Sunday 9th October 2022 3pm – Serie D Group H – The Campo Comunale Tonino d’Angelo, Altamura
A weekend away in Italy wouldn’t be the same without some calcio at some point. Yes, there’s the beautiful scenery, the stunning architecture, the amazing food and the followers of fashion, but you can get that all in Solihull, right? What really makes a proper trip is going to some football.
Italy is up there with the best for watching the beautiful game. Whilst most of the stadiums are ageing, and in some cases, decaying, they are icons. In his lesser known TV series, World Shut Your Mouth, Dom Joly traveled to the Seven Wonders of the World, standing next to tourists marvelling at the historic sites and simply uttered, “It’s a bit shit, isn’t it?”. In the case of the San Siro, Stadio Olimpico or the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona, it isn’t the outside view that people come to see, it is the passionate, often dark, heart beating inside.
New stadiums are rare in Italy. Many of them aren’t owned by the clubs, but the local governments who invested once and won’t invest again. Prior to the 1990 FIFA World Cup, two new stadiums (in Turin and Bari) were built, whilst the likes of the Stadio Luigi Ferraris (home of Genoa and Sampdoria), Stadio Sant’Elia in Cagliari and Verona’s Stadio Marcantonio Bentegodi had extensive redevelopments. Thirty years later and the Stadio delle Alpi in Turin has been completely rebuilt, Bari’s San Nicola has needed significant work, whilst the Stadio Sant’Elia has been abandoned, with Cagliari playing in a smaller stadium next door. Other notable stadiums such as the Pier Luigi Penzo in Venice is basic to say the least and was the smallest Serie A stadium last season.
Italians are known for their style and passion – their stadiums certainly aren’t stylish (OK, perhaps Bologna and Genoa excepted), but the passion flows through the game at whatever level you watch…..cue link into relevant part of this blog.
The latest weekend away wasn’t to anywhere that could be called a hot-bed of Italian football. Basilicata is one of the few regions in Italy that can’t boast a football team playing in the top two levels. In fact, it only has two (Potenza and Picerno) in the top three tiers. But go down into the roots of calcio and you’ll find clubs littered across the “instep” of Italy. Whilst Bari is the international gateway to the region, it was 30 miles inland I was heading, to the stunning town of Matera, made famous in the opening scenes of the latest James Bond film, No Time To Die.
The town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and was a European Capital of Culture in 2019. Buildings hewn into the rock face of the steep sides of a gorge give the town a pre-historic feel but there was nothing ancient about the cost of the hotels. The trip was booked long before the fixtures were released, with the hope that Bari would be at hope, a short drive from Karol Wojtyła Airport (Pope John Paul II to you and I) to the San Nicola, now repainted, rebuilt and ready for Serie B football. Alas, the fixture gods had other ideas, sending the Galletti north to Venice. But wait….Matera had a club and after lots of legal wrangling (common place in Italian football), they had a home game scheduled for the day we arrived in town.
A plan was hatched. Fly in, pick up car, drive to Matera, find parking space outside Matera (no cars allowed in apart from James Bond’s Aston Martin Vanquish), drop bags in expensive hotel, walk 20 minutes to the Stadio XXI Settembre-Franco Salerno, watch USD Matera Grumentum vs FBC Gravina, then back in time for pasta for tea.
We all know how the best laid plans never work. So, the week before the game, someone, somewhere decided to move just one fixture in Serie D, Group H from Sunday at 3pm, to Saturday at 3pm. Can you guess which one? Yep, the one in Matera.
“We must find another game to go to – after all we are traveling all that way and it would be a shame not to see a match somewhere new” is not something that the Current Mrs Fuller said. I’m sure she thought something like that and was probably just about to say it, when I told her not to worry because there was a Plan B.
And so, an hour after flying into Bari we were handing over our €11 to the “Hospitality Man/Woman” as it said on the website at the Campo Comunale Tonino d’Angelo in the town of Altamura, fifteen miles north of Matera for their Serie D game against SSD Casarano. A happy ending for all involved.
Altamura is a name any Paleontologist would be familiar with and let’s face it, we all love a bit of Jurassic Park don’t we? Back in the 1990’s not only did the locals find a 130,000 year old calcified man in a cave here, but 30,000 dinosaur footprints nearby. Surely an episode of Cold Cases in the making there? Altamura isn’t a name that most football fans would be familiar with though. In fact, I couldn’t find any history of the club, or amusing anecdotes to share with you. In the digital age we live in, it takes some beating not to find any Wikipedia page of a club, but I had to admit defeat.
A question I’m often asked about Lewes is if we suddenly found ourselves transported to Italy, at what level could or would we be comfortable playing at? In terms of a league structure, Italy has a 20 team top tier (Serie A), 20 teams in Serie B, then three interregional divisions of 20 sides at step 3. Below this is considered the Non-professional levels, which are top with 9 regional leagues with 18-20 sides, giving a total of around 260 sides…compared to England, we have 252 up to Step 3, where Lewes play. So, as a direct level comparison, Serie D would be the same as Isthmian Premier League. Now, what does that mean in terms ability? Well, read on….
The questions were the same as if back in England and going to a new ground – “just how close can I park to the ground?”. I couldn’t find any stats to show how well supported Altamura were, although a picture of the Main Stand from their final home game last season suggested it could be a few thousand on a good day. With the floodlights in sight and Now That’s What I Call The Nineties blaring from the PA system, we found a parking space no more than a minute’s walk from the ground. So either, everyone had walked here or there was nobody here.
Well, it turned out to be a bit of both. It wasn’t a 3pm kick off, rather 3.30pm and most of the fans, hard to miss in their black Ultra Altamura t-shirts were in the bars across the road from the ground. A bit like the Lewes Lunatic Fringe, but 40 years younger and didn’t have their home-made sandwiches in their pockets.
Tickets were €11 but only for Men. Women got in free. The Current Mrs Fuller was slightly aggrieved by that, as if it was a suggestion because Women didn’t know about football, they wouldn’t understand it and thus should’ve pay. In fact she was aggrieved because we’d agreed that I would pay for the tickets and she’d buy the beer.
The ground was once an athletics stadium. It could have still been one at a push – the pitch certainly showed signs of “field” activity. There was one large covered stand, where fans could sit on the concrete steps if they wanted. The middle section, known as the VIP Lounge, had some bucket seats bolted to the steps and was patrolled by “VIP security”. However, if you climbed the steps to the “normal” sections either side you could climb over the railings and go in, as most youngsters did.
Opposite the main stand was a terrace, caged in on all sides, for those troublesome away fans. Whilst the football on show was most definitely at the same, if not slightly below Step 3 in England, the away support would have put some League One clubs to shame. Casarano was a good three hour drive/six hours on a train from Altamura but there were a couple of hundred of their fans who had made the journey. Whilst the two sets of ultras were furiously supporting their own sides, there was a moment of respect in the opening minutes of the game from the home fans to their rivals, breaking into applause as Casarano’s fans broke into song.
A visit to Altamura wouldn’t be a favorite for any UK groundhoppers. There’s no programmes, no team sheets, no pin badges – unless you want a culinary experience of a bag of crisps and a non-alcoholic warm beer then you will be bitterly disappointed. There was no discernible features, no opportunity to “get up close and personal”.
We went to the top of the steps as the ultras started filling up the area below us. There would be no sitting down for this one. Whilst we were on the fringe of the action, we were close enough to jump around to Yellow Submarine/Just Can’t Get Enough (I’d never noticed how similar the melodies were before). The flags were waiving, the ultras were fist-pumping and the team, well, they were….average.
So to answer the first question posed – what standard is Serie D compared to football in England? After I saw the 6ft 3in Altamura left-back hoof the ball into the car park rather than controlling it I would say, without any disrespect meant, this was a Step 5 player. Big ginge, as we called him for obvious reasons, wasn’t alone in his inability to play the ball to another player in the same shirt. Add in a referee who wasn’t happy unless he’d given a free-kick less than 60 seconds from the last and you can imagine this wasn’t a game for the purest. In fact, it wasn’t a game for anyone who wanted to watch a game!
Casarano were no better than the home side but took the lead on a swift counter-attack down the left-hand side in the 30th minute, with Argentinian striker Pablo Burzio heading home. They doubled their lead in the 70th minute when veteran defender (another red-head) Ferdinando Vitofrancesco rose above the home defence and powered home. Having only scored 14 goals in his 15 year career in Italian football before this game, he scored a second in injury time to put a gloss on Casarano’s win. But come the 93rd minute, the Altamura’s ultras were still singing, still waving their flags and having the time of their lives.
So, in summary. Bring either of these sides over to the Isthmian Premier League and they would struggle. But bring their fans over and they would put clubs in the Football League to shame in terms of their fanatical support. Eleven euros for the two of us to spend a couple of hours bouncing around in the Italian sun? Sign me up for a season ticket.
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