In 1908, a split from Milan led to the formation of a new Milanese team, Internazionale Football Club. An artist, Giorgio Muggiani, along with 42 other rebels, organized the historic meeting in a city-centre restaurant called The Clock.12 Fanatical Inter fan Giuseppe Prisco – who was the team’s lawyer in the 1960s – later joked that ‘everyone knows that we were born from a split with Milan: well, we really came from nowhere’. It appears that the motives behind the split were many, but were dominated by a discussion over the role of foreigners (after the end of the Kilpin era) and personal tensions. Inter’s vaguely communist name hinted at the squad’s non-nationalist intentions, confirmed by their first team, which contained eight Swiss players.
On the field, Internazionale enjoyed almost immediate success. In 1910, in their first title-winning year, Inter crushed their ‘cousins’ twice in the derby; 5–0 and 5–1. Inter had won their first championship just two years after their formation, amid great controversy over the preponderance of foreign players in their side. According to the history books, Internazionale introduced a new playing style, based upon short passing and stylish touches. Their play was certainly attacking, as their goals tally shows (they scored 55 goals against the 46 of second-placed Pro Vercelli). Inter took the field in the Arena, an impressive amphitheatre built by Napoleon in the early nineteenth century.
A photo of the Inter team of 1909 shows ten men in striped shirts, one with a large badge on his left chest (with a cross) – the captain. All the players sport moustaches and there appear to be two goalkeepers dressed in white. Another team member boasts an impressive potbelly. The championship portrait of 1910 is far more professional. Only the team are in the photo, Virgilio Fossati, the captain, is in the middle with a ball under his arm (and he has the physical shape of a modern player), whilst the others stand in formation around him. The eccentric goalkeeper – Piero Campelli, only sixteen at the time – the first player in his position to ‘catch’ the ball, instead of simply hoofing or punching it away – stands behind with his hands up holding a ball. The other star of that team is absent from this particular photo. Ermanno Aebi was a Swiss-Italian (born in Milan, his mother was Italian, his father Swiss), who learnt the game at school in Switzerland. He became a skilful attacking midfielder, scoring 100 goals in ten seasons with Inter, and winning two championships. Aebi was perhaps the first of a long line of stylish midfielders in the Italian game, who were to be at the centre of criticism, time and again, for their lack of application and grinta – ‘grit’. Aebi was known, in fact, by the nickname of signorina – ‘miss’ or ‘little lady’. Inter’s second championship was not to come until 1920, after a series of mediocre seasons. The birth of Inter began the tradition of one of the world’s great derbies – Milan-Inter.
In 1928, Internazionale merged with another Milanese club to form Ambrosiana. Usually interpreted as acquiescence to fascist diktat (against all foreign names and words) this fusion was probably more of a financial move. After the war, Inter returned to their original name and colours and they continued to play at the Arena, right in the centre of Milan, until 1947. AC Milan, after 1926, had their home in the newly constructed San Siro stadium, on the northern edge of the metropolis. Since 1947–1948, the two clubs have shared the magnificent San Siro, which is sometimes compared to the city’s most famous cultural arena of all – as La Scala of football.
L’Italia. The National Team and the Reading Tour
Italy’s national team began playing internationals in 1910, and the enthusiasm that surrounded them from the start was symptomatic of, and contributed to, the rapid growth of calcio after World War One. Yet, the early Italian teams were extremely weak in comparison with the major footballing nations of the time. Despite thrashing France and edging past Belgium, Italy were much less strong than Austria and Hungary. In the 1912 Olympics Italy lost to Finland and were crushed by Austria 5–1, although they managed to beat Sweden. With England, whom they did not meet at an international level until 1933, there was simply no comparison. Reading FC, a relatively minor club, toured Italy in May 1913. At the time, Reading had just finished eighth in the Southern League Division One.13
Reading took nearly two days to reach Genoa, where they thrashed the local team, 4–2. The next day it was the turn of Milan, who were dispatched 5–0, after Reading were four up within half an hour. Casale, who were to win the championship the following year, actually beat Reading, 2–1, but their pitch was so small that its width was close to that of a modern penalty area. On 15 May – their fourth match in five days – Reading bounced back. They destroyed Pro Vercelli – champions of Italy, and unbeaten for eighteen months – 6–0. On the following Sunday, in Turin, a match was organized between Italy and Reading. The English team won, 2–0, in front of 15,000 spectators. This was no scratch Italian team, but one with eight Vercelli players. Italy would take time to become a force on the world stage, but some talented players were emerging. Attilio Fresia of Genoa so impressed Reading that they signed him the following season, making him the first Italian to take part in professional football in England. He was not a success and moved on – to Clapham Common, for ten pounds – without ever making a first-team appearance. Reading’s Italian tour made an eighteen-pound profit.
Despite its low technical level the Italian team, almost from the start, attracted large crowds and provoked widespread interest in the game. Calcio as a mass game was created in part through the efforts and the popularity of the national team. Rapid progress was also made in coaching and training systems after World War One so that, by the 1920s, Italy was able to challenge for major honours on the world stage.
Calcio and World War One
Italy entered the war in 1915 following a series of violent pro-war demonstrations by a radical nationalist minority. The majority of Italians were opposed to the war and millions of peasants were forced to fight in terrible conditions under officers who spoke a language – Italian – that very few of them understood. Most Italians still conversed in local dialects. Thanks largely to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italy was able to force a victorious armistice in November 1918. In return for relatively tiny tracts of new land, 571,000 Italians had died and over 450,000 had been seriously wounded. War lacerated Italian society, creating divisions that were to lead to near-civil war and the destruction of her fragile democracy in the 1920s.
Instead of signalling the start of games on 23 May 1915, referees all over the country announced the suspension of the tournament. A day later, war was declared against Austria-Hungary.14 The conflict took a terrible toll on young Italian players who were called up. Virgilio Fossati, captain of Inter and the Italian national team, was killed on Christmas Day, at the age of 25. In all 26 players and staff from Inter lost their lives in the war, making their 1920 championship victory appear something of a miracle.15 Only two players played in both the 1910 and 1920 Internazionale championship teams.
During the war, Italian nationalists attempted to mobilize sport behind the war effort. Soldiers were anxious to read about sport and special sports papers were produced for them to browse through. Soldiers also played football at the front and appeals were made for footballs to be sent out to them. Sports Illustrated produced a war issue that compared the conflict to a vast game ‘in which there are no laws and the spectators are also actors’. With time, this paper became less and less about sport and more and more about war propaganda. Fascism’s use of sport as a potent propaganda weapon in the