A Season with Verona
travels around Italy in search of illusion,
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Stand by your fans
Hellas Verona's racist and thuggish supporters are reviled in Italian football. Tim Parks's A Season with Verona won't change that reputation - but it does make for addictive reading
Robert MacFarlane
Observer
Sunday March 10, 2002
One of the pleasures of being a football fan is that it gives you a faith. This is implicit in the word: 'fan' comes from the Latin fanaticus, meaning 'a worshipper'. Your team is your god, and on match-days you become a fundamentalist - you become what Tim Parks calls 'a weekend Taliban'.
It's an alluringly uncomplicated faith, too. Cast in the Manichean light of fandom, the world divides neatly in two: two halves, two teams, two goals. Right and wrong are marvellously clarified; as distinguishable as the colours of the players' shirts.
Tim Parks, who has been a fan of Hellas Verona for nearly 20 years, is contemporary English literature's Italian connection. He lives with his Italian family in Verona, and he writes, translates and broadcasts in both Italian and English.
In English alone, since 1997 he has published three collections of essays, two novels (actually ten, does nobody visit my website?) - including the Booker-shortlisted Europa - a travelogue (another intriguing error. I've never published a travelogue), and three (at least ten) translated novels, as well as a torrent of journalism ( Actually, no. Very little journalism at all). He seems able, as Martin Amis observed of the even more prolific John Updike, to blurt out a book before breakfast (I wish!).
In early 2000, Parks decided that he would travel to every Hellas match in the upcoming season, home and away, and write about his experiences (this is more of a time commitment than it sounds: Italy is a long country).
With the aim of better understanding 'how people relate to football... how they dream this dream at once so intense and so utterly unimportant', he also decided to spend much of his match-time with the self-styled brigate gialloblù - the 'yellow-and-blue brigade', the hardcore Verona fans who turn matches into a 24-hour carnival of substance abuse, barracking, and violence.
Parks would join the tribe, in other words: the anthropologist would go native. A Season With Verona is the result of this total immersion. There were 34 matches in the season, there are 34 chapters in the book. Each chapter combines an account of a match with Parksian musings on crowd psychology, nationhood, authority, influence and all the other ideas that make up the myth of football.
After each chapter/match are printed the results of Serie A across the board, and Verona's consequent position in the league table. Quickly, even if you don't know anything about Hellas, and even though the season in question wound up a year ago, you start to care about what happens in the next game. Almost irresistibly, you become a Hellas supporter.
In Serie A terms, Hellas are a struggling team. In 1985, 'the year of the miracle', they won the scudetto, the league title. Since then, however, they have been commuting back and forth between Serie B and Serie A.
Failure is in its way as powerful a gelling agent as success, and Hellas's sustained poor form partly explains why their fan-base is renowned for being so tight-knit and so ultra - so extreme. Hellas fans are the pariahs of Italian football, deplored countrywide for their racism and vandalism. This antipathy serves only to consolidate their group identity, however: the brigate thrive on an inverted elitism, proud to be the worst of the worst.
Parks admits early on in the book that the brigate are 'not a savoury bunch'. Too right. They make monkey-noises whenever a black opposition player touches the ball. They sing celebratory songs about the Juventus supporters killed at Heysel. They compose admiring hymns to murderers and serial rapists. The question Parks wants to answer in his book is why? Why do they do these things, when the team itself - composed of imported players, none of whom is a native of Verona - is so remote from their lives? Why does fandom activate such a ferocious rush of feelings in people?
One answer, of course, is that it neuters boredom, that definingly modern disorder. Being fanatical makes life interesting again. Among the brigate boys we get to know is Forza (not Forza! Fondo, a completely different character), who works with disabled children during the week, and then gets pissed up, coked up and beaten up every match-day. He clearly loves the elation of transgression (though he wouldn't call it that): of having a weekend Hyde to his weekday Jekyll.
Another answer is that following a team offers what Parks calls 'the close ties of an undying community'; a pseudo-family. 'Can we imagine a fan on his own?' Parks asks. No, of course not. Fans only exist in the plural, unified by chant and slogan. Forza and all the other feckless members of the brigate love being part of a gang, a tribe, a crowd; they love being assimilated into a whole.
Parks himself is to a degree assimilated by the brigate. In the brilliant first chapter of the book, in which he describes travelling by coach with the fans to see Hellas play Bari away, there is a distinct gap between the mania of the fans, and Parks's detached account of it (to pass time on the bus, he notes dryly, 'they insult the driver and then sing, mainly in praise of deviant behaviour'). But as the season wears on, this gap narrows. Parks starts to lose his moral perspective on the brigate 's behaviour.
One moment exemplifies this. En route to an away game against Napoli, the train stops briefly in Bologna. A brigate member named Nato gets off, and first insults and then assaults a man who is kissing his girlfriend goodbye on the platform. The way Parks tells it, Nato is just a boy being a boy. He's not of course: he's a thug who's ruined someone's life for a while. Parks never loses his power elegantly to analyse the 'dream' of football, but his power to criticise some of its collateral effects does diminish.
This doesn't diminish the book; it makes it even more interesting. A Season With Verona is addictive reading, for its acute cultural criticism, for Parks's ability to evoke the 'choral pandemonium' of live football, and for its brilliant narrative rhythm - each chapter is a short story, the whole book an epic. With the wind of the World Cup in its sails, this will undoubtedly and deservedly be Parks's biggest success to date.
At the heart of it all
David Platt rediscovers the passion of an Italian football year in A Season with Verona by Tim Parks
David Platt (who would have thought I'd ever be reviewed by Plattie!)
Guardian
Saturday March 23, 2002
I l calcio è al cuore di tutto - football is at the heart of everything. Wise words from the 95-year-old regular at my local coffee bar, where I stopped off every morning on my way to Sampdoria's training ground. He meant that in Italy, politics, religion, business and even relationships were governed by events on the football pitch.
In A Season with Verona, Tim Parks takes us through all aspects of football in Italy, and examines what it shows us about the national character. He captures very well the passion, the bravado, and the downright rudeness, though he occasionally stretches the truth - in line with the perceptions of many Italians themselves - as to the advantages that big teams, such as Juventus, Milan, Internazionale, Roma and Lazio, are given over their less illustrious adversaries. Historic stories of match-rigging and biased refereeing decisions have been passed down through generations of supporters of provincial teams such as Verona.
The truth is probably less exotic: these clubs have better players, and are therefore entitled to win more, though it is true that they also have "bigger" presidents who have more political clout. But in my four years in Italy I can honestly say that I was never exposed to any football-related scandal, either against me at Bari or Sampdoria, or for me at the more powerful Juventus 8but David, would they have told you if the match had been fixed? I suspect not. Everybody in Italian football assures me these things happen from time to time. Only the foreign players seem oblivious!.
But enough of the preaching. Parks's account of a season travelling with his club in Italy's Serie A gives insights into all levels of Italian football culture: he infiltrates the club hierarchy, mingles with the "normal" supporters and, with more passion, becomes a "Brigate", a member of the club's diehard fans - in Italy known as the "Ultras". The key to the book is that Parks gets you involved, while offering different things to different sorts of reader.
You could enjoy it as an evocative piece of travel writing. I myself, being of an addictive nature, read it as an Ultra. I had been long enough away from Serie A not to know where Verona finished in the league this year and, although I yearned to look at the back page to find out if they had managed to have a good season, I resisted the temptation, for fear of ruining the emotions you feel as you are carried from game to game, looking at the league table at the end of each chapter. Parks manages to entwine the seriousness of Italian life with the "seriousness" of Italian football extremely well. He understands the most important fact of life in Italy - that without taking football into account, you cannot understand what passes for normality in almost every Italian household.
At the provincial clubs such as Verona, all supporters think that every facet of Italian politics and officialdom is against them. This goes way beyond the pitch: believing that they are considered to be the poor relations in life, they rally against power and money. It is ironic, therefore, that these resentful people can associate so freely with the players themselves, revering them as gods, oblivious to the fact that their heroes are earning money and gaining power that they can only dream of.
I had one taste of this extreme form of hero-worship. Suspended for a game, ironically against Verona, while I was playing for Bari, I was invited to watch the game with the supporters in their curva (end). My dilemma was that the president of the club had also asked me to sit next to him to watch the game. I made the tactical decision to spend just 15 minutes with the supporters, before taking my seat next to the president. For this simple act, I am now given a hero's welcome whenever I revisit Bari. It made me a Bari Ultra.
I had the same affinity with the Sampdoria supporters, but could never really manage it at Juventus. Was this because I didn't play particularly well or because, at clubs like Juventus, the supporters are used to winning? Hard to pin down, yet the warmth shown by the provincials was much greater than that shown by the big club.
Whether you buy this book as a football fan wishing to know more about Serie A, or to learn of Italian life and culture, I am sure you will not be disappointed. By the end of it, you will understand why my coffee-bar friend was so sure that il calcio è al cuore di tutto.
David Platt is a former England captain and is currently manager of the under-21 team. He played in Italy for four years.
A season in hell with some gentlemen of Verona
The Independent
By Chris Maume
14 March 2002
Hellas Verona football club are Italy's Millwall. No one likes them and they profess not to care, usually very loudly, but they see sinister machinations in every blow of the referee's whistle and policeman's baton. According to their biggest English fan, they are probably right.
Tim Parks, a novelist with the Somerset Maugham and Betty Trask awards in his trophy cabinet, has lived in Verona since the early 1980s. In his fiction, he seeks to cast a spell that allows contemplation of "all those things that are painful to us". That grounding gave him the tools he needed, last season, to chronicle Hellas's punishing struggle to remain among the élite of Serie A.
He wanted to make of this both a confessional depiction of that hopeless devotion to football with which the otherwise sane are cursed and an exploration of his adopted country's soul. Fortunately, this seamlessly layered book, expanded from a newspaper column (actulally, no - the column was just a small spin-off from the book), exhibits the sure hand of an essayist – another of his sidelines.
His guiding spirit is Giacomo Leopardi, whose 1821 poem "To a Winner with the Ball", kicks off conventionally, with sport standing in for war and sweated virtues surpassing effeminate indolence. But it changes course when Leopardi asks: "has human effort/ Ever been but a game? Is truth any less empty than falsehood?" In other words, since we are condemned to filling the emptiness of life with illusion, "football is as meaningful as anything ever will be. So go for it!"
Parks went for it home and away, on beery, smoky buses and trains, from Milan to Calabria, from the Veneto to Sicily. He was accepted immediately by Hellas's brigate of ultra-loyalists. Even when his project was outed by a group of fans styled The Maddest Ones, his comrades didn't blink. It was enough that he was prepared to suffer as they did: "Exasperation is of the essence in football."
It is surely no coincidence, he observes, that the Italian season stretches to 34 games, the number of cantos in Dante's Inferno. The Croatian winger Mario Cvitanovic remarks to him: "After every game, you are either in paradise or in hell."
This, Parks says, is what Italians want, "a constant alternation between trionfo and tristezza, triumph and sadness." The country is riven with divisions and contradictions: piety versus profanity; right versus left; the fat-cat north versus the yokel south. Parks tackles these dichotomies as Hellas's tortured season unfolds.
Perhaps the most contentious matter is racism. Though it is surely a case of scapegoating , the city of Verona tends to be castigated as Italy's staunchest outpost of opposition to multiculturalism. The book opens against the backdrop of a massive investigation into the apparently racist treatment of a Jewish lecturer.
Over the season come the first attempts to stamp out monkey sounds from the terraces towards black players. In fact, the loyalists of the Hellas brigate, one suspects, are no more or less racist than any football crowd – if more passionate than most.
Perhaps, though, Parks's mission goes beyond the mining of Italian character and into the realms of the spiritual. He explains the Italian passion for politics thus: "For those who have grown out of religion but haven't yet learnt to enslave their minds to something spectacular and harmless like football, political causes have become the only respectable object of those we once associated with the sacred." We think we're passionate about football, but it is difficult to imagine a more potent mixture of feelings coursing through the veins of even a diehard Rangers fan.
So the book functions well as a primer of Parks's philosophy of life and football; and it is difficult to think of a better first-person account of a season in hell, besieged by brutal policemen and cheated by corrupt officialdom. As the season reaches a climax, the iniquities of a system designed to favour the rich and powerful clubs induce feelings of extreme violence even in Parks. But the reader is left with the feeling that this season, he is still there with the Hellas brigate.
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