Juve Is Magic

My first direct encounter with the Anglicisms of Italian football was traumatic. Daubed in bold white letters on a wall near the circolo sportivo of a little village in the Abruzzi where I spend my summers and where I was, and to my knowledge still am, the only regular English male visitor, was a slogan whose message seemed to me to be painfully and unmistakably clear: ‘Via il mister da Tollo’. Discreet inquiry subsequently elicited the reassuring intelligence that it was merely an expression of dissatisfaction with the manager of the local football team, a linguistic relic of the early decades of the century when football managers were imported from England, strange and alien masters of a still arcane science, which they practised at unlikely-sounding establishments like the Genoa Cricket and Football Club, institutions set up by enthusiastic and upper-class British amateur sportsmen, spreading the gospel of Mens sana in corpore sana and the Olympic sporting ideal, in repayment of the cultural debt incurred by the milords of the Grand Tour

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• ‘Roma non dimentica i suoi figli’

  Open Access•Matthew Klugman, F Ricatti•Modern Italy•2012

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• Been There, Done That, Bought the T-Shirt

  Open Access•John Mcmanus•International Journal Middle East…•2013

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