Calcio: A History of Italian Football. John Foot

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СКАЧАТЬ It is easy to get in through a hole in the red fence, next to the remains of some ticket offices. What you next see are the vestiges of one of the most loved and famous football stadiums in the world – the ‘Filadelfia’, home to the Grande Torino team. In 1948 Torino played nineteen home games here, winning eighteen of them. The pitch is still there, and there is even a goal with a broken crossbar. Beyond that, all that is left are a few strange pieces of stand – sticking up out of the grass like bizarre Roman monuments. Here and there you can see traces of the old stadium – signs, steps, barriers. Outside, the Torino fans have hung up a defiant sign – the Casa del Popolo Granata (Claret red home of the people) and a protest banner calling for No Housing on the Filadelfia.

      Everything else, apart from one tower and a sparkling Torino emblem in stone on the front, has been demolished. Nonetheless, this is still a magical place that transmits a strong sense of history and tragedy. To walk on the field where Valentino Mazzola commanded play, rolling up his sleeves before ordering another attack, is to touch the very stuff of football legend. Torino fans can often be seen talking outside the ex-ground, or gathering in the Torino bars nearby. When journalist Massimo Gramellini organized a ‘March of Claret Red Pride’ in 2003, the starting point was at what he called ‘the ruins of the Filadelfia’. The old stadium, however, is also a source of shame – the ‘shame of all Turin’ as one fan’s website put it.

      In 1926 the stadium opened with a 4–0 victory over Roma, in the presence of Prince Umberto (heir to the throne) and 15,000 spectators. It had an English-style design, with long stands and barriers. The spectators were extremely close to the pitch. Financed by the then Turin president Conte Enrico Marone di Cinzano the stadium stood on what was at that time the edge of the city, close to the FIAT factories which provided the bedrock of Torino support. Torino won their first championship here in 1928.

      Torino’s great 1940s sides – Il Grande Torino – did not just beat teams, they destroyed them. Playing with the ‘method’ system made popular in England, Torino attacked – scoring goals almost at will, especially from midfield, and rarely conceding at the back. They were also fitter than other teams – often scoring late-on. President Novo took physical preparation very seriously, and employed an expert English coach – Leslie Lievesley – to deal with this side of the game in the late 1940s. In addition, Torino were a remarkable unit, friends on and off the field, a team who had lived through the trials and tribulations of the war. Torino could also count on the intimidating atmosphere of the Filadelfia stadium that no visiting team could cope with.

      After Superga, Torino continued to play in the crumbling venue until 1963, when they began to share the nearby Comunale stadium with Juventus.²⁸ Built in 1932–33, the Comunale was designed as a simple concrete bowl. It held almost 60,000 fans but lacked the intensity of the Filadelfia. The ex-‘Benito Mussolini stadium’ (renamed in 1945) was renowned for its enormous concrete tower, covered in lights – the Torre Maratona – with its huge sign saying STADIO. Torino played in the Comunale for 27 years, winning the championship there in 1975. The Comunale stood empty after 1990 – although Juventus continue to train there – while hundreds of turnstiles and ticket booths slowly rusted away.²⁹

      In 1990 both Turin clubs moved to yet another stadium, the Stadio delle Alpi, an impressive structure built for the World Cup of that year. However, it lies right on the edge of town – unlike the Comunale and the Filadelfia – and its athletics track (rarely used) and architecture make it hard to see the game properly from inside. Torino fans have had a dream for forty years – to return to regular games at a rebuilt Filadelfia. Many promises have been made over the years, and all of them have been broken.

      The Filadelfia Story. Reconstruction, Promises, Ruins

      ‘At the “Fila” we must start to make “Toro”’

      MASSIMO GRAMELLINI

      ‘A physical and moral black hole in Turin, a levelled ground of ruins’

      La Repubblica, 10.3.1999

      Torino continued to train in the Filadelfia until the 1980s. For coach Emilio Mondonico the secret of the magic of the Filadelfia was that ‘people live in symbiosis with the players…it was a home, a monument, a den’. An added touch was the visibility of the ground afforded to many residents in surrounding houses. Young fans mingled with older fans and the players at training sessions, held in front of the one remaining, long stand. In 1990 things began to move, at last, or so it seemed. The stadium was handed over to the club and a project was drawn up for a new 30,000-capacity ground. For the then president, ‘the plan to go back to the Filadelfia’ was ‘above all an ideological issue’. In 1994, the inevitable happened, after years of neglect. The stadium was closed with the club claiming it was now too dangerous to allow people in to watch the team train. Sessions were moved to a FIAT field on the outskirts of town. Whereas 1,000 fans would still turn up at the Filadelfia, only 200 fanatics bothered to travel out to the new venue.

      The Filadelfia site began a long decline. Later in the same year a group of punks occupied the site and played football on the overgrown pitch and drug-users began to frequent the abandoned field at night as it emerged that Torino had debts of fifty thousand billion lire. Most of the team was sold off as President Calleri became known as ‘lo smantellatore’ – the dismantler. Yet, Calleri remained hopeful about a return to the Filadelfia, a place, he said, where ‘rhetoric and reality coincide perfectly’.

      In 1994 a Pro-Filadelfia Foundation was set up by Torino fan and ex-city-Mayor Diego Novelli (a life-long communist). More promises were made. ‘The project is OK, we now need to find the money’, said Novelli. The ‘new stadium’ would be very small (just 15,000 seats) and would be accompanied by a museum and a library. In 1995, fans were asked to ‘buy a brick’ for the new Filadelfia (for about thirty pounds each); wisely, only 400 fans did so. A new plan now provided for an even smaller stadium (down to 12,000 seats) that would only be used for training. The building site would open in ‘one year’s time’. In the same year Torino’s fans unveiled this banner: ‘The tragedy is not dying, but forgetting: save the Filadelfia’. Work was scheduled to start in 1996 and would be completed, Novelli claimed, well in time for the fiftieth anniversary of Superga.

      In November 1998, the council declared that work on the new stadium would start ‘very soon’. Time went by. No building work began. Meanwhile one of Torino’s many ex-presidents, Gianmauro Borsano, who had taken the club to the brink of bankruptcy, was arrested. It emerged that he had more or less stolen fourteen thousand million lire from Torino. Another year passed but the site remained unchanged, if sadder and more overgrown. The club was sold – again – to Massimo Vidulich in March 1997 – a frontman for a mysterious group of Genovese financiers. ‘We are very interested in the rebirth of the Filadelfia,’ Vidulich told the fans, ‘we will never leave there, at any cost.’

      Discussions already seemed to be pointing in another direction, with plans to move Torino back to the Comunale. In July 1997, in what was both a good and a bad sign, more of the old stadium was demolished, preparing the way, it was hoped, for a new project. Many old players and staff were close to tears and Franco Ossola, son of a Superga victim (his namesake), said, ‘I only had this field where I could feel that my father was alive, they are taking everything away from us.’ Part of the monument to Superga was removed, leaving an empty plinth. Cynicism soon set in. Torino fan and journalist Massimo Gramellini wrote that ‘the Egyptians took less time to complete the Pyramid of Cheops’. Meanwhile, as the team got worse and worse, Torino’s long-suffering fans unveiled a banner – directed at the players – which read: ‘Even in the last few games, you have been unworthy of this shirt’. Torino’s followers occupied themselves mainly with songs about the past – chanting about heroes from the 1940s, СКАЧАТЬ