sport, played for