Paul Rouse

So this is Italy remaking in the 30s what had been already there in the early modern period, which itself was an extension of the old Roman world.

So it's not alone that we kind of, we've been at this game for thousands of years, but we're not having the mere English with their words coming, infecting how our commentary, which is reaching into homes because this is about Italy.

So even within fascism, there's an ambiguity around soccer.

And you can see it by the invention of a game by the national secretary of the fascist party, Augusto Turati, who set up a game which was loosely based around fascism.

the rules of soccer, but which was called Volata.

And it was to be the kind of a fascist, the fascist version of soccer.

Didn't kick off.

Sort of Quidditch of... Yes, exactly.

Quidditch without the broomstick as you go along.

And that just did not take off.

So that's within the party itself.

You then have that addition of the Rimpatriati, which of course is made...

really more difficult for those people who brought them in by the fact that some of those rimpatriati disappeared from the country in 35 and then into 36 when the invasion of Ethiopia and everything that came like that and there's military service on the way so that creates a problem and then you have the idea of Carlo Levi writing in in 1934 lamenting the fact that

that sport is now being used as propaganda, lamenting the fact that it's infantilizing a nation into acceptance of a regime which he utterly opposes and which he fought against.

And I do think in all of this, you have to remember that it's a real danger

that you believe the propaganda.

So that is to say, we accept that there was propaganda, but to move from that to say that the propaganda was successful is problematic.

And you see it with, for example, Lucio Lombardo Redici, the celebrated mathematician and communist from the 1930s in Italy.

He wrote later of those years saying he had been at the matches.

He was at the final in which the Czechs were beaten.