Paul Rouse

Broader public interest.

A lot of people experienced it on the radio or looking at newsreels, but actually attending the game was limited in numbers, and it's not clear that all the games sold out despite claims to the contrary.

Interesting.

Yes, and they will have seen the posters that are up, the visual imagery, these brilliant Italian propagandist posters that are put up and identified and done with such clarity and skill.

But the rise of radio,

was so important because if you think about it, it allowed the voice to reach into someone's kitchen and increasing numbers of Italians had radios by the mid-1930s.

I know radio was beginning to broadcast live sport by the early 1920s in America and then across Europe into 24 and then across to Australia, but...

The reality of it was that mass radio ownership was really a product from the mid-1930s onwards.

So by 1934, in Italy, more and more Italians had radios and there is that...

public square broadcast so that it could be experienced in a communal way in public squares by people as well who chose to do that.

Before that, people used to congregate outside newspaper offices and wait for telegrams to come through with the, it's like the old video printer on.

And the way they did it in 1930 in Buenos Aires was...

The tap comes true, but they have a loudspeaker set up outside to project to the thousands of people who've gathered and just these stories of the tears that flowed after your quote.

Why are you laughing at the Argentinian stomach?

Yeah, and this Italianization was really interesting as well.

It's even the adoption of the word calcio.

So it's not football or it's not football as it became in South America, but calcio takes on.

And of course, this is an echo back to Calcio Fiorentina.

the medieval game that was played or the early modern game in Florence still like reenacted now with new teams and how important was there was this construction of a mythology that that itself was

a recreation of Harpiston, the old Roman game.