The founding of Atalanta football club

Bergamo institution started by students of local high school

An historic picture of the Atalanta team that
competed in the 1913-14 season

The football club now known as Atalanta Bergamasca Calcio - generally known as Atalanta - was founded on this day in 1907 in the Lombardy city of Bergamo.

The club was the idea of a group of students from the Liceo Classico Paolo Sarpi, one of the city’s oldest and most prestigious high schools.

They gave it the rather long-winded name of the Società Bergamasca di Ginnastica e Sports Atletici - the Bergamasca Society of Gymnastics and Athletic Sports - to which they attached the name Atalanta after the Greek mythological heroine famed for her running prowess.

For the first seven years of its life, the new club had no home and played friendly matches on whatever open space was available, but in 1914 found a home ground in Via Maglio del Lotto, adjoining the railway line just outside Bergamo station.

The ground had a small grandstand housing 1,000 spectators. It is said that the drivers of trains approaching the station on match days would slow down in order to enjoy a few moments of the action.

The club badge depicts
Greek heroine Atalanta

In the event, after Italy was drawn into World War One, the club remained in Via Maglio del Lotto only two seasons. With so many young men going off to fight, the club suspended its activities and sold the ground.

When the club was reconstituted before the start of the 2019-20 season, they established a new home, named the Clementina Stadium, on the site of a former racecourse to the southeast of the city centre.

By that point, club members were eager to join the Italian Football Federation (FIGC) and compete in their league but Bergamo had another team with similar ambitions, called Bergamasca, which had evolved from a club started by Swiss emigrants in 1904.

The FIGC would allow only one team from Bergamo to compete in their Prima Categoria, as their first division was then called. To decide which of them would represent the city, in 1919 a play-off was arranged, which Atalanta won 2-0.

In the event, the two clubs agreed to merge in 1920, forming a new club which at first was called Atalanta Bergamasca di Ginnastica e Scherma 1907 - scherma being fencing. It was soon shortened to Atalanta Bergamasca Calcio, which remains its name today. 

The club now plays at the Gewiss Stadium on Viale Giulio Cesare in the northeast of the city, a short walk from the centre of the Città Bassa - Bergamo’s lower city - and visible in the panoramic view available from vantage points on the eastern side of the mediaeval Città Alta, the elevated old part of the city.

Atalanta BC play their home games at the Gewiss
Stadium in Bergamo's Città Bassa

The stadium has been their home since 1928. It was built during the Fascist era at a cost of 3.5 million lira and originally named Stadio Mario Brumana after a Fascist official, which was common practice with public buildings at the time.

After the Fascist regime was overthrown in World War Two, the ground was renamed Stadio Communale and gradually expanded to allow more than 40,000 spectators to attend matches. It became the Stadio Atleti Azzurri d'Italia in 1994 and in 2019 adopted the Gewiss name after the club signed a sponsorship deal with the Swiss electronics company.

At the same time as Atalanta moved into the ground in 1928, the Italian championship was restructured with the top division renamed Serie A, as it is today.

Atalanta were initially placed in Serie B but within a decade had been promoted to Serie A. 

Nicknamed variously La Dea (The Goddess), Glo Orobici (after the Orobic or Bergamo Alps) or I Nerazzurri (the Black and Blues), Atalanta have never won the Serie A, yet have the proud record of having spent 62 seasons in the top division, 28 in Serie B and only one in Serie B, which is the best record of any team not based in a regional capital.

The current team, managed since 2016 by Gian Piero Gasperini, are enjoying one of the most successful spells in the club’s history, having qualified for the Champions League three seasons in a row and twice reached the final of the Coppa Italia.

The imposing walls around Bergamo's Città 
Alta go back to the time of the Renaissance

Travel tip:

Bergamo, the fourth largest city in Lombardy, has an upper and lower town that are separated by impressive fortifications. The magical upper town - the Città Alta - has gems of mediaeval and Renaissance architecture surrounded by the impressive 16th century walls, which were built by the Venetians, of which Bergamo was a dominion at the time. Outside the walls, the elegant Città Bassa, which grew up on the plain below, has some buildings that date back to the 15th century as well as imposing architecture added in the 19th and 20th centuries. While the Città Alta is the draw for many tourists, the lower town also has art galleries, churches and theatres and a wealth of good restaurants and smart shops to enjoy.

The neoclassical facade of the Liceo
Classico Paolo Sarpi in Bergamo

Travel tip:

The Liceo Classico Paolo Sarpi, the high school whose students started the club now known as Atalanta BC, is an historic institution in Piazza Rosate in Bergamo’s Città Alta, opposite the rear entrance of the city’s cathedral. Identifiable by its neoclassical facade designed by Ferdinando Crivelli, the Liceo has its roots in the first public school of Grammar, Humanities, and Rhetorics established by the Republic of Venice in 1506 under the name of Accademia della Misericordia. It was renamed after Paolo Sarpi, a Venetian polymath, in 1803, by Napoleonic decree. The building that houses the modern school was built between 1845 and 1852 under the auspices of the Austrian Government, when it was known as Regio Liceo. In 1860, the academy contributed to the Italian Unification with 70 students joining Garibaldi's Expedition of the Thousand, aimed at annexing the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to the embryonic Kingdom of Italy. Today it is one of Italy’s leading elite academies, with 100 to 120 students graduating every year and a curriculum based in classical subjects such as Greek, Latin, Philosophy and History.

Also on this day:

1473: The birth of Renaissance sculptor Bartolommeo Bandinelli

1797: Venice loses its independence

1810: The birth of operatic tenor Giovanni Matteo Mario

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Paolo Di Canio - footballer

Sublime talent overshadowed by fiery temperament

Paolo Di Canio had four
successful years at West Ham

The brilliant but controversial footballer Paolo Di Canio was born on this day in 1968 in the Quarticciolo neighbourhood of Rome.

Di Canio, an attacking player with a reputation for scoring spectacular goals, played for several of Italy’s top clubs but also forged a career in Britain, joining Glasgow Celtic in Scotland and representing Sheffield Wednesday, West Ham United and Charlton Athletic during a seven-year stay in England.

After finishing his playing career back in Italy, he returned to England to become manager of Swindon Town and then Sunderland, although it was a brief stay.

Di Canio scored almost 150 goals in his career but his fiery temper landed him in trouble on the field while his political views - he was openly a supporter of fascism - attracted negative headlines off it.

Despite growing up in a working-class area of Rome which was a stronghold of AS Roma fans, Di Canio supported their city rivals SS Lazio from an early age.

As a child, he was overweight, but his love for football drove him to beat his addiction to junk food and high-calorie fizzy drinks and become supremely physically fit. 

He signed his first professional contract with Lazio in 1985 at the age of 17, having impressed with the club’s Under-19 team, spending a season on loan at the lower division club Ternana before making his senior debut in Lazio colours in October 1988.

Di Canio began his career with the
club he supported as a boy, Lazio

Lazio had won promotion to Serie A the previous season and Di Canio became an instant hero with Lazio fans when he scored the only goal in the first Rome derby of the season.

It soon became clear that Di Canio was a highly-talented player and it was not long before he earned a move to Juventus in 1990. However, he found himself competing for a place against such stars as Roberto Baggio, Salvatore Schillaci, Pierluigi Casiraghi, Fabrizio Ravanelli, Gianluca Vialli, and Andreas Möller and his displeasure at not being given more game time led to a falling-out with coach Giovanni Trapattoni.

He moved to Napoli and, after one season, to AC Milan, with whom he won a Serie A medal in 1996 but again could not hold down a permanent role in the side and departed after a row with their coach, Fabio Capello.

His next move was to Scotland, joining Celtic, where he scored 15 goals in 37 games in the 1996-97 season, easily the best return of his career. He was the Scottish Professional Footballers Association player of the year but after his demand for a substantial pay rise was knocked back he refused to travel on the club’s pre-season tour to the Netherlands and was swiftly offloaded.

Di Canio’s next club was in England, where manager David Pleat made the inspired decision to team him up with another Italian forward, Benito Carbone, at Sheffield Wednesday. As the two became a brilliant double act, scoring 25 goals between them in the 1997-98 Premier League season, Pleat’s gamble in paying £4.2 million for Di Canio looked to have paid off.

It all turned sour, however, in September of the following season in one of the most notorious incidents in the history of the Premier League when Di Canio was so incensed at being shown the red card by referee Paul Alcock in a match against Arsenal that he pushed the official to the ground. Banned for 11 matches and fined £10,000, Di Canio never played for Wednesday again.

Di Canio signing autographs on a return visit to Upton
Park in 2010. He had been hugely popular there

Yet by the following January, he was lighting up the Premier League again, this time with West Ham United, who had signed him for a bargain price of £1.5 million. His four years there were arguably the best of his career, bringing him 47 goals in 118 Premier League games. He might have stayed longer had they not been relegated in 2003, the club releasing him on a free transfer.

A year with another London club, Charlton Athletic, proved less successful and in 2004 he returned to Italy, rejoining his first club, Lazio. It was there that his political views came to the fore. Having revealed in his autobiography in 2001 that he was an admirer of Italy’s Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, he would sometimes celebrate a goal with a fascist salute, much to the delight of the far-right political factions among the Lazio fans.

Their adoption of Di Canio as a figurehead did not sit well with the club’s hierarchy, who felt the club’s reputation was being damaged. In 2006 his contract was not renewed. He signed instead for a lower league club, Cisco Roma, where he had two seasons before announcing his retirement in 2008.

Three years later, he returned to England to begin a career in management. In his first job, at Swindon Town, he won promotion to from League Two to League One in his first season and might have gone on to enjoy more success had the club not hit the rocks financially. He moved next to Sunderland, but his time on Wearside ended after only six months, despite him supervising a stunning 3-0 win away to arch rivals Newcastle United in only his second match.

Sunderland had lost their vice-chairman, the Labour politician David Miliband, and the patronage of the Durham Miners’ Association because of Di Canio’s political views, but it was after complaints from the players about his treatment of them that he was sacked in September, 2013.

Despite applying for several jobs subsequently, Di Canio has not worked in management again, although in an interview in 2021 he expressed a continuing desire to return to England should an opportunity arise.

The former police headquarters in Quarticciolo
is an example of the area's stark architecture

Travel tip:

Quarticciolo, which can be found about 10km (six miles) east of Rome’s city centre, is part of the Alessandrino district and is a predominantly working class neighbourhood. It was built by the Fascist regime in the late 1930s and bears many of the characteristics of the architectural styles favoured at the time, combining stark urban lines with occasional echoes of classicism. At its centre was the Casa del Fascio, which served as the municipal offices and the headquarters of the party. Residential apartments were strictly assigned depending on size of family or societal status, with some set aside for war widows, some for active soldiers, others to members of the Fascist militia. Ironically, as German troops occupied Rome after the fall of Mussolini in 1943, the area became a stronghold for partisans and resistance fighters and the operational base for Giuseppe Albano, a famous partisan known as Il Gobbo di Quarticciolo - the Hunchback of Quarticciolo - and his Gobbo Gang.

The Palazzo Spada, which dates back to the
mid-16th century, is one of Terni's older buildings

Travel tip:

Before he made his Serie A debut for Lazio, Paolo di Canio spent a period on loan with Ternana, a smaller club based in the city of Terni, in Umbria, which is situated about 95km (59 miles) north of Rome, near the border with Lazio. Terni was left in need of substantial renewal after the Second World War and therefore combines historical buildings with more modern ones. For example, in the central Piazza della Repubblica, which stands where the forum of the Roman city of Interamna was located, is the Palazzo Spada, which was designed by Antonio da Sangallo, who died in Terni in 1546. By contrast, the Corso del Popolo, the central thoroughfare behind Palazzo Spada, was built in the post-War period, while the Lancia di Luce, a 30m high steel artwork by Arnaldo Pomodoro, was added as recently as 1993.

Also on this day:

1879: The birth of musician Ottorino Respighi

1897: The birth of politician Manlio Brosio

1950: The birth of tennis star Adriano Panatta

1964: The birth of footballer Gianluca Vialli

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Diego Maradona joins Napoli

Argentina star hailed as a ‘messiah’ by Neapolitans

Diego Maradona helped SSC Napoli to
reach the top of the Italian football world

SSC Napoli, a club who had never won Italy’s Serie A since their formation in 1926 and lived in the shadow of the powerful clubs in the north of the country, stunned the football world on this day in 1984 by completing the world record signing of Argentina star Diego Maradona.

Maradona, who would captain his country as they won the World Cup in Mexico two years later, agreed to move to Napoli from Spanish giants Barcelona, who he had joined from Argentina club Boca Juniors in 1982.

Although the Catalan team had been keen to offload him after two years in which Maradona had never been far from controversy, his arrival in arguably the poorest major city in Italy, whose team had finished 10th and 12th in the previous two Serie A seasons, was still a sensation.

Maradona’s unveiling at the Stadio San Paolo on 5 July, 1984 attracted a crowd of 75,000 to the stadium. Napoli supporters were fanatical about their team despite their lack of success and were thrilled to have a distraction at a time when problems with housing, schools, buses, employment and sanitation were making daily life in Naples very difficult.

The world record fee of £6.9 million was funded in part by a loan arranged by a local politician. 

Napoli fans immediately identified with Maradona, who hailed from a working class background in Buenos Aires and made his name playing with a club, Boca Juniors, which represented a part of the city that was home to many ex-patriate Italians and their descendants. 

Maradona was unveiled before
75,000 fans at the Stadio San Paolo

The move to Napoli suited Maradona, who had some debts at the time but was able to pay them off with his signing-on fee and the money made by selling off his home in Catalonia.

Within three seasons, with Maradona captain, Napoli had won the Serie A championship. At a time when Italy’s north-south divide was being sharply felt in the south with a wide economic disparity between the two halves of the country, the reaction in the city was tumultuous. 

Neapolitans spilled out onto the streets to hold impromptu parties and motor cavalcades turning Naples into a carnival city for a week. Napoli fans painted coffins in the colours of northern giants Juventus and Milan and burned them in mock funerals. 

Ancient, crumbling buildings around the city were decorated with huge murals of Maradona, whose face was in every shop window. Suddenly, Diego became the most popular name for newborn baby boys.

The 1986-87 title season was only the start.  Napoli were runners-up in Serie A for the next two seasons and won the title again in 1989-90, also winning the Coppa Italia in 1987, the UEFA Cup in 1989 and the Italian Supercup in 1990. 

Although he was primarily an attacking midfielder rather than an out-and-out striker, Maradona was the top scorer in Serie A in 1987–88 with 15 goals, amassing 115 goals in his seven-year stay at the club, which made him Napoli’s all-time leading goalscorer until the record was surpassed by Marek Hamšík in 2017.

Maradona’s relationship with the fans soured a little after his Argentina side defeated Italy in the semi-final of the World Cup in Naples in 1990, after which it broke down completely when his cocaine use led to him repeatedly missing training sessions and some matches, leading ultimately to a 15-month ban and a departure from the club somewhat in disgrace.

Yet to many in Naples he remained a hero and shortly after his death in September 2020, Napoli’s Stadio San Paolo home ground was renamed the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona.

The Palazzo Reale is a legacy of the wealth of
Naples in the 17th and 18th centuries

Travel tip:

In recent years, Naples has become the poorest of Italy’s major cities, but in the 17th and 18th centuries it was one of Europe's great cities and many of the city’s finest buildings are a legacy of that period. In the area around Piazza del Plebiscito, for example, you can see the impressive Palazzo Reale, which was one of the residences of the Kings of Naples at the time the city was capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The palace is home to a 30-room museum and the largest library in southern Italy, both now open to the public. Close to the royal palace is one of the oldest opera houses in the world, built for a Bourbon King of Naples. Teatro di San Carlo was officially opened on 4 November 1737, some years before La Scala in Milan and La Fenice in Venice. Part of the Bourbon legacy to Naples is the vast Reggia di Caserta, the royal palace commissioned in 1752 by Charles VII of Naples and built by the Italian architect Luigi Vanvitelli along the lines of the French royal palace at Versailles.

The Stadio San Paolo - now the Stadio Diego Armando
Maradona - is the third largest football ground in Italy

Travel tip:

The Stadio San Paolo - now renamed the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona - is Italy’s third largest football ground with a capacity of just over 60,000. Built in the Fuorigrotta neighbourhood on the north side of the city, it was completed in 1959, more than 10 years after work began and has since been renovated twice, including for the 1990 World Cup. The home of SSC Napoli, it was Maradona’s home stadium between 1984 and 1991. The suburb of Fuorigrotta, the most densely populated area of the city, lies beyond the Posillipo hill and has been joined to the main body of Naples by two traffic tunnels that pass through the hill since the early 20th century. The suburb is also the home of the vast Mostra d’Oltremare, one of the largest exhibition complexes in Italy, built in 1937 to host the Triennale d'Oltremare, the aim of which was to celebrate the colonial expansion envisaged by the Fascist dictator Mussolini.

Also on this day:

1466: The birth of military leader Giovanni Sforza

1966: The birth of footballer Gianfranco Zola

1974: The birth of motorcycling champion Roberto Locatelli

1982: The birth of footballer Alberto Gilardino

1982: Paolo Rossi’s hat-trick defeats Brazil at the 1982 World Cup

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Giuseppe Savoldi - footballer

The world’s first £1 million player

Savoldi scored 168 goals in 
405 matches for Bologna

Giuseppe Savoldi, whose transfer from Bologna to Napoli in 1975 made him the first footballer in the world to be bought for £1 million, was born on this day in 1947 in Gorlago, a municipality a short distance from the city of Bergamo in Lombardy.

A prolific striker, Savoldi’s big-money deal came four years ahead of the much heralded £1 million transfer of another striker, Trevor Francis, from Birmingham City to Nottingham Forest, which made him the first player in Britain to move for a seven-figure sum.

Napoli, who saw Savoldi as the last component in what they hoped would be a title-winning team, paid 1.4 billion lire in cash, plus two players, Sergio Clerici and Romario Rampanti, to secure his signature. The two players were valued at 600 million lire in total, which valued Savoldi at 2 billion lire, the equivalent at the time of about £1.2 million.

But where Francis, who later spent five seasons playing in Serie A, won two European Cups with Nottingham Forest, scoring the winning goal in the final in 1979, Savoldi’s move did not yield anything like the same kind of success.

Napoli had finished third and then second in Serie A in the seasons before Savoldi’s arrival but were unable to maintain their momentum. Savoldi was top scorer in each of his four seasons in Campania but i Partenopei - named after the ancient Greek settlement that evolved into Neapolis - could finish no higher than fifth in his time there.

Giuseppe Savoldi (left) with his brother,
Gianluigi, who played for Juventus

Indeed, although he ended his career as the 13th highest scorer in the history of the Italian championship with 168 goals from 405 matches, his only winners’ medals came in the Coppa Italia, which he won twice with Bologna and once with Napoli, and the Anglo-Italian League Cup, which he won once with each club.

Savoldi was born into a sporting family. His mother, Gloria Guerini, was a top-level volleyball player, winning the first Italian women’s championship in the sport as a member of the Amatori Bergamo club, and his younger brother, Gianluigi, also played professional football.

Giuseppe himself was a talented all-round athlete, excelling at both the high jump and basketball, despite standing only 1.75m (5ft 9ins). His footballing ability was clear, however, and in 1965, at the age of 18, he joined his local Serie A club, Atalanta.

Initially used as a winger, Savoldi took a while to reveal his potential. In his first full season, despite being given the No 9 shirt and a licence to attack through the middle, he managed only five goals. Yet in his second season at centre-forward he was Atalanta’s top scorer with 13 Serie A goals and began to attract attention from other clubs.

At first he was not keen to leave his hometown club but his chances of winning trophies with Atalanta were remote and in 1968 he willingly signed for Bologna, where he would become one of the club’s most successful forwards, his tally of 140 goals in all competitions bettered by only three other players in the club’s history.

Savoldi (back row, third from left) made his first
appearance in the

His tally in Serie A for the rossoblu was 85 from 201 appearances, an outstanding achievement given that Italian football was heavily defensive in the 1970s. It would have been 86 but for an extraordinary incident in a fixture against Ascoli Piceno in the 1974-75, when Savoldi was denied a goal after a ballboy managed to kick the ball back into play after it had crossed the line, without the referee noticing.

Savoldi was capocannoniere - top scorer - for Bologna for six consecutive seasons, winning the Coppa Italia in 1970 and 1974 and the Anglo-Italian League Cup - a short-lived competition that pitched the Coppa Italia winners against the English League Cup winners over two legs - by beating Manchester City.  But Bologna could not finish higher than fifth in Serie A, which persuaded him that he needed to move again.

Napoli looked like a team that could fulfil Savoldi’s dream of becoming a Serie A winner. There was an outcry in some quarters over the price Napoli were willing to pay.  Many Neapolitans lived on the breadline at the time and angry trade unions complained that half of the two billion lire would have paid the city’s refuse collectors what they were owed in unpaid wages by the near-bankrupt city council. Seven goals in his first seven matches by Savoldi quelled some of the discontent, however, and had the city dreaming of a first Serie A title.

Savoldi frequently offers his opinion as
a regular Serie A pundit

Sadly for Savoldi, that distinction would not come until the following decade, when a certain Diego Maradona arrived to transform the club’s fortunes. Savoldi had to content himself with his third Coppa Italia and another Anglo-Italian League Cup.

He returned to Bologna in 1979 but a shadow was cast over the end of his career when he became embroiled in the infamous Totonero match-fixing scandal that saw a number of high-profile players, including the future World Cup hero Paolo Rossi, handed lengthy bans.

Savoldi, who earned seven senior caps with the Italian national team, was barred from playing for three and a half years. This was reduced to two years on appeal but effectively ended his career at the top level. He returned for one more season with Atalanta in Serie B before retiring in 1983.

For the next 15 years, he concentrated on coaching but achieved only modest success. Nowadays, he is involved in football largely as pundit, in which role he is often asked his opinion on the current fortunes of his former clubs. He lives in the Bergamo area.

Bergamo's walls have been standing for
about four and a half centuries

Travel tip:

Bergamo in Lombardy, where Giuseppe Savoldi lives, having been born in nearby Gorlago, is a fascinating, historic city with two distinct centres. The Città Alta, upper town, is a beautiful, walled city with buildings that date back to medieval times, with a good deal of Venetian influence. The walls, which extend to more than six kilometres (3.72 miles) around the Città Alta, with four gates, go back to the mid-16th century. Designed to protect the city from enemies, they remain largely intact. The elegant Città Bassa, lower town, still has some buildings that date back to the 15th century, but more imposing and elaborate architecture was added in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Piazza Maggiore in Bologna; the square is the
heart of the well-preserved city centre

Travel tip:

Bologna, where Savoldi made his name as a player, is one of Italy's oldest cities. It can be traced back to 1,000BC or possibly earlier, with a settlement that was developed into an urban area by the Etruscans, the Celts and the Romans.  The University of Bologna, the oldest in the world, was founded in 1088.  Bologna's city centre, which has undergone substantial restoration since the 1970s, is one of the largest and best preserved historical centres in Italy, characterised by 38km (24 miles) of walkways protected by porticoes.  At the heart of the city is the beautiful Piazza Maggiore, dominated by the Gothic Basilica of San Petronio, which at 132m long, 66m wide and with a facade that touches 51m at its tallest, is the 10th largest church in the world and the largest built in brick.

Also on this day:

1918: The birth of conductor and cellist Antonio Janigro

1926: The death of neuroscientist Camillo Golgi

1949: The birth of chef Gennaro Contaldo

2006: The death of 1938 World Cup winner Pietro Rava

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Alessandro Altobelli - World Cup winner

Scored Italy’s third goal in 1982 Final

Alessandro Altobelli in action in one of
his 61 games for the Italy national team 

Alessandro Altobelli, one of only four players to score in a World Cup final after starting on the substitutes’ bench, was born on this day in 1955 in Sonnino, a small medieval town in mountainous southern Lazio.

At the age of 26, Altobelli was part of Enzo Bearzot’s squad for the 1982 World Cup finals in Spain, in which Italy triumphed for the first time since their two tournament victories under Vittorio Pozzo in the 1930s.

A striker with Internazionale of Milan, Altobelli did not start a single game in the 1982 finals and had played only a few minutes during Italy’s progress to the knock-out stages.

But he was called on after just seven minutes of the Final against West Germany, replacing Francesco Graziani, stricken with a shoulder injury, and his patience waiting for his chance was rewarded when he finished an Italian counter-attack with their third goal in the second half, giving the Azzurri a 3-0 lead that the Germans could not overcome.

Italy’s tournament hero, Paolo Rossi, had scored their opening goal before Marco Tardelli fired home their second, which he celebrated wildly in what became the enduring image of the tournament.  Paul Breitner then scored for West Germany but the Italians by then looked unassailable.

The Italians had made a poor start to the tournament, scraping through the opening group phase, in which they drew all of their three games but progressed to the second phase only because they scored one more goal than outsiders Cameroon, who had an identical record.

Paolo Rossi was Italy's 
star in the 1982 finals

Yet they exploded into life in the second group phase, defeating holders Argentina before stunning favourites Brazil in one of the greatest games in World Cup history, Rossi scoring a hat-trick in a 3-2 win.

They swept aside Poland in the semi-finals before proving too strong for the Germans in the final before a 90,000 crowd in the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium, Madrid.

Altobelli began his career with his local team, Latina, in Serie C - the third tier of the Italian football pyramid. He impressed enough in his debut season in the first team to earn a move to Brescia, who played in Serie B, where his form caught the eye of Serie A scouts. In 1977 he joined Inter.

It was at the San Siro, where Inter shared the famous Giuseppe Meazza Stadium with city rivals AC Milan, that his quality came to the fore. In 317 Serie A appearances, he scored 128 goals, finishing as Inter’s top scorer in nine of his 10 seasons. His 15 goals in the 1977-78 helped them win the scudetto - the Serie A title - for the 12th time.

In his time with Inter, Altobelli also won the Coppa Italia twice. He left in 1988 to join Juventus and finished his career back at Brescia.  With almost 300 career goals in senior football, he is one of the top 10 most prolific strikers in Italian football history. His 56 goals in 93 games in the Coppa Italia remains the biggest tally for any player in the competition.

Altobelli today is a familiar
face to television viewers

Despite a slender build that saw him acquire the nickname Il spillo - the needle - Altobelli was deceptively strong and difficult to knock off the ball, as well as possessing a powerful and accurate shot with each foot.

His international career began in his third season with Inter, making his debut in the 1980 European championships, and he went on to make 61 appearances for the Azzurri, scoring 25 goals, captaining the side at Euro 1988.

After his retirement as a player, Altobelli had a brief career in politics, gaining election as a councillor in Brescia in 1991, representing the Christian Democrats, and made an unsuccessful attempt to be elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1996.

By that time, he was back in football, both as a player - representing Italy at the world beach football championships - and in a management capacity as sporting director at Calcio Padova. He also acted as a scout for Inter.

More recently, he has been a regular television pundit, appearing on a number of popular shows.

A narrow street typical
of medieval Sonnino

Travel tip:

Sonnino is a small hill town with many preserved medieval features in the Monti Lepini mountain range of southern Lazio, in the province of Latina. It is thought to have grown from an eighth century settlement established when inhabitants of the town of Priverno moved to higher ground to hide from invading Barbarians. Over the centuries it was controlled by several major Italian families, including the Borgias and Colonnas. Situated about an hour and 45 minutes’ journey from Rome to the north and a similar distance from Naples to the south, Sonnino’s elevated position offers spectacular views, while visitors can explore a network of steep, narrow streets.

Latina's Cattedrale di San
Marco was completed in 1933

Travel tip:

To some, Latina, the capital of the province of the same name that includes Sonnino, serves as an ugly reminder of the dark days of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist dictatorship. To others, it stands as a monument to the architectural style that typified the era, which combined some elements of classicism, with its preponderance of columns and arches, with the stark lines of 1920s and 30s rationalism. The city itself owes its very existence to Mussolini, being built on land reclaimed when his government fulfilled its pledge to drain the inhospitable, mosquito-ridden Pontine Marshes to which visitors frequently became infected with malaria. Established in 1932 as Littoria - a name in itself associated with Fascist symbolism - it has a large number of monuments and edifices, including a town hall with a tall clock tower and a cathedral, designed by architects such as Marcello Piacentini and Angiolo Mazzoni. Renamed Latina in 1946, it has grown into a substantial city with a population of 126,000, making it the second largest city in Lazio after Rome. 

Also on this day:

1873: The death of astronomer Caterina Scarpellini

1907: The birth of writer Alberto Moravia

1913: The birth of film music composer Mario Nascimbene

1941: The birth of actress Laura Antonelli

1977: The birth of 2006 World Cup hero Fabio Grosso

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Roberto Donadoni - footballer and coach

Understated midfielder who helped AC Milan win six Serie A titles

Roberto Donadoni is now a coach after
a hugely successful playing career

The footballer and coach Roberto Donadoni, who was a key figure in an AC Milan side that dominated Italian football for the best part of a decade, was born on this day in 1963 in Cisano Bergamasco in Lombardy.

A winger or midfielder famed for his ability to create goalscoring opportunities for his team-mates, Donadoni was once described by the brilliant French attacker Michel Platini as ‘the best Italian footballer of the 1990s’.

His collection of 21 winner’s medals includes six for winning the Serie A title with AC Milan and three for the European Cup or Champions League.

He was also part of the Italian national team that reached the final of the World Cup in 1994, losing to Brazil on penalties.

Donadoni was never a prolific goalscorer: in more than 500 league and international matches, he found the net only 34 times. Yet he had exceptional technical ability and great passing skills and if tallies of ‘assists’ in matches had been recorded during his career as they are now, the role he played in Milan’s success in particular would be appreciated still more.

Since ending his career as a player, Donadoni has totted up 450 matches as a coach, taking charge at seven clubs in Italian football and one in China, as well as having a stint as head coach of the national team. Although he led the Azzurri to the quarter-finals of Euro 2008, he has yet to win a trophy as a coach.

Donadoni won six Serie A
titles with AC Milan

Born within the province of Bergamo, it was natural for Donadoni to launch his professional career with Atalanta, the club based in Bergamo, the Lombardy region’s fourth largest city. He joined the club’s youth system and made his debut in Serie C at the age of 18, winning the Serie C1 title in his first season.

Two years later, in 1984, he helped Atalanta return to Serie A after an absence of five seasons, as Serie B champions. His youthful talent did not go unnoticed and in 1986 he moved to AC Milan, one of the first signings made following Silvio Berlusconi’s takeover of the club.

It was not long before he was playing in front of defenders such as Franco Baresi, Paolo Maldini and Mauro Tassotti and behind strikers of the calibre of Marco van Basten, Ruud Gullit and George Weah as the Milan teams coached by Arrigo Sacchi and Fabio Capello swept all before them.

He was part of the team that Sacchi led to the 1987-88 Serie A title, Milan’s first for nine years, which went on to win the European Cup in 1989 and 1990, the first team to retain the trophy since Nottingham Forest a decade earlier.

Under Capello, who succeeded Sacchi when the latter was appointed to coach the national team, Donadoni won four scudetti - the scudetto being the shield-shaped badge worn on the shirts of the reigning champions - in the space of five seasons, as well as another European Cup, by then rebranded as the Champions League, in 1994.

Donadoni has gained respect as a coach, although
he has yet to enjoy tangible success

After his fifth domestic title, Donadoni left the club, initially intending to retire but then accepting on offer to extend his career in the United States with the Metrostars, where his form not only prompted a recall to the Italian national team but a further stint with AC Milan, where he was part of Alberto Zaccheroni's team that won Serie A in 1998-99.

Regarded as the most dedicated and selfless of players, he was once quoted as saying that his greatest satisfaction on the football field came from “making the pass that leads to the goal”.

In his international career, Donadoni made his senior debut for the Azzurri in 1986 and was a key member of the team that finished third in the 1990 World Cup on home soil under Azeglio Vicini, although the tournament was marred for him by missing one of Italy’s penalties in the shoot-out that determined their semi-final against Argentina, which was won by the South American side.

He went one better in the 1994 World Cup in the United States. Reunited with his former Milan coach Sacchi, he helped the Italians reach the final in Pasadena, but was again on the losing side after a penalty shoot-out, with Brazil taking the prize. This time, Donadoni was spared the responsibility of taking one of the kicks.

He retired for good in 2000, having helped Al-Ittihad win the Saudi Premier League title.

Since then he has built a second career as a coach. Following the traditional Italian route of working his way up through the lower divisions, Donadoni took his first coaching job with Lecco - just 15km (nine miles) north of his hometown of Cisano Bergamasco - and has since had another nine coaching contracts with eight clubs, as well as a two-year spell as head coach of the national team. 

He was sacked as Azzurri coach after Italy’s disappointing performance at Euro 2008 and had the misfortune to be in charge at Parma as the once highly-successful club plunged towards bankruptcy for a second time in 2015, when he was applauded for sticking by his players - unsuccessfully, in the end - as they battled to avoid relegation from Serie A, despite going unpaid for a year.

The new church of San Zenone in
Cisano Bergamasco

Travel tip:

The small town of Cisano Bergamasco is in the San Martino valley, which straddles the provinces of Lecco, 15km (nine miles) to the north, and Bergamo, 20km (12 miles) to the southeast. It is also close to the lakeside city of Como, some 40km (25 miles) to the west. Although there has been a settlement in the area since Roman times, and some remains of the medieval Vimercati-Sozzi Castle are preserved within the grounds of a private villa, the Cisano Bergamasco of today is typical of the pleasant, well-maintained municipalities to be found in much of northern Italy.

Lecco sits alongside the beautiful Lago
di Lecco, the eastern fork of Lake Como

Travel tip:

Lecco, where Roberto Donadoni took his first steps in coaching, lies at the end of the south eastern branch of Lago di Como, which is known as Lago di Lecco. The Bergamo Alps rise to the north and east of the lake. The writer Alessandro Manzoni lived in Lecco for part of his life and based his famous novel, I promessi sposi, there. 

Also on this day:

1908: The birth of writer Cesare Pavese

1918: The birth of former Italian president Oscar Luigi Scalfaro

1943: Allied troops land at Salerno, south of Naples

1982: The birth of photographer and film director Francesco Carrozzini

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Adriano Galliani - entrepreneur, politician and football executive

Businessman was CEO of AC Milan in golden era 

Adriano Galliani was AC Milan's chief
executive for 21 mostly successful years

The entrepreneur Adriano Galliani, who was chief executive of AC Milan for 21 years, was born on this day in 1944 in Monza, the Lombardy city a little under 20km (12 miles) north of Milan.

With Galliani at the helm, Milan won the Serie A title eight times and were five-times winners of the Champions League in what was a golden era for the club.

Galliani became CEO at the club in 1986 when the ownership transferred to Silvio Berlusconi, the businessman and future prime minister with whom he had created the commercial TV company Mediaset.

He was responsible for some of the club’s most spectacular player signings, persuading such global stars as Marco van Basten, Ruud Gullit, George Weah, Andriy Shevchenko and Kaka to sign for the club.

All five won the Ballon D’Or, the annual award given to the player judged to the best player in all the European leagues, during their time with the club.

Since 2018, Galliani has held a seat in the Senate of the Italian parliament as a representative of Forza Italia, the political party founded by Berlusconi.

Galliani (left) and Silvio Berlusconi were business
partners before they took charge at AC Milan

Galliani hailed from a middle class family in Monza. His father was an official on the local council, his mother the owner of a small transport company. She died when he was only 15 years old, a loss he has described in interviews as devastating.

He trained as a surveyor and worked on various projects in Monza for eight years but had an entrepreneurial spirit which he claims he inherited from his mother and made his first commercial investment in a bathing establishment at Vieste on the Adriatic coast, near Foggia, some 810km (503 miles) from his hometown.

But the gamble that would change his life came in 1975, when he bought Elettronica Industriale, a company based near Monza at Lissone, which made the equipment needed to send and receive television signals.

The owner, Ottorino Barbuti, was one of many businessmen in Italy at that time who were worried about the rise of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), fearful that they if they were successful enough in parliamentary elections to form a government they would take the opportunity to seize private businesses and put them in public ownership.

Galliani, a Christian Democrat supporter, had more faith in the status quo being maintained and Elettronica Industriale prospered, becoming a supplier to Telemontecarlo, at the time the most successful private TV channel in Italy.

Galliani, with Dutch players Michael Reiziger (left)
and Edgar Davids, was responsible for recruitment 

Meanwhile, Berlusconi had launched Italy’s first private television network, TeleMilano, serving the new town of Milano Due he had built with his property company, Edilnord, and had ambitions to launch a nationwide network to challenge the national public broadcaster, Rai.

The two met for the first time in November, 1979, when Berlusconi invited him for dinner at Villa San Martino, his house at Arcore in the province of Monza and Brianza. Berlusconi spelled out his ambition to launch three national commercial channels to rival the three state channels that came under the Rai umbrella and Galliani put forward the proposition to create a national network of antennae to broadcast Berlusconi’s channels.  

Berlusconi bought 50 per cent of Elettronica Industriale and together he and Galliani changed the face of Italian television, adding Canale 5, Italia 1 and Rete 4 to the choice of channels available to Italian viewers.

When Berlusconi bought AC Milan in 1986 it was natural he would turn to Galliani, a football enthusiast, to help him fulfil his dream of winning major titles with the rossoneri.  Working together, they would enjoy unparalleled success.

Galliani is now CEO at his
home town club, AC Monza

Coached by Arrigo Sacchi, Fabio Capello, Carlo Ancelotti and Massimiliano Allegri, AC Milan won eight Serie A titles and were European champions five times, although their run of success ended in 2011 with the power in Italian football shifting to Juventus.

Galliani’s judgment in the transfer market came under scrutiny, with his decision to allow midfielder Andrea Pirlo to leave Milan on a free transfer in 2011 seen as a symbolic mistake, the World Cup winner signing for Juventus and going on to have some of the best years of his career.

Berlusconi sold AC Milan in 2017, at which point Galliani ceased to be CEO, although he remained involved in the Berlusconi business empire as a director of Berlusconi’s Fininvest company and president of Mediaset Premium.

He returned to football in 2018 as CEO of his hometown club, Monza, which had been bought by Berlusconi and was soon promoted to Serie B of the championship.

In February, 2021, Galliani contracted Covid-19 and spent 10 days in intensive care in the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan. On discharge, he admitted he feared he would die from the disease and that, after being confined to a windowless ICU, being back on a normal ward felt like being in the best room in a five-star hotel.

Married three times, Galliani has a grandson, Adrian, who was born in New York in 2001 and currently plays as a midfielder for the Greek club Olympiacos, having had a brief spell in England with Nottingham Forest.

The beautiful town of Vieste sits at the tip of
the Gargano peninsula in Puglia

Travel tip:

Vieste, where Galliani invested in a bathing facility in the early part of his business career, is a beautiful fishing port and tourist resort at the tip of the Gargano peninsula in Puglia, a little over 90km (55 miles) east of the city of Foggia. Part of the Gargano National Park, it sits on a stretch of coastline unusual for its combination of long, sandy beaches and rocky coves. At the end of one stretch of beach is the Pizzomunno, a 25m (82ft) limestone monolith separated by erosion from the adjacent cliffs. The town, which was regularly attacked by pirates, Saracens and other enemies of the Kingdom of Naples in medieval times, also has an attractive historic centre in which the milky white stone of the buildings contrasts with the emerald green of the sea.

Monza's Duomo has an attractive
facade in white and green marble 

Travel tip:

Monza, where Galliani was born, is about 15km (9 miles) to the north east of Milan. It is famous for its Grand Prix motor racing circuit, the Autodromo Nazionale Monza, which hosts the Formula One Italian Grand Prix. The city is also home to the Iron Crown of Lombardy, a circlet of gold with a central iron band, which according to legend, was beaten out of a nail from Christ’s true cross and was found by Saint Helena in the Holy Land. The crown is believed to have been given to the city of Monza in the sixth century and is kept in a chapel in the Cathedral of Saint John. When Napoleon Bonaparte was declared King of Italy in 1805, he was crowned in the Duomo in Milan and the Iron Crown had to be fetched from Monza before the ceremony. During his coronation, Napoleon is reported to have picked up the precious relic, announced that God had given it to him, and placed it on his own head.

Also on this day:

1626: Naples earthquake and tsunami kills 70,000 people

1909: The birth of chemist Vittorio Erspamer

2006: The death of film director Michelangelo Antonio

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Gianluca Vialli - footballer and coach

Striker who managed Chelsea has faced personal battle

Gianluca Vialli is currently working
with the Italian national team

The footballer Gianluca Vialli, who enjoyed success as a player in Italy and England and led Chelsea to five trophies as manager of the London club, was born on this day in 1964 in Cremona in Lombardy.

After beginning his professional career with his local team, Cremonese, Vialli spent eight seasons with Sampdoria of Genoa, helping a team that had seldom previously finished higher than mid-table in Serie A enjoy their most successful era, winning the Coppa Italia three times, the European Cup-Winners’ Cup and an historic first Serie A title in 1990-91.

He then spent four years with Juventus, winning another Scudetto in 1994-95 and becoming a Champions League winner the following season.

He signed for Chelsea in 1996 as one of the first in a wave of top Italian players arriving in the Premier League in the second half of that decade, becoming player-manager in 1998 after the man who signed him, Ruud Gullit, was sacked. 

In the blue of Chelsea, Vialli won medals in the FA Cup as a player, the Football League Cup, the Cup-Winners’ Cup and the UEFA Super Cup as player-manager, before guiding the team to another FA Cup success as manager, after retiring as a player at the end of the 1998-99 season.

After leaving Stamford Bridge, Vialli remained in London, dropping out of the Premier League to take charge of second-tier club Watford but lasted only a season before being sacked and has not worked in management since.

Vialli was a prolific goalscorer in the 
colours of Sampdoria 

Vialli, who also made 59 appearances and scored 16 goals for the Italian national team, was for many years a pundit on the Sky Italia satellite TV channel and has written two books. He has been a member of current Azzurri head coach Roberto Mancini’s pitch-side technical staff during the delayed 2020 European championships, having emerged successfully from a two-and-a-half year battle with pancreatic cancer.

Vialli’s upbringing was very different from most footballers. The youngest of five children, he enjoyed the trappings of his entrepreneur father’s wealth, being brought up in the historic 60-room Castello di Belgioioso, in the small town of the same name set in extensive gardens a little under 60km (37 miles) west of Cremona on the way to Pavia.  Vialli senior was the millionaire owner of a construction company.

He was as keen on football as any young child and played endless games with his sister and three brothers in a large courtyard at the back of the castle. His first formal steps towards a football career came after he had entered the Cristo Re oratory, an educational institution in Cremona, which had a football team and links to others, including Pizzighettone, a regional team from Cremona province. After a few games there, his talent as a striker was quickly picked up on the Cremonese radar and made his senior debut at the age of 16.

Fired by Vialli’s goals, Cremonese jumped from Serie C to Serie A in four seasons. Vialli enjoyed his time there and was often seen around the city, zipping about on his Vespa scooter with the girlfriend from childhood, Giovanna, on the back.  He would sometimes hang out with the club’s fans at the Bar Rio in the centre of Cremona.

Vialli played alongside fellow striker Fabrizio
Ravanelli (left) during his four years with Juventus

But bigger things beckoned. In 1984, at the age of 20, Vialli signed for Sampdoria, making the acquaintance for the first time of his new teammate, Roberto Mancini.  The coach, Vujadin Boskov, treated him like a son and gave him the confidence to form a deadly partnership with Mancini. In 1991, Vialli was top scorer with 19 goals and helped the club to win both the Scudetto and the Italian Super Cup.

In June 1992, with Sampdoria wishing they could keep him but also needing a cash influx, Vialli moved to Juventus for a world record fee, the equivalent of £12.5 million. He made a slow start, his first two seasons disrupted by injuries, but under coach Marcello Lippi he won the domestic league and cup double and the UEFA Cup and both main domestic trophies as well as the Uefa Cup and before making his final appearance in the 1996 Champions League final in Rome, when a Juventus side captained by him beat Ajax of Holland. 

Vialli’s international career ended in 1992, essentially because of his poor relationship with Arrigo Sacchi, the manager who succeeded Azeglio Vicini after the 1990 World Cup and took Italy to the final in USA ‘94. 

After moving to Chelsea, he settled in London, buying a house in Belgravia, marrying an English interior designer, Cathryn White-Cooper, with whom he has two daughters, and later moving to Hampstead.  A smoker even in his playing days, Vialli was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2017. He announced in April 2020 that he had been given the all-clear.

Vialli collaborated with his friend, football journalist Gabriele Marcotti, in writing The Italian Job: A Journey to the Heart of Two Great Footballing Cultures, which discusses the differences between English and Italian football. He donated the proceeds of the book to a charitable foundation he founded together with player-turned-politician Massimo Mauro to raise funds for research into cancer and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which is also known as motor neurone disease.

Mancini, who became Italy’s head coach in 2018 after their failure to qualify for the World Cup finals in Russia, turned to Vialli to be part of his backroom team in 2019, giving him the title of delegation chief, a position unfilled since Luigi Riva's retirement in 2013.

UPDATE: Italy won the final of the delayed Euro 2020 championships two days after this article was originally published, defeating host nation England on penalties at Wembley. Vialli shared the glory with Mancini, his close friend since they played together at Sampdoria.

Sadly, Vialli's cancer returned late in 2021. The disease was kept under control initially but his condition deteriorated in December 2022, causing him to be readmitted to hospital in London. He died on 6 January, 2023, aged just 58.

Vialli grew up in the ancient Castello di
Belgioioso between Cremona and Pavia

Travel tip:

It is thought the Castello di Belgioioso was founded by Galeazzo II Visconti in the second half of the 14th century as part of an extensive area owned by the family in the territory where the village of Belgioioso later arose. In the 18th century the castle belonged to Don Antonio Barbiano, the first prince of Belgioioso, who was responsible for the many improvements to the complex.Lombard nobility often met there to celebrate lavish receptions.  Today the castle is home to exhibitions, cultural events, exhibitions and fairs, as well as becoming a popular venue for weddings.

The fishing village and resort of Bogliasco is close
to where Vialli lived in his time at Sampdoria

Travel tip: 

During his time at Sampdoria, lived close to the Ligurian resort of Bogliasco, situated just 11km (7 miles) east of Genoa in an area known as the Golfo Paradiso. Bogliasco is not so well known as the beautiful Camogli or exclusive Portofino further down the coast, yet is an attractive port village with characteristic pastel-coloured houses lining a sweep of sandy beach. Bogliasco has many good restaurants, is accessible by train along the railway line that hugs the coast and has three important art collections in the Frugone, Wolfsoniana and Galleria d'Arte Moderna.

Also on this day:

1879: The birth of violinist and composer Ottorino Respighi

1897: The of former NATO Secretary-General Manlio Brosio

1950: The birth of tennis champion Adriano Panatta

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