Nostalgia is a peculiar thing. It’s an extremely personal thing. It’s a pop song from when you were 17. It’s the sun on your back, sand between your toes and the waves lapping at the shore on an Italian beach. It’s your first love. Your pet from 20 years ago. It’s the smell of freshly cut grass. It’s old, beautiful football shirts. It’s Italian football. Super Pippo scoring with his hip, Zidane juggling the ball, Davids rampaging in midfield, Maldini executing a perfect sliding tackle, Bobo Vieri’s scowl, Batistuta’s machine gun celebration.
Three major calcio memories stick out to me. The first was June 2001. Roma vs Parma. If Roma won, they’d pick up the Scudetto, their first for 18 years. I wasn’t in Rome that day. I was in a suburban northern England, about as far away as you can get in terms of vitality. I was 11, the perfect age to become totally enraptured by football. I remember the television coverage from the Stadio Olimpico that day, teeming with colour and noise and blazing heat. It was so intense, so electric, that I may as well have been in Rome. I wouldn’t consider myself a Roma fan as such (I’m one of those peculiar lovers of Italian football, rather than of one team) but when Totti scored the first goal and the stadium erupted, I felt a wave of euphoria. I still do, when I watch the footage back today. It’s goosebumps all over your arms moment even now. Talk about first loves? The young hometown hero scoring a title winning goal Infront of a rabid crowd, and it takes the title away from arch-rivals Lazio! First love, indeed.
The second is a strange one, the 2003 champions league final. Milan beat Juventus on penalties after a tense, tight and mostly drama-free game. But being slightly older than for Totti’s heroics, this game seemed to suggest all types of hidden depths to Italian football to me. It felt like listening to classical music; I knew this was impressive, technical excellence. But I didn’t have the breadth or depth of knowledge of Calcio history to full grasp what Maldini lifting the trophy fully meant. It also taught me that real football wasn’t a video game. Perhaps Del Piero or Rui Costa could dance around defenders and score screamers on a whim in Fifa or PES, but this was real life, not pixels. It was a game in isolation I don’t have a fond memory of; but the intrigue it provided me was seemingly everlasting.
The last, I was in Italy. I was in Rome, in July 2006. I’d made it out of the suburbs. But the action was now in Berlin. My burgeoning love of Italian football had fully blossomed, but calcoppoli had reared its foul head. We all know how that summer played out. I saw the whole of Rome explode again, but this time in person. Fabio Cannavaro seemed to leap impossibly hight and impossibly far to win the ball and start a move which saw Del Piero knock out Germany. Italy were bound for the final. The whole evening of that semi final is a blur of images and noises; people surfing on cars, waitresses blasting airhorns, a confused but enthralled American tourist nonsensically shouting “Go! Go!” into the night sky. Joyous, delirious faces. The final was even more surreal, both the game (that headbutt…) and the fact I felt at 16 as if I was at the centre of the whole world. The eternal city lived up to its name.
All the moments I mentioned are major moments in Italian football, and Italian life, over the last thirty years. I’m not unique in reflecting fondly on them. But my own perspective on them, my feelings of nostalgia towards them are. Nostalgia seems to be back in vogue. The more streamlined and digital our society is ostensibly becoming, the more we seem to be craving blocky analogue. If you’re reading this, if you’re on the Gentleman Ultra website, you love nostalgia just as much as us. You love the history of the game and how moments made you feel, and still make you feel. But defining nostalgia is like counting the grains of sand on that beach you once sat on. Impossible, and shifting all the time. 2010 was 15 years ago. For a younger fan of calcio, that is nostalgia. So, we’re widening our scope. In the past, we were mainly focussed on 2006 and things prior to that. We’re still obsessives for that period. We’ll still be discussing those football italia channel 4 years, and the decades prior. We’ll still be featuring wonderful long reads, fascinating insights and perspectives. But if nostalgia to you is Pirlo, Kaka, Di Natale or Dybala, we want to hear from you to.