| Product: |
A Season with Verona - Tim Parks |
| Date: |
15/07/03 (219 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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"The football stadium excludes the world, reserves its mysteries for initiates. The TV cannot violate it, cannot even begin to catch it. It's a place of collective passion."
Late September 2000. Hellas Verona, about to embark on another struggle against relegation, have lost their manager, half a team to the substitutes benches of Inter Milan, Fiorentina and Parma and their sponsors. The start of the football season has been delayed by the "grim athleticism and loathsome armchair nationalism" of the Sydney Olympics, and the owner has declared himself willing to sell the club as soon as he can find a buyer. Standing outside a closed bar in a grim suburb of Verona at 1.30am in the morning, Tim Parks is about to start a season following the most hated club in Italy.
But this is more than just a book about football. A travel book infused with perceptive insights into the way Italians relate to football and to each other; how a weekend obsession interacts with the everyday business of work, family and extra-marital affairs. It's a peek behind the just-for-tourists veneer of rolling Chiantishire, rustic Tuscan villas, grand, imperial Rome and Pisa's Field of Miracles into a nation where rules are stretched to the point of absurdity - just as long as the results are profitable - drug tests can be positive, negative and not negative, and people "spend half their lives getting certificates, not learning to do things." Welcome to a country where you can buy bottles of Hitler and Mussolini wine with your morning cappuccino and croissant, and where four of the ten TV channels in a cheap Milan hotel room are showing football (including a fascinating analysis of every top flight team's chances for the season ahead based on astrological readings - "Reggina have too many Aquarians"), another a wizard contacting the dead on request, and a couple more phone-in tarot readings.
Having lived in Vero
na since 1981, Parks is at once a knowledgeable insider and a wide-eyed outsider. On his travels to away games with the notorious Brigate Gialloblu (Yellow-Blue Brigade) he becomes at times overly intoxicated with the insane self-parody of hardcore football supporters - the childishness, stupidity, camaraderie and enchantment of the group. Quite ordinary incidents - an encounter with a pretty young girl in a train compartment for example - are given undue prominence, and the book does feel a little stretched in places. Yet there are also moments of sublime madness here: the referee who refuses to stop testing a waterlogged pitch until he finds the one dry spot that will enable him to declare the whole thing playable; a fan accompanied by his wife who mutters "merda, merda, merda" throughout an entire game, breaking off to embrace everyone around him when Verona score and then immediately resuming his downcast mantra; a fist fight with a lorry driver and a mad chase down a deserted motorway; a club president who kicks opposing players down a flight of stairs after his team have lost a vital game, and club officials trying to crowbar their way through a dressing room door shortly afterwards; a 31-year-old man trying to overcome his mother's disapproval of his asthmatic girlfriend on the grounds that "she won't be a healthy wife and mother"; a teenage boy screaming "Thugs! Worms! Turds! Communists!" at policemen while covering his mobile phone so as not to be heard by his mother, who is calling to check that he's finished all his homework.
I said that this wasn't just a book about football, but in a country where politicians talk football-speak at every opportunity, matches are seen as rehearsals for elections, and Silvio Berlusconi, owner of AC Milan, is about to become Prime Minister of Italy, the sport permeates every page. The antagonism between northerners and southerners, "the internecine struggle which
is Italian unity" is seen through the prism of chants like "Le nostre tasse pagano per voi" ("Our taxes pay for you"), "We have a dream in our hearts, to burn the south" and "It takes soap and water to wash a southerner." When Napoli play at Verona the home supporters don white surgical masks and sing about a smell so bad that "even the dogs are running", and the first chant in Sicily politely translates as "We can't understand a word you're saying." There are moments that any football fan in any country would recognise - sick songs about Juventus supporters killed at Heysel, 'Forza Etna' banners at Catania as the volcano threatens to destroy the city, tirades against the "cat-eaters" of Venezia, chants of "Terremotati" at Udine to remind the locals of a 1976 earthquake that killed thousands, and the moment after a 3-0 defeat to Atalanta when the police are taunted with a re-working of an old Fascist song, adapted to include a topical reference to a helicopter crash in which ten officers died.
This is a book about the frustrations of following the unfashionable. A world of blind optimism in the certain knowledge that the faceless "bastardi" will always have the upper hand, of dutiful support to overpaid players who "don't give a damn...except in so far as their own prospects are furthered or damaged by the team's performance", of the fear that always follows an early goal, and the hatred of those who support the big teams for the sake of convenience. It's about something that an out-of-town Manchester United or Liverpool supporter would be as unlikely to fathom as their Italian equivalents at Juventus or AC Milan. About a world where the biggest fear is relegation and the awful certainty that your neighbours will one day overshadow you.
You don't have to be acquainted with football or Italy to like this book, but
, if you've got no experience of either, I doubt you'd finish the 400-odd pages far in advance of another Verona scudetto. It's by no means faultless - a little too long, a few too many asides and more interesting than inspirational - but it remains a wonderful read for anyone who's never quite outgrown that childhood indignance at the Liverpool shirt in the school playground, who's ever travelled on an overnight coach with the smell of beer and urine in his nostrils, or who can feel empathy for men travelling through Italy in segregated railway carriages to dodge cobblestones in Naples, bottles in Calabria, knives in Rome, police batons in Turin and rockets and coins in Milan - a 'Fever Pitch' for those who don't follow football from the armchair.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks moved to Verona in 1981 to teach English. 'A Season With Verona' was his third non-fiction account of life in northern Italy after 'Italian Neighbours' and 'An Italian Education'. His novel 'Europa' was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
www.timparks.co.uk
'A Season With Verona' is available in paperback for £3.99 at amazon.co.uk.
464 pages.
ISBN: 0099422670
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