Nicola Sbetti & Daniele Serapiglia. Soccer & Society. Volume 21, Issue 8, 2020.
Introduction
In 2014, in a special Issue of the Journal Studi Storici, a new generation of scholars focussed on the study of fascism, concentrating on many of its dimensions: political violence, the control apparatus, the legal institutionalization of the regime, the party, the relationship between Church and State, economics, social policies, racism, the relationship with anti-fascism, foreign policy and cinema. However, none of these essays took sport into consideration. Yet sport can help us to understand the modernity of fascism. It is indeed linked to the concept of modernity, as several studies have highlighted, beginning with those of Richard Holt. Of all the sporting disciplines, football provides us with an interesting angle from which to see how fascism tried to respond to the contradictions of modern society.
This link between sport and modernity further allows us to understand why academic studies on sport and fascism have emerged only since the second half of the 1970s, in parallel with the affirmation of Renzo De Felice’s paradigm. In fact, the origin of these studies is the connection between regime and mass consensus, for which sport could be useful. Since 1976, some scholars have considered various aspects of fascist sport, including the social institutions of Italian mass sport. The studies of Gentile and Mosse on the sacralization of politics, however, have especially influenced the work of sport history dedicated to the ideal of the construction of the ‘New Man’: the relationship between the regime and various disciplines, sport and international relations, as well asresearch pertaining to some key figures such as Lando Ferretti and Achille Starace.
The same applies to studies dedicated to football, which were influenced more by the research of Gentile and Mosse than that of De Felice. This influence is visible in Bolz’s work on the sacralization of stadiums in the fascist sense and in Simon Martin’s book, Football and Fascism. The latter, along with the research of Elia, Papa and Panico, Foot, and Dietschy, is considered a reference for studies of the social history of football during the dictatorship. The interweaving of football and Italian fascism is also visible in the role of the sport as a means for cultural diplomacy.
Several publications have focussed on the 1934 World Cup, which was the most important international football event organized in Italy during fascism. They mainly address the propagandistic aspects of the competition, ignoring, to paraphrase Luisa Passerini, the real and imagined life of the Italian people. As Luzzatto argues, ‘the imagination’ coincides with ‘the travail of memory’. And the memory of the 1934 World Cup is the focus of this article, which aims to introduce the history of sport into the historical debate over the memory of fascism after the Second World War. The protagonists involved in that debate include John Foot, David Forgacs, Ruth Ben-Giat, Angelo Del Boca and Filippo Focardi, all of whom have taken into account concepts such as memory suppression when re-discussing the stereotype ‘Italians are good people’. Memory suppression in particular was the question motivating our research: beginning in 1945, was the public memory of the 1934 World Cup an example of the removing the past to avoid confirming a connection between the Italian people and fascism?
We will try to identify the reasons for the transformation of the memory of the first Italian World Cup after the fall of fascism. Specifically, we will first focus on memory of the 1934 World Cup in the years immediately after the end of the war in order to highlight more clearly the continuities and the changes from the Fascist period to the Republican one. We will then look at the years around Italy 1990, the second World Cup held in Italy. We will explore this difference by addressing a question inspired by Tony Judt’s reflection on the European process of removing from public memory the popular support for authoritarian regimes and, implicitly, the crimes they committed during the Second World War.
This research employed several primary sources. First of all, journalistic sources were analysed: the major Italian sports and generalist newspapers such as La Repubblica, La Gazzetta dello Sport, Corriere dello Sport and Corriere della Sera. Secondly, television sources were studied thanks to the Teche Rai archive, as were official Federazione Italiana Gioco Calcio (FIGC) publications.
Fascist football and the 1934 World Cup
Antonio Papa stressed that ‘the fascist presence in football was less than what was believed and that the relationship between the littorio and football could not be interpreted as the relationship between dominator and dominated’. However, despite the preservation of some spaces of relative autonomy, Italian football underwent a gradual process of fascistization. Initially, football was viewed with diffidence by the regime, because it had been created in England and because parochialism seemed to predominate within it, which was dangerous for national unity. To overcome these problems, fascism moved in two different directions. First, it put the world of Italian football under its control. Second, it tried to make Italians passionate about a new sport, named volata, created for them, mixing the rules of football with those of rugby. Despite the promotional effort, that sport did not prove to be a crowd pleaser, and from 1933 onwards volata saw a rapid and relentless decline. This demonstrated that nothing could be imposed on the population that did not arouse genuine enthusiasm. Indeed, the sporting myth followed the same parable as the political myth which, in order to be successful, ‘must conform to collective desires and aspirations’. Unlike volata, football had imposed itself among the masses independently. Even before the Great War, it had many fans: 18,000 spectators attended the Italy-Belgium match on 1 May 1913. However, until the end of the Second World War, it never managed to overtake cycling as the national sport.
After the Great War, the number of spectators present at the matches of the men’s national team continued to increase. Therefore, not surprisingly, with the affirmation of fascism, the sport was placed under the control of the regime. This was due to the dictatorship’s will to control every aspect of mass society, but also to the passion of some in the hierarchy, especially Leandro Arpinati, the head of the fascists in Bologna. Arpinati was the president of the FIGC from 1926 to 1933. He undertook to put into practice the rules promulgated on 2 August 1926 by the Italian Olympic Committee (CONI), directed by Lando Ferretti, in a document called Carta di Viareggio. This document developed a new federal statute for football, established the hierarchical system of offices, reformed the institutions of the governance of football, regulated the professional status of players and set new rules for foreign players, but above all it established the single national league, which had the symbolic purpose of strengthening nationalist feeling. The following year, the fascio littorio (symbol of the Fascist Party) was added to the Savoy shield on the uniform of the Italian national team.
In Bologna, Arpinati promoted the construction of the largest stadium that had yet been built, the Littoriale, which was inaugurated in 1927. This was a multi-purpose facility designed not only for football but also for athletics and swimming, in the context of an area entirely dedicated to sport. In that context, it had to be a place to forge the New ‘Fascist Man’: a man physically and ideologically prepared for the ultimate sacrifice in war for the glory of the nation. In 1928, the campaign to build the Littorio sport fields was promoted, and by 1930 there were 3,280 of them. This attention to sport and football in particular allowed Fascist Italy to organize the 1934 World Championship, after having withdrawn its candidature for the organization of the 1930 World Cup.
As Daphné Bolz wrote, ‘the 1934 Football World Cup offers an overview of the history of fascist sport.’ For this tournament, some existing stadiums were used, including the Littoriale, but above all, new structures were created. These were intended not only to be functional for the practice of sport, but to demonstrate to foreign observers the innovation of fascist architecture and to provide an opportunity for Italians to attend sports competitions inside of the symbolic apparatus of the regime. It was on this basis that the ‘Partenopeo’ stadium in Naples, the ‘Giovanni Berta’ stadium in Florence and the ‘Mussolini’ stadium in Turin were built. The last two certainly evoked the dictatorship with their names. While the one in Turin was dedicated to the head of Fascism, the stadium in Florence was dedicated to ‘a martyr of the Fascist revolution’. Berta was a member of fascist military squads who died in 1921 during a fight with a group of socialists and communists. In addition, as in Bologna, the stadiums in Turin and Florence both had towers. These were symbols of a civil religion, much like the towers of a town hall or the ‘Fascio houses’ built at the time. The new stadium tower was a fascist ‘bell tower’ that entered the daily lives of Italians to impose fascist ‘banal nationalism’. It was based on the display of a whole series of symbols that became part of the daily lives of citizens, creating a tradition and a fascist imagined community.
These buildings served as a framework for the World Cup, which benefited the regime from various points of view: sports, tourism and propaganda. Although public attendance at the matches was not particularly impressive, from the sporting point of view, the 1934 World Cup was a success given that Italy won the competition. Following that victory, the Italian national team had a series of successes, including a second Central European International Cup in 1935, the Olympic gold medal in 1936 and another World championship victory in France in 1938.
From a tourism point of view, Fascist Italy was able to present itself as a modern country to the foreign public. It is also important to note that sports-related tourism had been developing in Europe since the second half of the 19th century, encouraged at the same time by the expansion of railways. In the Italy of 1934 as well, tourism was facilitated by the improvement of transport and other infrastructure. These improvements accelerated the movement of fans and subsequently led to the growth of tourism. In addition, a merchandising system was created for the occasion to celebrate the event: commemorative stamps and tickets that were printed on elegant paper to be kept as souvenirs. Finally, fascist propaganda was important for the World Cup. Just before the start of the championship, Under Secretary for Propaganda Galeazzo Ciano encouraged Italian newspaper directors to highlight football on the front page, with the aim of attracting the attention of the broadest possible audience to the sport. The Italian diplomatic corps was also asked to promote the Italian national football team among communities abroad and to foreign media and governments. Football could be a means of representing the strength and goodness of fascism in the world, especially among the communities of Italian emigrants. In fact, emigrants were fundamental to Fascist Italy: first, their economic remittances to their families in Italy were an important contribution to the national economy, and, second, their support for Fascism was important to encouraging the nations which hosted them to support the regime.
As was common practice even in States with non-fascist political systems, Italian victories were narrated in triumphant headlines in newspapers and via the nascent radio, and the athletes were exalted as what Bruno Roghi called ‘soldiers of sport’. In a similar fashion, the radio presenter Nicolò Carosio also redefined the language of football in a nationalist sense. In deference to the cult of sacrifice and fascist martyrs, this rhetoric used terminology that would be more likely fond in the theatre of war.
Vittorio Pozzo, the coach of the Azzurri, and Giuseppe Meazza became icons of that group of ‘soldiers of sport’, the incarnation of the fascist New Man in the world of football. However, there were also contradictions. Meazza was nicknamed ‘Balilla’, but he did not embody a soldier devoted to sacrifice. In fact, he lived a well-off existence, a lavish lifestyle that was presented several times in magazines. Meazza, like other Italian sport champions, spread the mirage of a sumptuous lifestyle, unaffordable for most Italians at the time. He was therefore a different model from the New Man, who had to bite the bullet and even die for his nation. In fact, thanks to their overexposure in the media, footballers became models more of a consumer society than of a regime devoted to sacrifice for the cause of fascism. This was further confirmed by the fact that Italian footballers avoided military conscription. This image entered the imagination of Italians, who in subsequent years stripped these sportsmen of their black shirt as quickly as they did for themselves, diverting attention from their political value and to the improvement of individual living conditions, which these players embodied.
A memory reshaped. Continuity and change in Italian football after the War
As several scholars have highlighted, from an international point of view, the 1934 World Cup tournament was, at the time, perceived as a success. Despite some criticism of the tough way of playing of the Azzurri, the praise in the international press for the modern stadiums and for the organization somehow mirrored the general acceptance and even admiration abroad of the fascist before the 1935 invasion of Ethiopia. Benito Mussolini was present at the games but he was not particularly involved in the organization of the tournament; only on its eve did he understand that it could become an excellent propaganda tool. However, the increasingly aggressive foreign policy adopted by the fascist regime, the ‘Battle of Highbury’, the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the fascist salutes in black shirts by the Italian footballers in the 1938 World Cup contributed to changing the memory of the 1934 World Cup abroad by magnifying the importance of Mussolini and political exploitation of the World Cup.
But in postwar Italy, in the memory of the 1934 World Cup, the lumbering presence of Mussolini and fascism nearly disappeared. One reason was certainly the ideology that shaped the Italian sporting institution after the fall of fascism. After the war, the partially purged CONI, which also acted as a confederation of national sport federations and as a kind of ministry of sport, took on a new motto: ‘lo sport agli sportivi’. Affirming that sport should be a realm only for sportsmen was a way to preserve a certain degree of autonomy from the government (something that had been completely absent during the fascist period) and ensure economic independence via the football lottery, Totocalcio. However, the philosophy of ‘sport for sportspeople’ also functioned to justify the absence of a serious purge in the sporting world, and it helped several athletes, officials and sport journalists who, after being particularly loyal to the fascist regime, wanted to recycle themselves in the Republican period. For example, as soon as he came to power, and after having remembered that sport ‘was not invented by fascism’, Giulio Onesti, the new CONI commissioner and future president, even affirmed that sportspeople put in place ‘a determined passive resistance’ to Mussolini’s Regime.
In general, however, this rhetoric of sport agnosticism was particularly supported by those who, after having fully embraced fascism, could now define themselves, in a self-absolving way, simply as sportspeople and affirming that the realm of sport should have always been separated from that of politics. For example, Bruno Roghi, the director of La Gazzetta dello Sport and one of the cantors of fascist sport wrote:
Among all the social activities influenced by the dictatorship, sport is probably the one which has better defended itself. (…) A lot of sporting officials of the time dressed themselves as fascist because that was the wardrobe expected of them. In order to serve the sport, they would have stitched a Turkish half-moon on their hat or put an Indian plume in their hair.
Expelling or at least diluting from the tale of the World Cup victories the presence and the exploitation of Mussolini and the fascist regime was also instrumental, not only for journalists as Roghi, but also for those who continued to work for Italian football even after the fall of the regime, like Ottorino Barassi and Vittorio Pozzo.
Barassi was the secretary general of the FIGC from 1933 to 1943. He worked closely with Giorgio Vaccaro, the president of the FIGC and the general of the fascist militia, and he was the key figure in the organization of the 1934 World Cup. Barassi fully embraced the regime, at least until the fall of Mussolini on 25 July 1943, and collaborated with some high-ranking members of the Fascist Party (such as Arpinati and Farinacci). Despite this, in autumn 1944 he was nominated by Onesti, leader of the FIGC to replace Fulvio Bernardini. Ironically, Bernardini had decided to step down from his position after having accused the CONI Commissioner of having too mild an approach regarding the former fascists in the sport institutions. In the press there were some voices who spoke against Barassi; for example il Popolo, the newspaper of the Christian Democracy Party wrote: ‘Why are we not able to get rid of these compromised old men?’ However, despite this initial opposition towards his appointment, Barassi was elected and remained FIGC president until 1958. He immediately embraced the apolitical rhetoric of ‘sport for sportspeople’ and was instrumental in making sure that, at least in the official narrative, the memory of the football successes of the 1930 s was stripped of any fascist connotation. While he tried to bury his role of FIGC Secretary General during the fascist period, he also made sure that the anecdote that it was he who had saved the World Cup Trophy from being melted down by the Germans for its gold was remembered in posterity. Furthermore, he linked himself to the Christian Democracy party, running unsuccessfully in the elections.
In the depoliticization process of the 1934 World Cup, Barassi found an ally Jules Rimet. This FIFA president had not only helped Italy avoid exclusion from the federation after the Second World War, but, in his book The Wonderful History of the World Cup, he also minimized the political influence on the second edition of the competition. For example, he described the FIGC president and fascist militia general Giorgio Vaccaro not as a politician, but as just a sportsman. Barassi, who was the closest collaborator of Vaccaro, was the foremost beneficiary of this redemption.
Similarly, Vittorio Pozzo, the architect of the 1934 and 1938 victories, represented an element of continuity from the fascist past, as he kept his coaching position until 1948, when he stepped down after a big defeat against England. His competence and the success of the idea that sport and politics must remain separated allowed him to maintain his position, but the fact that he won trophies during the fascist era remained a stigma. Although a non-hagiographical biography of Pozzo is yet to be written, and despite the fact that he was involved with the FIGC well before the March on Rome, his articles in La Stampa, a broadly diffused daily newspaper based in Turin, shows full engagement with the fascist regime. In 1941 Pozzo was still coaching the Azzurri in a friendly match against the Croatian national team, a match that was organized with the political goal of legitimizing the Ustashe regime. However, after 8 September 1943, Pozzo started to gradually distance himself from the fascist regime, as his having received a pass from the local Partisans command seems to demonstrate. This choice, together with the support of Barassi and his football knowledge and competence, explained why he managed to remain the coach of the national team and the main football writer of La Stampa. However, during the Republican period, he paid more than any other player or official involved, for the fact that he was a symbol of the football triumphs in the fascist era. For example, the Monday after his death, in December 1968, the newspapers pointed out that the minute of silence in his honour before the matches of the Italian league was not always respected. If the whistles that interrupted the minute of silence were the consequence of his identification with the fascist period, in the Corriere della Sera, Gino Palumbo, referring to his fascist past wrote: ‘Pozzo was a galvanizer and a profound connoisseur of human psychology. It is not true that, taking advantage of the rhetoric of the fascist era, he sent the players to the match after singing “Giovinezza”: but it is true that he understood every game as a battle.’
Just as much as Barassi, Vittorio Pozzo contributed to the promotion of a memory of the 1934 World Coup stripped of its fascist element, through the 1960 publication of a volume of his memoirs which become particularly influential. In the pages dedicated to the 1934 triumph there is no reference (negative or positive) to the fascist regime. There is no mention of the Coppa del Duce nor of the reception at Palazzo Venezia after the victory; the focus of the tale is completely dedicated to how he protected his ‘boys’ from the distraction of the outside and in celebrating the superstars of the opposing teams that Italy defeated to win the Cup: Zamora, Sindelar and Planika.
This important source has become the main reference for all the subsequent official, hagiographical and mainstream literature and has helped to shape the memories of the Italians. Storia del calcio in Italia by Antonio Ghirelli and Storia critica del calcio italiano by Gianni Brera, may represent in this sense two valuable exceptions. However, if we take as an example the publication of the volume edited for the 75th anniversary of the FIGC, written by Antonio Ghirelli himself, we again find a narrative where the presence of fascism seems to be watered down.
In any case, this process of eradication of the fascist presence in the memory of the football victories was also successful for another reason: after the difficult War years, Italians wanted to feel alive again, and football—along with cycling—was not only a great distraction, but also a symbol of peace and freedom. Furthermore, it should not be forgotten that, after 1938, Italians had to wait until the 1968 European Championship before winning another trophy.
Italia 1934 in Italia 1990
According to Tony Judt, the solution to the problem of troublesome memories of the twentieth century has been ‘to fix them, quite literally, in stone’. Here, he was referring to a series of memorials that remembered the horrors of the Second World War and theauthoritarian regimes, including the Berlin Holocaust Memorial. As for the memory in stone of Italian fascism, it is not present in memorials dedicated to that era, but rather in the buildings and monuments of many cities built during the regime. As John Foot has stated, ‘Monuments were not simply the end of a story, but part of the story itself.’ This has often created a heated debate about the need to remove some of the symbols of the Mussolini era. Recently, Ruth Ben-Ghiat denounced the lack of knowledge among Italians relating to the significance of some fascist constructions. Using the words of the American historian as a pretext, Emilio Gentile ironically replied to her that demolishing all fascist constructions would be a suitable way to solve Italy’s problems. As far as sport is concerned, this debate has been continuously present in postwar Italy.
As already mentioned, many sport facilities had been built during the fascist period and could potentially be seen to revitalize the memory of the regime. Above all, this is the case of the Foro Italico, formerly Foro Mussolini, which was built as a space for the education of the New Man, in both operational and symbolic terms. This happened during the process of building the ‘Third Rome’, the modern and fascist Rome, which saw city centre renovation developed under Monte Mario and later the new Via del Mare neighbourhood, which we know as ‘Eur’ (Universal Exposition of Rome). In this space, in addition to the presence of the obelisk dedicated to Mussolini, mosaics were assembled and marble blocks were erected to commemorate the events of the regime. This created a heated debate in the Italian Parliament on the occasion of the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome, which took place in the new Olympic stadium, built on the site of the former hundred-thousand-seat stadium of the Foro Italico. This debate led to the covering and elimination of the mosaics and symbols that were considered ‘more overtly fascist’, in order to present the new democratic Italy to the world through television.
The same danger could have occurred during the 1990 World Cup: not only did some of the most important matches take place at the Olympic stadium, but some of the locations of the tournament were the same as those of the ‘Mussolini World Cup 1934ʹ. In the case of Genoa, Bologna, Milan and Florence, the football pitches were also the same. In Naples, however, the matches were played in the San Paolo Stadium because the ‘Partenopeo’ stadium had been destroyed during the war, and in Turin a new stadium was built for Italia 90, Stadium Delle Alpi.
During the 1960 Olympic Games, however, all references to fascism were removed from the stadiums that were already present during the 1934 World Cup. The only stadiums to maintain the same structure were those of Bologna and Florence, although the former was wrapped in metal scaffolding and the latter had lost its athletics track. The fascist symbols that had adorned the two towers had been removed in 1945. In Bologna, for example, the equestrian statue of Mussolini, which stood under the tower, had already been melted. In addition, the names of ‘Littoriale’ and ‘Giovanni Berta’ had also been changed. Both were now called ‘municipal stadiums’, and they were later named in honour of two prestigious presidents: Renato Dall’Ara for the Bologna stadium and Artemio Franchi for the Florence stadium.
Though totally renovated compared to 1934, the stadium in Genoa kept the name of Luigi Ferraris, a former captain of Genoa FC who died in battle during the Great War. The facility was dedicated to him in 1933, during the fascist regime. This point is important, because the martyrs of the war were celebrated both during the fascist period and during the First Republic as symbols of the last part of the Italian Risorgimento and of national unity. The same thing happened to the cities of the Pontine countryside. While Littoria became Latina, Borgo Grappa and Borgo Piave kept the names given to them during the fascist era because they evoked the First World War. The stadium in Milan had been totally renovated compared to 1934. In 1980 this structure was named Giuseppe Meazza, whose role as an icon of Fascism in the context of Italian public memory had been cleaned up.
In 1990 other protagonists of the 1934 World Cup ‘lost their black shirts’ the way Meazza did. The profile of one of them, Angelo Schiavio, is particularly interesting. In fact, he scored the decisive goal in the final against Czechoslovakia, giving Italy the title of world champion. Still alive in 1990, he was called to participate in the ‘Grand Gala of the World Cup’, which took place on 27 May at the Palatrussardi in Milan. Also invited to this event were other famous world champions: Pelé, Carlos Alberto and Bobby Charlton. The event was broadcast worldwide and also featured one of the most famous Italian stars in the world, Luciano Pavarotti. On that occasion, images of Schiavo’s goal were shown. The former Italian player was also given an award by the Italian national team’s technical commissioner, Azeglio Vicini, which was accepted on his behalf by another protagonist of the 1934 World Cup, Felice Borel, as Schiavio was not present. On this occasion, there was also no reference to the fascist regime. However, Schiavio’s remarks in an interview with Gazzetta dello Sport published on that same day is interesting to note:
I sincerely don’t remember much of that day anymore. I learned the details I had forgotten only by reading the newspapers that talked about it. For example (and this is big …) that Benito Mussolini was present. They said he was going to come, but I hadn’t noticed that from the field and said goodbye to the gallery as we normally did. Rather, the next day, we went to Palazzo Venezia, where the famous balcony is. Some of us stretched out our hand to shake his, but this wasn’t so good because Mussolini raised his hand in the air, greeting us with the Romans. It was me who had scored the decisive goal, but I got no special compliment—maybe he didn’t even know that I had done it. As a reward they promised us ten thousand liras but in reality we got only 5 thousand. They said the other half went to the party for the construction of I don’t know which Casa del fascio.
The phrase ‘I don’t remember much of that day anymore’ seems significant. This may really be the result of forgetfulness arising from the passage of time, but it may also be the consequence of an attempt to expunge the fact that that victory and its goal had been used in fascist propaganda to exalt the regime. The irony of the meeting with Mussolini is interesting: the story of the greeting sounded like an echo of the meeting at the station between Napoloni and Hynkel in the film The Great Dictator by Charlie Chaplin. Indeed, in that film, the two actors are unable to coordinate their greeting, because they do not know whether to shake hands or use the Roman salute. Instead, the reference to the incomplete payment of the cash prize ridicules the regime, marking the distance between Schiavio and the Italian national team on the one hand and the fascist regime on the other. In some ways, this was the metaphor for the distance between a ridiculous regime and the citizens.
Moreover, the memory of that event seemed to be a good omen for the adventure of the Italian national team in Italia 90. Curiously, in the qualifying round, Italy played against three of the four teams that it had met in 1934: the United States, Czechoslovakia and Austria. However, the reference in the press to those matches was purely about football and was devoid of political connotations.
The ‘Azzurro’ colour of victory
The intention of the organizers and of the Italian government was for the 1990 World Cup to be remembered as the World Cup of Wonders, which was based on the triangle of sport, media and sponsors. Like the 1934 tournament, it had to be representative of the nation inside and outside Italy’s borders. Like the 1960 Olympics, the leading character of this event was Italian public television (Rai), which was created in 1954 and which would present to the world the new Italy built on the Socialist-Christian Democrat axis.
This was very important during the 1980 s, a decade during which control by the Italian political parties on public television become even more pervasive than in the past for entertainment programmes and especially short tv series. On 22 and 23 April 1990, Rai Uno (channel one) aired the two-episode film Il colore della vittoria (The Colour of Victory) during prime time. This film inaugurated Rai’s programmes dedicated to the 1990 World Cup, obtaining 25.13% of audience share on the first day of screening, with 6,523,000 people. This fictional story, based on a subject by Il Messaggero sports journalist Lino Cascioli, was written by Vittorio Bonicelli after researching newspapers of 1934. Il colore della vittoria was directed by Vittorio De Sisti and produced by Raiuno, Betafilm, Film Leader and TVE (the Spanish state TV). The FIGC also supported this project and demanded a change of the original title, ‘Wild Battle’, because it was considered too violent. This film told the story of the World Cup winning team of 1934, focusing on the figures of two heroes of that success: Vittorio Pozzo, played by Adalberto Maria Merli, and Attilio Ferraris IV, played by Claudio Amendola. In this film, the regime played second fiddle to the personal vicissitudes of the protagonists, who did not seem to be at all in collusion with the fascist regime.
In a sequence set on the eve of the first dramatic quarter-final match with Spain in Florence, the local fascist militia visited Pozzo, ordering him to win against the ‘red furies’ that ‘recalled the colours’ and the feelings of the Communist Party. Pozzo replied to them that the match was just a sporting event that had nothing to do with politics. In fact, in the fiction of this film, Spain was painted as the expression of the Popular Front. This was an obvious mistake, since the Popular Front was established in Spain only two years later, in 1936. This error, however, was included consciously as a way to convey that the Italians represented by Pozzo and football wanted merely to play their game in the spirit of reconciliation, abjuring all kinds of extremism.
In Il colore della vittoria, the audience is shown a bourgeois Italy where fascism was nothing more than a type of political regime. Mussolini was shown almost as any head of government who, following the final, met with the victorious players, for whom the course of existence would not change following that meeting. In the final scenes of the film, Ferraris IV says to his girlfriend: ‘tomorrow I’ll go to the Duce and then I’ll marry you’, ostensibly putting much more emphasis on the wedding than on the meeting with Mussolini, which in this way was deprived of that mythical aura, built by propaganda.
It is interesting to note that the fiction also refers to other national myths. In the sequence dedicated to the moments before the semi-final, won by Italy 1 to 0 against Austria, Pozzo encourages his players to sing the nationalistic song La leggenda del Piave (the legend of the River Piave), recalling the Great War. In this case, the song becomes the soundtrack to images of the Great War. As in the case of the name of Luigi Ferraris, the name that continues to be used for the Stadium of Genoa, even after Fascism the victory in the First World War is remembered as an element of identity and national unity in this fiction.
This film was fully in line with the films on fascism made in the 1980 s, which had been influenced by the work of Renzo De Felice. De Felice, starting from an approach linked to the traditional historiographical paradigms linked to the Marxist and liberal culture, completed a process of maturation, which was affected by the climate of tension of the ‘Years of Lead’ and the link ‘between a certain culture of anti-fascism and terrorism’. Through his work, De Felice not only sought to contribute to the development of studies on fascism, but he also wanted to contribute to finding solutions for the crisis of the so-called ‘First Republic’, to overcome the cycle of conflict of opposition between fascism and anti-fascism. This was useful for socialist governments, which were opening up to the Italian Social Movement. In this context, the so-called ‘historians of the people’ came to the attention of the Italians. These were a nucleus of journalists and scholars, including Antonio Spinosa, Arrigo Petacco, Roberto Gervaso and Giordano Bruno Guerri, who, as consultants for television and cinema, had the task of ‘watering down, to the general public, the vision of fascism by Renzo De Felice’.
In particular, these actors committed themselves to analysing fascism through the biographies of its protagonists in terms of their intimate individualism rather than in their political role. This was visible in Pasquale Squitieri’s film Claretta, co-written with Petacco and focusing on the figure of Mussolini’s lover; in Alberto Negrin’s Io e il Duce (Mussolini and I) focusing on the figure of Galeazzo Ciano, with historical advice from Giordano Bruno Guerri; as well as Il giovane Mussolini (Benito) of 1993, supervised by Renzo De Felice himself. The same approach was followed by Il colore della vittoria, which instead of narrating the socio-political aspects of the organization of the 1934 World Cup, focussed on the intimate and psychological aspects of Pozzo and Ferraris IV. Much as in La Notte di San Lorenzo (The Night of the Shooting Star) by the Taviani brothers, in which fascists and anti-fascists, even if holding irreconcilable positions, are shown as sons of the same land, in De Sisti’s film the most classic stereotype of Italians as ‘good people’ was presented again. The following year, this stereotype was also present in Mediterraneo, the Oscar award-winning film by Gabriele Salvatores.
This stereotype had already begun to be developed after the end of the Second World War. At that moment, a story began to be told about the regime and the following years, which did not condemn the Italians for their support of the past regime, but rather the Germans, who occupied the national territory from 1943, after the fall of Mussolini on 25 July. In cinema, these feelings were well described by the first neo-realist films, as demonstrated by Rossellini’s Roma Città Aperta (Rome, Open City), which highlighted the goodness of Italians as opposed to the German occupier and which was based on Catholic rhetoric through exaltation of the figure of the priest and the central position of the family.
This vision was part of the new project regarding the image of Italian identity, promoted since 1948 by Giulio Andreotti, who, as Undersecretary of the Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi, was responsible for sport and entrainment until 1954. Therefore, it is no coincidence that at the time Il colore della vittoria was made, Giulio Andreotti was the head of the government and that this film was produced by Rai 1, the main public television network, controlled by the Christian Democrats. However, as mentioned, this interpretation was affected by the narrative of fascism of Renzo De Felice, a narrative that was supported by Craxi’s socialists, in order to eliminate the conflict between fascists and anti-fascists that had characterized the ‘Years of Lead’. In this sense, it is also significant that this production was financed by Spanish Radio Television, which at the time was committed to supporting the process of transition to democracy and was trying to send a message of reconciliation between Franco and anti-Francoists, which was useful to the ‘new Spain’ led by the socialists of Filipe Gonzales. A few years later TVE financed the production of Il giovane Mussolini, mentioned above.
The national football museum
One more testament to the depoliticization of the 1934 World Cup victory is the Museo del calcio: the Football Museum in Coverciano, the neighbourhood in Florence where the training grounds and technical headquarters of the FIGC are located. Conceived during the 1990 World Cup but inaugurated on 22 May 2000. The deus ex machina of the Museum is the former doctor of the Italian male national football team, Fino Fini, who is still president of its Foundation.
As stated on the website, the idea behind the Museum is not only ‘to tell the story of the FIGC and the National team’, but also to support ‘the belief that sport and football have a key role in the development of people and society’ and the idea that football, ‘thanks to its universal language, is a tool for fundamental values such as solidarity, sacrifice, altruism, generosity, justice, and a key factor for integration and for crossing any linguistic or cultural barrier’.
However, all the victories during the fascist period are celebrated as much as the others, without offering to the visitors any particular socio-political explanation or context. There are two captions dedicated to the 1934 victory. In one titled ‘the world of football is painted in blue’, there are no references to the existence of the fascist regime or regarding the organization; there is simply the following assertion: ‘the organization was perfect and the infrastructure provided to the participating teams was excellent. Many stadiums had been newly built or recently refurbished’.
On the contrary, in another caption entitled ‘The 1934 World Cup (Italy)’, which is greater in length compared to the first, there are several references to fascism. However, despite the presence of fascist symbols in almost all the pictures (the fascist emblem being present on the players’ shirts), in the narrative adopted by the curators, the presence of the fascist regime is almost absent. The sentence ‘At the end, Mussolini awarded the Cup to the winning captain’ is the only one in which the Duce is mentioned, and the statement takes for granted that he was head of the government and of the Fascist Party. While we can also read the statement ‘The event promised to have significant popularity, and the occasion was seized upon by the regime to show the country not only from a sporting point of view’, it is curious to note the absence of the word ‘fascist’ next to ‘regime’. No other references are made to explain how the fascist regime used football and the 1934 World Cup as a propaganda tool. Even the presence of the Coppa del Duce, a trophy which was awarded to the winner together with a much smaller one designed by Abel Lafleur, is a missed opportunity, as it is exposed without any particular explanation. Curiously, the idea of naming a trophy after Mussolini was conceived by the organizers in order to ask for some money from the government rather than as a mere propaganda tool.
Similarly, in the caption dedicated to Vittorio Pozzo, one reads the following: ‘For all his life, he was a journalist. He fought as an Alpino during the First World War and on several occasions was the coach of the national team.’ It is a unifying narrative, which ignores both his initial acceptance of the fascist regime and the fact that, from 1943, he started to support the partisan movement. Furthermore, he is described as the ‘protagonist’ of both ‘the moments of glory’ of the 1930 s, and the ‘reconstruction that followed the disaster, the disruptions and the hate caused by the war’. Again, however, the words ‘fascism’ or ‘fascist’ never appear.
Furthermore, in the official publication of the museum edited after the 4th Italian World Cup victory in 2006, these limits re-emerge in the tale of the Italian victory of 1934, which follow the depoliticized path of the official FIGC narrative. However, compared to past official publications there are at least three pictures which are not related only to football: the national team giving the fascist salute before the final, the poster of Il Calcio Illustrato signed by the players with an Italian footballer giving the fascist salute, and the picture of the team meeting Benito Mussolini at Palazzo Venezia. While the word fascism is again still not used in the text, the reference to the fascist presence is greater compared to the official publications of the 1970 s, 1980 s and 1990s. The chapter is titled ‘When the Duce used to score’ and at the beginning fascist Italy is metaphorically called the ‘Italy of the alalà’, referring to a fascist chant. It is written that ‘in a year’s time, the most popular song would be Faccetta Nera’ (little black face), a fascist song linked to colonialism. In this piece, Mussolini is even quoted. However, all mentions of Italy’s fascist past are more for background reference for promoting a colourful narrative rather than for somehow contributing to perpetuate the memory of the 1934 World Cup. In this way, the sporting aspects are preserved while the political ones, linked to the dictatorship, are hidden as much as possible.
Conclusion
This article can be seen a first general overview of the memory of the 1934 World Cup, which needs further investigation. The topic could also be enlarged to the memory of football during fascism. However, it is already possible to answer the question: From 1945, was the public memory of 1934 World Cup an example of the suppression of the past so as to avoid confirming the connection between Italian people and fascism?
As we have shown, the public and mainstream narrative of the 1934 World Cup made that event a symbol of Italian sport, even after the fall of the fascist regime. Since the end of the Second World War, the sporting successes achieved during the fascist regime were emptied of their fascist component. In this sense, in the last 75 years, the official narratives of sport institutions and of some of the media have tried to create a concrete gap between the regime and football. This is evident by looking at the official memoirs and at some of the journalistic and television memoirs. The 1934 World Cup was an example of how the memory of the past is often a political transposition of the present. In fact, the separation of football from its fascist components was used in the public discourse. At least throughout the so-called ‘First Republic’, official speech on football tended to describe a world that was part of the regime, but not connected with it and far from fascist ideology. This description was intended to show that the thousands of fans who went to the stadium every week between the two world wars went only to attend football matches and not to participate in collective rituals aimed at the sacredness of fascism.
At the end of the War, this could show that the Italians were good people and that they had suffered as a result of the regime but had not been complicit. Therefore, the tendency since 1945 has been to erase the symbolic value that football and in particular the national team of Pozzo had for fascism at a time when football was considered a means to penetrate the public, match after match. To paraphrase Billig, football was ‘a banal fascism’, which would tie the Italians even more to the regime.