A Season with Verona [Hardcover]

For the last few months Anglo-Italian novelist Tim Parks has been writing of his devotion to Italian football club Hellas Verona in The Guardian. In A Season with Verona we get a chance to read the full and absorbing narrative that lay behind those short snippets.

In some ways the book is a standard travelogue. In following his lowly Series A team in their seasonal slog around Italy, Parks gets to visit all the famous sights and cities. What makes this journey so different and so interesting is that Parks is accompanied by vividly ordinary, honestly working-class, determinedly urban Italians and gets to share their Nick Hornbyish highs and lows. This in turn provides a credible, fresh and revealing insight into the Italian character. These fans do all the normal soccer-supporter things like fight, drink, despair, exult, rant and put each other in comas; but they also do more surprising things, like sing songs in praise of the murderous Liverpool fans of Heysel and give voice to racist feelings about their southern compatriots.

This may not sound like most people's image of southern loveliness. Indeed it isn't. But it is a much needed antidote to all that saccharine-sweet Under The Tuscan Sun stuff; and it also makes this book a splendid bedside companion to the Italian campaign in the next, or indeed any, World Cup. --Sean Thomas

Travels around Italy, in search of illusion, national character and goals!

Travels around Italy in search of illusion, national character and goals --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Tim Parks goes on the road to follow the fortunes of Hellas Verona football club, to pay a different kind of visit to some of the world's most beautiful cities, and to get a fresh take on the conundrum that is national character. From Udine to Catania, from the San Siro to the Olimpico, travelling with the fans and the players, this is a highly personal account of one man's relationship with a country, its people and its national sport. The club are struggling, as always, to keep their heads above water in Serie A. The fans, as always, are accused of vulgarity, racism and violence. It's an election year and politics encroaches. The police are ambiguous, the journeys exhausting, the referees unforgivable, the anecdotes hilarious. Behind it all is the growing intuition that in a world stripped of idealism and bereft of religion, football offers a new and fiercely ironic way of forming community and engaging with the sacred.

Travels around Italy, in search of illusion, national character and goals!

'Addictive reading...each chapter is a short story, the whole book an epic' Observer

Is Italy a united country, or a loose affiliation of warring states? Is Italian football a sport, or an ill-disguised protraction of ancient enmities?

After twenty years in the bel paese, Tim Parks goes on the road to follow the fortunes of Hellas Verona football club, to pay a different kind of visit to some of the world's most beautiful cities. From Udine to Catania, from the San Siro to the Olimpico, this is a highly personal account of one man's relationship with a country, its people and its national sport. A book that combines the tension of cliff-hanging narrative with the pleasures of travel writing, and the stimulation of a profound analysis of one country's mad, mad way of keeping itself entertained.

'Parks knows his football, and he knows Italy still better. His adopted country, in all its enduring and exasperating strengths and weaknesses, comes vividly to life' Sunday Times

'A fascinating emotional journey... His descriptions of Italian football are descriptions of Italy itself, its regional differences, its squabbles, its distinctive temper' Daily Telegraph

'An enthralling, insightful account of the real Italy' Independent

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Tim Parks studied at Cambridge and Harvard. He lives near Verona with his wife and three children.

Facci Sognare
Proud to be among the worst ...
McDan, Verona, Veneto
FACCI SOGNARE, says the banner. Make us dream! Please!
We're in the Bentegodi stadium, Verona. My son and I are sitting on the edge of the famous Curva Sud. The South End. Ten minutes ago, hurrying with the throng up the stairs, our path was suddenly blocked. Somebody thrust a plastic stick across the steps. Tightly wrapped around it was a blue and yellow flag. I agreed to a 'donation' of a thousand lire. So now the whole curva is a rising tide of flags, of shiny blue and yellow plastic, mass-produced, fiercely waved, and from beneath that flutter comes the slow loud swell of ten thousand voices chanting: 'Haaaayllas. Haaaayllas. Haaaayllas!' Because the team's official name is Hellas Verona. At the bottom of the curve, draped over the parapet where the terraces look down on the goal, a huge and beautiful banner proclaims 19/=\03, indicating the date when the club was formed and the little ladder, symbol of the Scaligeri family, ancient masters of Verona. The fans know their history.
Hellas - Homeland. Fan, from fanatic, from the Latin fanaticus, which means a worshipper at a temple. 'CIAO CAMPO!' somebody has written in spray-paint on the concrete of the tunnel that leads us out into the stadium - Hello Pitch! - and then beside this, in English, since everything is more solemn when written in a foreign language: I LOVE YOU. As if it were the place rather than the team or the game that was important, this temple, the Bentegodi stadium. Certainly when you push out of that tunnel after a choking switchback of dusty stairs and corridors, when you emerge into the sunshine or the floodlights, the head lifts and the heart expands quite marvellously. The sense of occasion, with the crowd now ranged in slanted tiers and the pitch hugely green beneath you, is enormous.
The football stadium is one of the few really large constructions that turns its wrong side out. The oval bowl 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 obsession, of exaltation. Even a grumpy misanthrope like myself can feel the lift of communal delirium. Even I am chanting, Haaaayllas, Haaaayllas, Haaaayllas, waving my plastic flag. It's the first home game of the season. Verona face the daunting Udinese, already well advanced in the UEFA cup. Please don't lose. A chant starts up. 'Verona, Verona segna per noi!' Verona, score for us. It spreads round the curva.'Verona Verona, vinci per noi!' Win for us. It's a liturgy. Hellas Verona, facci sognare! Make us dream.
But not all dreams are happy, and even fewer untroubled. My own season actually began two weeks ago. For years I have been a regular at the Bentegodi, but this season, for the first time, I have decided to go to all the away games too. And to write about them. Partly, the writing is an excuse. How can I explain to my wife that I am going to be away every other Sunday for nine months if I'm not writing about it? If I'm not making money. It's such a mad indulgence: to watch Verona play in Rome, in Naples, in Lecce and Reggio Calabria. 'It'll be a travel book,' I insist. 'At last I'll write a real travel book.' I can't wait to see those games. I can't believe I'm going to do this.
But at the same time, I want to get my mind around it too. I want to think and think long about the way people, the way Italians, Veronese, relate to football, the way they, we, dream this dream, at once so intense and so utterly, it seems, unimportant. And the way the dream intersects with ordinary life, private and public. For years now I've had the suspicion that there is something emblematically modern about the football crowd. They are truly fanatical, in the Curva Sud, but simultaneously ironic, even comic. A sticky film of self-parody clings to every gesture of fandom. We cannot take ourselves entirely seriously. Or perhaps this is the serious thing, this mixture of delirium and irony, this indulgence in strong emotions without being burned up by them. When the Haaaayllas chant ends everybody claps in self-congratulation and lots of them burst out laughing. Forza Hellas! We know we're ridiculous.
But to go back a step; the first game being away from home, the season began, for me, one evening towards the end of September, when I stopped the car outside Bar Zanzibar, rendezvous of the notorious Brigate Gialloblù , the Yellow-Blue Brigades, the hardcore. In the cluttered window a handwritten announcement said that the coach trip to Bari would cost a hundred thousand lire return. Thirty pounds. Bari is about five hundred and fifty miles away and since the game is at three in the afternoon, fans are invited to meet for departure outside the Zanzibar at midnight the evening before. It's a baptism of fire.
I push through the doors, produce my hundred thousand, ask for a ticket. The pair behind the bar are middle-aged, man and wife, straightforward and gruff, bent over the sink. They are clearly surprised not to know a face. Everybody here knows everybody else by name, by nickname, big boys and old men vigorously slapping down cards on chequered tablecloths and shouting at each other. You'll never understand whether they're arguing or not. They're arguing without being angry. Or they're angry without arguing. In any event the bar booms with noise. The TV has been turned up to deal with it. I have to repeat myself: I want to go to Bari!
And now the couple are surprised again that they can't place my accent. Why would I support Verona if I wasn't Veronese? Verona are not Juventus.