A Season with Verona: Travels Around Italy in Search of Illusion, National Character, and...Goals!
Tim Parks
Language: English
Pages: 464
ISBN: 1559706813
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
After 20 years of living in Italy, Tim Parks, whom Joseph Brodsky, has called "the nest British author working today," spent a full year following the fortunes-and misfortunes-of the Verona football-oops! Soccer-club. Here is his rollicking report. Fro Udine to Catania, from San Siro to the Olimpico, traveling with the fans and the players from the tip to the toe of Italy, Tim Parks offers a highly personal account of his relationship with a country, its people, and its national sport. The fans, as always are accused of vulgarity, racism, and violence. The police are ambiguous, the journeys exhausting, the referees unforgivable, the anecdotes hilarious. In a world stripped of idealism and increasingly bereft of religion, Parks suggests that soccer offers a new and fiercely ironic way of engaging with the sacred.
A Civil War: A History of the Italian Resistance
Lonely Planet Italy's Classic Trips (1st Edition)
Florence & Tuscany (Regional Travel Guide)
Davids will hack like a butcher, completely unpunished, Inzaghi will at last find an “understanding ear” – butei, I’m afraid the big yellow-blue heart won’t be enough against those old thieves.’ It’s uncanny, coming back to my notes now more than a month after the event, to think that this man, tapping on his keyboard after another disappointing Sunday afternoon, could have got it so exactly right. It was as if he had already clicked on a link and seen next week’s game before it happened.
Fierce. Somebody decided it was time for Oddo to get the monkey grunts. Oddo has let us down seriously. Oo, oo, oo! The team went to pieces. Substituted, Bonazzoli appeared to be telling Perotti to go to hell. Adailton was sent off for an incident off the ball. Another suspension. The crowd began to applaud every move Reggina made. The brigate pressed against the railings behind Perotti. It was menacing. A squad of riot police in full gear appeared below us on the east side of the curva and.
Once to win a foul. There are more dangerous free kicks. The usually calm Danish boy is getting wild. He’s forgotten all the noble words he spoke when interviewed after the Pope’s game. We need these points! Even more importantly, we mustn’t let Vicenza have them. He slides across the filthy pitch with studs up. It’s dangerous. But he just can’t hold his man. Toni is strong, he’s talented. He defends the ball with great cunning. Laursen is tiring. Finally he hacks the striker down from behind and.
‘Professor Agnolin,’ announces the company secretary, ‘this is Mr Tim Parks.’ This man (professor?) is handsome, solid, thickly bearded, clear-eyed, cautious, in his early fifties I would guess. His voice has a pleasant gravelly sound to it. Very noticeably, he thinks before he speaks. Yes, about my coming to Lecce. ‘Hmm. Yes. Well, we are a little worried, to be frank, about what your plans are.’ He mentions an American writer who has written a book about a season with the Serie B team Castel.
March, apparently in a gesture of solidarity. They weren’t welcome. Each side blamed the other. Marsiglia wrote a letter to the Manifesto, the paper of the far left, announcing: ‘Verona is falling into the dark night of the Italian Republic. You must reawaken people’s consciences. The church is even worse than my aggressors.’ ‘This bastard Jew’, Albe is saying, in the dark coach at three-thirty in the morning, a bottle of limoncello in his hand, ‘is covering our city with shit.’ Limoncello is a.