There’s a song by Sud Sound System, a reggae group from the Italian region of Apulia, that begins like this: ‘If you never forget your roots, you’ll be able to respect those…
Tag: italy
In part one of a four-part series looking back at the career of Gianluca Vialli, his rapid rise and early success at Sampdoria comes under the spotlight
Two of the finest strikers of their generation took to the field for Inter Milan on the final day of the 2001/02 Serie A season, with their side needing to win at Lazio…
I have this memory from my childhood that’s still vivid in my mind. It’s some time in the 1990s and I’m sitting on the sofa watching Channel 4’s Football Italia. I had…
OVER THE YEARS, Italian football has endured its fair share of sporting, socio-cultural, political and economic hardships. The 2006 Calciopoli scandal sent shockwaves throughout the Peninsula, leaving three of Serie A’s top four…
SWEDEN AND ITALY ARE TWO NATIONS separated by both geography and culture. Sweden is a Scandinavian country of just 10 million people where the Vikings once ruled, and where temperatures plunge below…
THE NEW SOCIETY OF AC MILAN doesn’t sound too far from something the iconoclastic Italian politician and media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi would have dreamed up, but it is in fact the symbolic…
IT SEEMED AN IMPOSSIBLE TASK, but by the end, Lazio had made it possible. For more than two years Juventus had been undefeated in Turin, an imposing, inexorable force with six successive…
BEFORE MATTEO DARMIAN, FEDERICO MACHEDA AND MASSIMO TAIBI, there was another Italian on the books at Old Trafford – the Red Devils’ first ever non-British player, Carlo Domenico Sartori. Born on 10…
Calcio in the 1990s was the golden age of modern football. From Franco Baresi and George Weah to Marco van Basten and Gabriel Batistuta, there were a good seven teams that could…
ON THE HILLY COUNTRYSIDE of Serra Riccò, deep inside the bowels of a parish church, Don Stefano Vassallo cracked a wry smile. After days of painstaking research, scrolling through copious archived documents,…
Illustration by Federico Manasse Italian football is first and foremost defined by defence and tactics. No player in the history of calcio more closely defines these ideals than Franco Baresi of AC…
The brutality was as effective as it was violent. The claustrophobia inflicted on his opponents was stifling to the point of suffocation. Reputations were swept away as easily as a standing leg…
“My only real regret was not being able to share my life and success with my parents. If anyone could help me with this problem I would say to him: bring them…
There is nothing more thrilling in football than a goal. The sight of seeing the ball hit the back of the net stirs up multiple emotions in different sets of fans and…
OVER THE COURSE OF TIME, football has seen its share of starlets burst onto the scene. And with every passing year, their age tends to be a bit younger as modern football…
Gianluigi Buffon ran triumphantly, alone, to the anticipant, raucous Juventus fans in the Curva Sud. The applause was mutual, the celebrations were shared, a collective admiration apparent even for those that know…
Securing European qualification with a squad made up of numerous academy graduates, Atalanta are pioneering a better future for player development in Italy