Feel free to skip my commentary and watch the insanity of a match in the YouTube video below.
Every year, unless it's banned, Florence is home to the most brutal legal human-only sport I've ever witnessed, Calcio Storico. In a city obsessed with tradition and historical preservation (rightfully so, considering the amount of art here and the city's historical role as an early capital of the Italian Republic), it's not hard to imagine why Florence would want to pay homage to historical sports. But they might be going too far with this.
Yesterday, 25 June 2012, was a big day in Florence for three reasons. The festival of Saint John the Baptist (the city's patron saint) was celebrated, mainly through shooting off fireworks over the Arno river after sunset. The European cup hosted Italy vs. England, which turned out to be a 0-0 tie but was decided via penalty kicks in Italy's favor, 4-2. And but before all of that a huge sandpit surrounded by bleachers in Piazza Santa Croce hosted about 50 rather large, tattooed, fierce-looking Italian men destined to beat the everloving snot out of each other for the final match of Calcio Storico 2012.
I saw the bleachers start to go up in Santa Croce a couple weeks ago. I live on Borgo Santa Croce and walk by the piazza every day. It's a lovely open square with a massive marble-front church, but since it's one of the most popular squares and since it has so much room, the city uses it often to set up huge stages or markets, or else the young Italians use it routinely to drink in and throw their trash in.
Yesterday it was used once again for Calcio Storico. Calcio means "soccer" and storico means "historic," but I was unable to ascertain if either of those descriptions was true. The only minor ways in which is resembles modern-day soccer is that there are two teams and there is a ball. Players usually just carry the ball (rather than kick it), like in rugby. But it is not like rugby either, because, well, it's basically what I imagine an Ultimate Fighting Championship taking place in a prison would be like.
For the tournament, the city's areas were represented by four teams, each bearing a color and emblem. So this was the final match of three bouts (that took place over a couple weeks), with the Bianchi (white) San Spirito lads versus the Azzurri (blue) Santa Croce lads in this final game. I was rooting for blue (since I lived right there) and most of our students seemed to be for white (since they live on the other side of the river).Â
The gameplay was preceded by an hour-long processional of young and old Florentines in Renaissance dress. They wore bright colors, the parachute pants, the feather caps. Some rode horses. Some wore suits of armor. Some played bugles, others drums. It's been pretty significantly summer here and waiting in the uncovered bleachers pressed against hundreds of spectators (many of whom chose to smoke) with the sun beating down made me very impatient for the game to start. It turned out that the game was only 45 minutes. And the opening procession, Olympics-like in its pomp and circumstance, was one hour.
But what a 45 minutes of gameplay it was. The match started with more players than I could count on the field. Between 40-50 total. I soon figured out that this was because many would become injured and some would be thrown out of the game. On the field with the players were about a half dozen referees (in full Renaissance dress, looking like princes with feather caps) and about a dozen paramedics (in standard-issue modern dress, with bright-yellow shirts, bright-orange pants, and white rubber medical gloves). I think also the team owners/managers and other dudes were banging around on the field. The players themselves wore only sneakers and those Renaissance parachute pants (down slightly past the knees). Most were shirtless at the start and all were shirtless after about 10 minutes.
There was a wide range in the age and physiques of the players. Some looked as young as 18, others as old as 50. Some were as sculpted as bodybuilders, others had mad beer guts and went for that "sheer girth" kind of advantage. Nearly all had tattooes, athletic tape (in various places) and no-nonsense expressions on their faces.
The way the game starts (and how it restarts after a goal) is thusly: a main referee blows a whistle and throws a medium-sized red-and-white ball (which is about soccer-ball size, but without the dimples and looking kind of more rubber-like) as high into the air as he can, usually in a wonky arc, nothing close to resembling a straight-up toss like in basketball. One team then tips or hits or grabs and throws the ball toward their backcourt, where a team player catches it and stands with it for as long as possible. In the mid-field, about a dozen Bianchi guys meet about a dozen Azzurri guys for boxing skirmishes. They will throw some punches, grapple, slam each other onto the ground. Some will stop skirmishing (at random points) and walk away. Others will stay paired up on the ground, with one guy sitting on another. Still others will simply grapple each other standing up, sometimes swaying in what one student described as slowdancing. (It did appear as such to the untrained Calcio Storico eye.)
So, if you can imagine, the gameplay is fierce and yet unfocused. Audience and player attention was almost never on the ball, which remained mostly stationary backfield. The ultimate goal was for one team to beat the other into physical submission, at which point the dominating team could simply run around the dominated team and start scoring goals. The arena was surrounding by a red padded wall that came up to about chest-height, and behind that (maybe a meter behind) was a chainlinked fence that held up a net of sorts. To score a goal, a player had to launch the ball into the space between the opposing wall of the court and the fence behind it.
There appeared to be no rules to the game. Every five minutes or so the crowd would gasp as one guy literally picked up another guy and slammed him onto the ground. Team assistants or referees or paramedics would routinely splash the players with water, perhaps to dissuade them from fighting dirty, or else to wash the blood and dirt from their bodies so they could continue fighting. Any player was subject to being tackled at any moment from any direction — most tackles took place nowhere near the ball, when a guy walking around on his own, minding his own business, was suddenly attacked from behind (for no visible reason).
A few players were knocked out cold during the course of the game. Others dislocated joints or were beaten to a pulp until they remained motionless on the ground. At this point, one paramedic would rush other and poke the player. If he was unconscious or unable to move, the paramedic would then signal to the rest of the medical crew, who would run a stretcher over to the injured player and carry him out of the arena. This precaution never stopped the gameplay. The only thing that stopped gameplay was a goal, and then that was only for about 15 seconds because the main referee would move as quickly as possible to throw the ball up in a wonky arc again.
Although there were no rules, there did seem to be some rudimentary strategy. At any given time at least a dozen players would be incapacitated. Dudes would literally just sit on other dudes, then both would look towards the direction of the ball and try to follow the "gameplay." If they didn't want to wait on the ground, some dudes would just grab each other by the pants, pretending to grapple each other into submission. At random times, one guy would let go or stand up, and then both would walk away. This was probably to clear players out of the way so the ball could move more easily around the court. But it was a ridiculous sight.
More ridiculous sights: A guy's head bleeding so much it needed to be bandaged, and then that guy continuing to play, punching, getting punched, tackling, getting tackled. A guy bleeding from his face down his neck, chest, and stomach and continuing to run around like a madman, looking like a zombie ready to feast.Â
I heard one year a guy bit off another guy's ear.
The crowd responded to the action by throwing water bottles and huge flares onto the field. At the admission gates, everyone in the audience had to remove the caps from their water bottles. Because a capped bottle full of water could do some serious damage if thrown correctly. Still, many audience members threw many water battles onto the field. The bottles would stay in the dirt, getting trampled on or drunk from or used to pour the water over the players' heads. The referees scrambled to collect errant blue and white flares from the field before everything got covered up in smoke (which happened two or three times during gameplay).Â
The Bianchi ended up trouncing Santa Croce 4-0. Immediately following the game, many San Spirito fans rushed the field by climbing over the fence.
I took many poor photos of the event and probably ever poorer video, but here's a great trailer someone made about Calcio Storico (a game which is apparently only still played in Tuscany, Florence's region of Italy):
