Of Casciavit and Bauscia

Words by Davide Coppo, Federico Corona
Photography by Francesca Scandella
Styling by Anna Dibernardo

What remains and what has changed in the way of experiencing the Milan derby more than forty years after Eccezzziunale…veramente.

There was a time, at the beginning of the 1980s, when Italian cinema loved to tell tales of urban phenomena, with an eye halfway between blunt sociology and sharp cabaret gags.
You had the Yuppies, the epics of winter and summer holidays, and, inevitably, also the golden age of the football curve, at the apex of the ultras movement. Behind all these films, one name: that of Carlo Vanzina. One could argue he inherited the sociologist’s eye of his father Steno, who had contributed so much to that cinema that across the previous two decades had enjoyed bringing the vices and virtues of Italians to the big screen.

Eccezzziunale…veramente was released in cinemas in March 1982, thus becoming the first film to deal with football fandom, from the perspective of comedy. In doing so, its initiatory language was decoded – admittedly also caricatured –, but without a doubt it offered a genuine celebration that, for over forty years, has survived all the upheavals of football and all the snobbery of arthouse critics.

The film, therefore, goes where previous works with a purely documentary slant such as Daniele Segre’s Ragazzi di Stadio (1979) had failed. So much so that today, the Milan ultras Donato Cavallo, the Inter’s Franco Alfano, and the Juventus supporter Tirzan – the three characters played by Diego Abatantuono, joined in the film by Massimo Boldi, Teo Teocoli, Guido Nicheli, Stefania Sandrelli and Renato d’Amore – continue to embody iconographic and attitudinal staples for the fans of their respective teams.

At the dawn of the derby della Madonnina and on the occasion of the release of the film’s CAM Sugar soundtrack composed by Detto Mariano and available for the first time ever on vinyl and digital, journalists and authors Davide Coppo and Federico Corona, Milan and Inter fans respectively, talk about what remains and what has changed today of that way of living the secular faith towards their teams, of their being Casciavit and Bauscia – the two terms that historically connote A.C. Milan’s working-class roots and Inter’s bourgeoise grandeur.

Being Casciavit

Words by Davide Coppo

Donato, the protagonist of Eccezzziunale… veramente, calls himself ‘the Ras della Fossa’,
yet he is the leader of the Brigate Rossonere. Little does it matter, because of the confusion:
there was actually a period, which is also the period of my sentimental education, the very first years of the 2000s, when Fossa and Brigate were two sides of the same identity. This identity was the southern curva of San Siro, in the strict, practical sense. They were also my identity: that of a kid who, as it always happens, has to look for one, and ends up finding it, even, standing on the seats of a football ground.

I approached football late, as a child growing up in Milan. It wasn’t until I was ten that I decided to concentrate on enjoying that slow and boring game, and I did so in front of one of Milan’s most tragic moments: in April 1997, when Juventus beat the rossoneri 1-6 at San Siro. As if the cathartic energy that developed from that abyss of humiliation – for a team that only three years before were European champions – had been able to imprison me and drag me down.

From the age of 14 onwards, until almost 30, that name, ‘Fossa’, was synonymous with weekends, games in Milan and around Italy and Europe. No, it wasn’t, actually. Because the real Fossa disbanded shortly after, in November 2005: yet that first lustre behind the flag with the stylised lion was worth as much as a profession of undying faith, our adolescent football Takbir. That lion, on the shoulders and biceps and pecs of several friends, also became a tattoo, now faded but never regretted.

The milanism of those born in the 1980s, like me, is a strange dichotomy of opposing prides.
The proletarian one and the elitist one. Casciavit is a word I’ve always liked, and of course, if you play ultras and hooligans, you’re exalted to be associated with that cunning and versatile tool, with the humility of the street and the toil, even if you don’t want to even toil for an hour a day on a maths book. And then there was the pitch: at the most delicate moments in the formation of a person’s character – primary school, junior high and high school – my peers and I benefited from rare good fortune. The team we chose managed to win five championships, four Supercoppe, two Champions Leagues (plus a third in the early university years). Being on the side of the footballing winners, in the delicate game of balancing compulsory schooling, is often a prerequisite for not ending up at the bottom of a food chain that, at those ages, can be ruthless. Even in the darkest years of Milanism – the post-Calciopoli scandal triumphs of Inter – one could easily cling to what is not a slogan but an intimate conviction, a sentiment of predestination so boastful that it makes us think we are a sort of chosen team, destined for international exploits (‘I prefer the Cup’) rather than the (more petty) ones linked to national borders.

How did a proletarian team turn into the team that for years sewed the phrase ‘the most titled club in the world’ onto its shirts? How much do Silvio Berlusconi’s 30 years have to do with this paradigm shift?

From Berlusconi’s Milan a Milanista of today has certainly taken many character tics: the habit of greatness, a certain snobbery towards rivals – whether Italian or international –, above all a belief in predestination that is linked, on the one hand, to the conviction of being a sort of chosen team among teams, and on the other to stoicism, whereby a bad season may happen, but will be redeemed, inevitably, by a triumph in the near future.

A.C. Milan, in the last fifteen years, has changed as much as Milan: it is increasingly international, and this is both a good and a bad thing, it has become extrovert, less elegant and more colourful, even more boorish. It has many ephemeral inhabitants, a hit-and-run tourism that, football-wise, manifests itself in increasingly casual fans. The team has an unstable ownership, perhaps American, perhaps Luxembourgish, perhaps, in the future, Arab. The concept of identity and identitarianism, in football, is fundamental and should not be as controversial as it is in politics. The roots serve to create a community, the community creates that not-so-thing that reverberates in the imagination of opponents and players for generations. How deep are the roots of the Milan fan identity, in order to remain what it was in its best years? Perhaps it is also to have a little support in these difficult years that, after nearly two decades of absence, two old banners have returned to the curva. They read: Fossa dei Leoni, and Brigate Rossonere.

Being Bauscia

Words by Federico Corona

In a sequence from Eccezzziunale…veramente, Franco Alfano (Diego Abatantuono) is watching the derby from the first ring of the San Siro together with Teo (Teocoli) and Massimo (Boldi), his Inter friends. Tightly draped in their Nerazzurri drapes, they joke, they hit each other over the head with newspapers, in short, they behave as they do every day at Franco’s bar in their everyday sluggishness. At one point, however, they become serious, and with their eyes turned to the pitch they comment haughtily that ‘you absolutely have to do zonal marking’ and that ‘everything revolves around the athletic point of view’.

It is a scene in which any Inter fan can recognise himself, even forty years after it was conceived and filmed. It does not matter if the context has changed radically. If there are no longer bonafide legends like the Baresi brothers on the pitch, if San Siro has implemented the third ring which has already become outdated, if now on the seat in front of yours you can find an Australian guy who gets up during the match to go get a hot dog, as if he were at the Staples Center. That critical and haughty way of commenting on Inter, typical of those who always think they know better than others, remains a familiar lexicon. A remnant of what we somewhat solemnly call the fan DNA. The last whiff of that Bauscia identity with which the Inter fan was represented for almost half a century, before social transformations and sporting developments watered down the profile of this slightly boastful bourgeoisie who never misses an opportunity to shove his superiority in your face with a distinctive Milanese accent.

Every club has its roots in a precise culture, forges an imagery in which the fan can recognise its essence. But drawing definite and lasting contours of a faith, except in a few cases, is a good-natured exercise that football feeds on to create belonging. I am like that and that is why I am different from you, I am special. This is the healthy illusion of cheering, which in reality has a shifting identity. With solid traits and references, but iridescent. Just think of Inter’s coat of arms, which in 116 years of history has changed sixteen times, continually revisited for historical, political, cultural and finally commercial reasons, being reduced to the bone in the minimalist dictatorship that has brutalised contemporary aesthetics and erased the warmth of that golden brim that represented the starry sky on the night of the club’s foundation.

The Bauscia identity has also undergone shocks and restorations. In the early 1980s, the era in which the events narrated in the film take place, the dichotomy with A.C. Milan is ideally corroded by time. Milan is no longer a working-class city divided between industrialists and wage earners, it is no longer that of the factories portrayed by Gabriele Basilico. The economic miracle and internal emigration after World War II have reshaped the social fabric and created widespread prosperity. Yet the portrait of the Inter-supporting Bauscia has somehow endured, kept alive by the romanticism that still permeates football and by its most illustrious narrators, such as Gianni Brera. Not only that, it has the opportunity to proliferate. A.C. Milan is doing badly, it has been relegated twice within three seasons: an excellent pretext to feed the Inter braggadocio and snobbery. We are at the dawn of Milano da bere, of the yuppie rampantism that would soon transform the city into a cradle of great opportunities, fertile ground for those with the bauscia, the easy-talking burr.

Emblematic in this sense is the passage in the film in which Franco Alfano, Burberry scarf around his neck and boastful manner, taunts the boss of the car showroom where he works because his friends have made him believe he has won the football pools. Yet the paradox is just around the corner. A few years later, as if by a twist of fate, the rise of the most Bauscia of them all, an almost caricatured one due to the excess of his stereotypical image, overturned the narrative of the city’s football rivalry and changed, at least for a while, the connotations of Inter supporters.

The glittering successes of Silvio Berlusconi’s A.C. Milan elevated the club into the aristocracy of world football and plunged Inter into unexpected subordination, especially in the first decade of the Massimo Moratti era.

The crazy expenses, the long trophy fast, the sporting tragedies of 5 May and the 2003 Champions League semi-final against A.C. Milan, who would end up winning the cup. The haughtiness that had characterised the Inter fan takes on a new form. That of one who exalts the epic of suffering, the nobility of misfortune, the nobility of failure. That of those who stick to the definition of Pazza Inter, crazy Inter, to glorify the whole range of feelings that the npredictable offers. That of those who take an almost perverse pleasure in thinking that things will surely go wrong. But also that of those who claim a moral superiority for never having incurred penalties for sporting offences. I lose but I live intensely, I lose but I do it gracefully, seems to engrave the interista on his new fan’s licence. In his way, always bourgeois. Always Bauscia. The catharsis of the Triplete and the farewell a few years later of Moratti, the last in a tradition of Milanese presidents, industrialists, and Inter lovers, wiuld also blur these new traits of Interism, without, however, completely blurring them.

Today, Inter supporters are in a new phase, less vainly pessimistic and more united, with ordinary fans huddling around the curve, singing choruses with their phone torches lit like one does at gigs. But somehow all that has passed remains and becomes symbols, those that the culture of cheering sorely needs to season a hyper-capitalist football era with sentiment. And so we still see choreographies dedicated to Peppino Prisco, the epitome of witty, sarcastic and brilliant Interism. Or others in which the resounding inscription I Pussee Bej (the most beautiful) appears alongside an enormous snake, displayed in a 2016 derby played by the two teams in a practically identical jersey, in which the red of the working class and the blue of the wealthy had been devoured by black.

Even if the romantic imagery of Eccezzziunale…veramente has eroded, even if that shabbier, cheesier, but infinitely purer football has died out, even if it’s harder to find the truck driver Tirzan sitting next to Gianni Agnelli in the stands, every time you enter the San Siro, faith lights up the glow of a shared identity. And you will find a Bauscia who can explain why.

The Eccezzziunale…veramente vinyl soundtrack by Detto Mariano is now out on camsugarmusic.com and on all digital platforms. The Milan derby capsule collection in collaboration with Tacchettee is available on tacchettee.it