A Season With Verona by Tim Parks

Author:Tim Parks
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448105168
Publisher: Random House

La Befana

Isn’t there some Arab sheikh interested in buying Verona? Our presidents are always crap. I can’t handle it.

Franco (Verona, Italia), Fuckingfedup.it

Please, Bill Gates, buy Verona.

Desper@do

L’EPIFANIA, TUTTE LE feste si porta via – Epiphany carries off the last holiday. So goes the proverb. It’s 6 January, the Twelfth Night, the last flicker of the Christmas–New Year binge. Crossing the street before breakfast with the local newspapers in my hand, I read the headline: La Befana ci riporta il calcio.

Befana is another word for the same festival: ‘Epiphany brings back football.’ More exactly, the Befana is the name of a legendary old woman who was too busy to see the Magi when they passed by on their way to Bethlehem. She would catch them on their way home, she thought. The Magi returned by a different route and two thousand years later she is still roving the world looking out for them. On 6 January, her busy day, she brings presents to Italy’s children. So her missed opportunity becomes our gift. Today La Nazione, a southern paper, subverts the old proverb about carrying off the holidays to say that in fact La Befana is bringing us children our football back. My suspicion of a complicity between the Christian and Serie A calendars is confirmed. When one enchantment wearies, the other kicks in again: Vicenza and Bari are playing this afternoon, Juventus and Fiorentina this evening. I’m going to watch them on TV with the players of Hellas Verona.

Meantime the local section of the paper gives three full pages to a ‘far west’ shootout in a village just a few miles from Lecce. Ten minutes of heavy gunfire. Over breakfast in the hotel, the news provokes the inevitable reflections on the south. ‘They shoot at each other, then whine about it.’ Certainly this would be rare news indeed in Verona.

I find myself at table with Beppe the masseur, Vincenzo the man who trains the keepers and Marco the kit man. Beppe had tried to be a footballer as a kid. At fourteen he was selected for a football college down in Rome. It didn’t work out. When they sent him away he was so depressed he couldn’t watch football for ages. Eventually he came back in via massage. All three of them agree that twenty years ago the players were more skilled. ‘When we trapped a ball, we trapped it dead. If it escaped even half a metre from your feet you were out.’ Thus Beppe. ‘But today. Half of them can barely trap the ball at all.’

I sense the man is still bitter about the day they told him his trial was over.

‘So what are the trainers looking for now?’

‘You have to be strong as an ox and then mentally willing to fit in with all these rigid schemes and mechanisms they have these days.’

But having said this, Beppe goes on to praise ex-coach Cesare Prandelli for the complicated patterns and strategies that he taught his players. As soon as the

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