As world watches Games, Italy watches soccer
Not even Italian gold-medal winner can distract nation from favorite sport
 Andrew Medichini / AP Italians watch a soccer game on a television screen in a lounge of a hotel in the Sestriere ski resort in Italy on Feb. 19, while the Winter Games were going on around them. |
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OULX, Italy - Silvio Faure is a lonely man in a lonely bar.
He sits on a stool in a room empty but for four men playing cards. On TV, Italy is beating Canada in Olympic curling.
Around the corner at the Roxy Bar, 100 fanatics are gathered around another TV. This one sits in a corner like an altar. There is constant yelling and cheering. It’s for Juventus, the storied soccer team from nearby Turin.
Even in this valley, where Olympic events are being staged seemingly on every hill, all that matters is “calcio” (KAHL-choe) — Italian for soccer.
“The Olympics are a passing fancy that will be extinguished along with the Olympic flame,” Claudio Zanbernardi, 29, said during halftime at the Roxy.
“In Italy, soccer is a true passion.”
Last week, Italians celebrated their first gold medal of the games, the luge triumph of veteran Armin Zoeggeler. But the news wasn’t as big as the matchup between first-place Juventus and second-place Internazionale, even though the title is all but decided.
At the Casa FISI, the Italian winter sports federation’s hospitality venue in the Alps, guests at a champagne-soaked celebration for Zoeggeler’s victory couldn’t resist slinking downstairs to catch glimpses of the Juventus game.
The next morning, the front page of sports newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport showed where the nation’s sporting priorities are: A huge headline trumpeted Juventus’ 2-1 victory, while Zoeggeler’s gold got silver-medal treatment — a picture of the luger with a small caption.
Gazzetta’s soccer coverage ran for the first 23 pages. News about the Olympics started on page 30.
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“There isn’t an equivalent in the United States,” he added. “You have basketball season, you have baseball and you have football — three sports competing for attention. Soccer has no rival.”
For those Italians who don’t share the passion, the hoopla can get a little annoying.
Businessman Massimo Oblino popped into the Roxy for a cup of tea and looked with bemusement at the crowd of people hypnotized by the TV.
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“They should have a network devoted entirely to the Olympics,” Oblino said, “but they keep putting soccer in between.”
For many Italians, however, soccer is more than entertainment. It’s woven into the social fabric.
“If you are the owner of a factory employing 500 people, on Monday you talk to any of them about soccer, and that’s completely unifying,” Severgnini said. “Italy doesn’t have very much in terms of national culture like that. ... You have Hollywood and all the stars, we don’t have anything remotely (like that).”
Soccer is also the bond to one’s hometown, extremely important in a nation that was a collection of small kingdoms and city-states until Italy’s unification in 1861.
“So much (of soccer) is linked with cities and towns,” Severgnini said. “We don’t see franchises, as you do, that go from one place to another.”
Vittorio Manfredi, who was watching the Juventus match at the Roxy, had another way to explain the place soccer holds in the hearts of Italian men.
“After women, there is soccer,” he said. “Then comes culture, and then politics. That is the scale of values.”
And where do the Olympics rank?
Manfredi merely shrugged, as if he didn’t understand the question.
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