“Beauty is a puzzle”, muses Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.
In international football, the components needed to assemble this puzzle are fleeting, often intangible and dependent on a strange alchemy of unity between the fans and the team. This mixture is all the more difficult in a country with such a fragmented and contested identity as historic and contemporary Italy. Beauty remains indecipherable in its mystery, untranslatable in its higher purpose and it can take you by surprise in terms of where it can be found.
It’s a slippery fish even when the purpose is self-evident and in a game like football the purpose is, indeed, self-evident. The game is about defeating the adversary, the goal is.. to score goals. To the untrained eye, this purpose is the be-all and end-all of the beautiful game yet, the beauty of the game lies elsewhere. At times, the passion that a team inspires to a wider audience is hidden in the details, in elements that only careful observers can spot, but not always explain.
The players are brought together to create a unity, and this patient construction, block after block, starts outside of the pitch. Sometimes the unexpected happens: the atmosphere between players which, at the outset, seems to be created as a strategy to win, becomes a genuine and spontaneous expression of as many personalities as those which render the game alive.
The game doesn’t start or finish on the pitch. The genius locus of the locker room, the sense of community of the training sessions, the in-jokes, the rituals are so much more than a few memes dominating social media time-lines. During Euro 2020, the Italian national team became a master in those rituals. The key to unlocking the beautiful puzzle that is a successful international tournament?
A pop song about meatballs.
A cursory listen to Ma Quale Dieta by Neapolitan singer Luca Il Sole di Notte would not lead most to consider this to be the key artefact in Italy’s famous sporting summer of 2021. As an artistic and cultural entity, it owes more to the Venga Boys than Verdi. The song, written in Neapolitan, documents the struggle of its protagonist to understand why people maintain a diet. He celebrates his usual breakfast of plenty of pastries and frothy cappuccini and, later in the day, beloved meatballs.
Lorenzo Insigne, Gli Azzurri’s Neapolitan number ten, taught this song to the rest of squad early on in their Euro 2020 campaign. On the surface this might not be seen as a brave act, aside from the fact that footballers and singing often don’t marry well, as Glenn Hoddle’s music career can testify, but territorial discrimination between northern and southern clubs is a real and acute problem in Italian stadia (as Luca Hodges-Ramon explains here). Even outside of Italy, there are issues with how certain cities are perceived and written about. PSG ultras had to defend Naples against le Figaro and the Daily Mail in England thought it fit to compare the city to Caracas. Even respected historian David Gilmour implied that the unification of Italy may have caused more harm than good in his The Pursuit of Italy.
Insigne would end the summer with an international winners medal – a fact which places him in the minority of other trophy lifting Italian alumni. In 1982 none of the players who took to the pitch in the final at the Santiago Bernabeu were from the South of Italy. 2006’s triumph at the Olympiastadion in Berlin only featured three. The 2020 European Championship winning starting eleven, however, had more southern Italian players in it than northern. Campania being represented by the Player of the Tournament, goalkeeper Gigio Donnarumma as well as Napoli captain Lorenzo Insigne and Ciro Immobile, and the midfield was majority south: Marco Verratti hailing from Abruzzo and Nicolo Barella a proud Sardinian.
This social and historical context is a key reason for the emotion that many felt when videos started to emerge of the entire team singing Ma Quale Dieta on the team bus after their extraordinary performances on the pitch. On one hand, Gli Azzurri were superhuman, potential champions. But on the other, they were ragazzini on the way home from a school trip, singing together, playing pranks and inspiring cheekiness as so many Italian youngsters continue to do so.
The RAI documentary about the Euro 2020 win, Sogno Azzurro, features incredible access to the team and the song dominates the backstage footage as this (imagined) screenplay will hopefully explain:-
Title Over: Italia 3 – Svizzera 0
Cut to:
Medium shot of Lorenzo Insigne, arm in the air, singing emphatically:-
ma quale dieta
Gigio Donnarumma, Salvatore Sirigu and Federico Bernadeschi enter the shot and join in, with more enthusiasm:-
m piacn’ ‘e pulpett’
Before Nicolo Barella jumps in to complete a dissonant quintet for:-
me piace ‘a cotolett’
Later in the programme, we see a particularly raucous team bus singing Ma Quale Dieta once more. Ciro Immobile, Andrea Belotti, Bernadeschi (again), Insigne and Andea Locatelli are all taking part. At the end of the sequence, in a pleasing mixture of banter and inter-cultural exchange, Insigne corrects Locatelli’s Neapolitan pronunciation. Lombard midfielder Andrea Pessina later explains his confusion at first hearing the Neapolitan music but how now he is the first to ask for Ma Quale Dieta to be sung on the team bus. He explains how the song was played in the gym, pre-match – everywhere. Even talisman of northern Italian club success, Giorgio Chellini, admits to learning the chorus and, in an image barely believable to most Juventus tifosi is seen actually dancing to the Neapolitan tune.
Gli Azzurri mid-chorus singing Ma Quale Dieta
The collective jubilation renders this absurdly catchy Neapolitan pop song almost… beautiful by the spontaneous expression of unity from the squadra. During the tournament, when this began to spread to the stands the joy became infectious and a nation began to party, enjoy itself and find the beauty in the collective love of meatballs.
Ma Quale Dieta also highlighted an important trend in Italian footballing silverware collection. The relationship between unexpected and spontaneous singing, and on the pitch success. 2006 was defined by the double repurposing (via AS Roma) of The White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army and 1990’s semi final run in the World Cup was achieved to the backdrop of Un’estate Italiana, a duet performed by the Tuscan Gianna Nannini and the Neapolitan Edoardo Bennato. Back to 2021 and the sheer fun of it all was shared by the players and fans. Come the final, this lightness of expression was palpable as England wilted under the pressure of expectation and Roby Mancini was content to play the smallest player on the pitch as a floating false nine as Italy and Insigne found their way back into the game.
The beauty of the summer remained a puzzle only briefly solved. Soon the more expected angst and finger pointing returned with Italy’s failure to automatically qualify for the 2022 World Cup. Predictable factionalism from tifosi also returned with the new Serie A season as a three way race for the Scudetto pitted SSC Napoli against the two Milan clubs.
Prince Myskin, the titular character of Dosteyvsky’s The Idiot struggled to find a place in a world where beauty was so often trampled, neglected or actively disregarded. Perhaps the same struggle is to be found in moments of spontaneous national expressions of joy? There will, however, always be music, calcio and meatballs. (or their vegetarian alternative)