Chapter Fourteen—A Juventus Game: No Wonder Cicero Was Italian

Max and I were walking around the outside of the stadium to our section. We were going to see Juventus, Turin’s Series A soccer team. It was the coldest day since we had been in Turin. It was raining. We’d had difficulty finding which gate we were supposed to enter. My shoes were wet, my hands were cold, and Juventus wasn’t all that good this year. We could see the lights, shining through the thick fog that the Po Valley offers in the winter, but we weren’t inside yet. Up ahead we could see the ticket-checkers scanning IDs. (Side note: bring, once again, photocopies of your passport—you should always have them.)

And then we heard the voice of something like a small army bellowing in unison from the arena. Max looked at me with bright eyes through his glasses. “This is awesome!” he said. I smiled. Indeed, Max was right.

Judging from the intensity and volume of the chants and songs we’d heard on the outside, I’d have guessed the stadium was full. But it was only at about 60% capacity. We got to our seats as the players were being introduced. I wondered if I’d be disappointed. The announcer broadcasted the first name of the player, something wonderfully Italian, and the crowd bellowed back his last name. My eyebrows rose. Each name filled the stadium as if it were sold out.

Most of the noise came from the two sections behind the nets, the equivalents of student sections in American college football. Those were the cheaper seats, but the fans sitting there sang the loudest. Indeed, they sang the whole game. They sang throughout the scoreless first half, they sang when we scored, and they still sang when we lost. It was admirable. It made me a little ashamed of our own student sections, where only the suspiciously loyal student knows the words to the five different school songs, where most people are drunk. But the Italians, like American college students, can be unforgiving with their players during the game when they make mistakes. Several times a Juventus player would blunder and then, feverishly, a handful of people would stand up in their seats and deliver a Cicero-esque speech of what the player ought to have done. Exceptional rhetoric. The energy of the two sections is comparable, but the Italians cheer with consistency, with style.

I think Max and I felt a good deal more Italian after that game.