Over the Apennines for the First Time

The Tuscan Address

Number 1, Via Berchet: a Tuscan wine-shop in the middle of Milan, the Fiaschetteria Toscana, the flasks of Chianti standing in ranks along the wall and the post arriving addressed to the Milan Foot-Ball and Cricket Club — for in 1904 the club's registered heart beat not in a boardroom but under a wine-merchant's rafters. Outside the door lay Italy's industrial capital in full boom — the Milan of Pirelli rubber, of the textile mills, of the new electric tram rattling where the horse had lately been — a city already dreaming aloud of the great International Exposition of 1906, the fair that would celebrate the piercing of the Simplon tunnel, as though the Alps themselves had at last agreed to step aside for Lombard commerce. Football in such a city was still a modest trade. The entire Italian championship of 1904 — the Prima Categoria, seventh of its name — mustered five clubs from three regions: Genoa and Andrea Doria from Liguria, Juventus and Torinese from Piedmont, and, from Lombardy, the club whose letters went to the wine-shop.

The club that gathered beneath those rafters still had the shape of a family firm. Alfred Ormond Edwards, the Englishman, presided; Edward Nathan Berra served as his vice-president; Daniele Angeloni kept the minute-book as secretary and then, on Sunday afternoons, unbuttoned his collar and played in midfield, because the age of the specialist had not yet dawned and a man was expected to be useful in every room of the house. And beneath them all — beneath, note, not above, for his empire was the mud of the Campo Acquabella — stood Herbert Kilpin, captain, coach and, when the occasion demanded, goalscorer: thirty-four years old now, and entering the sixth season of the club he had founded on 16 December 1899, with the declaration the official histories repeat like a creed — that his men would wear red like fire and black to invoke fear.

Edwards had spent the season performing a quiet surgery on this little body. Where foreigners had once filled more than half the team, he cut them to four — Kilpin, plus the Swiss trio of Paul Arnold Walty, Alfred Haberlin and Hans Heinrich Suter — so that nine of the thirteen players used in 1903-04 were Italian. It was policy, not accident: the Englishman's club was being made Milanese on purpose. They wore a long-sleeved shirt in thin, equal stripes of red and black, the red cross of the city on a white shield at the breast. The shorts? White, says one tradition; black, says another; the accounts differ and no photograph settles it, and I am content to leave the matter open, for a club whose chroniclers cannot agree on the colour of its knees is a club born before the camera could end such arguments — which is to say, born in the heroic age.

The Silver Ball That Stayed by the Sea

Understand first what the Palla Dapples was, because without it the winter of 1904 makes no sense. Henry Dapples — Swiss, a financier, a director of Genoa and once a forward for them himself — had donated a full-size football made of silver, and around this glittering object the pioneers built the strangest of competitions: a single challenge match, winner takes the ball, with the delicious rule that the holder kept it in the event of a draw, and the still more delicious rule that a fresh challenge had to be delivered within minutes of the final whistle — in person, if you had the nerve, or by telegram, if you had a fast boy and the price of the wire. Contemporaries, the chroniclers tell us, rated this silver ball perhaps more important than the championship itself, and one understands them perfectly: a championship is an argument, but a ball of silver is a fact.

The ball had been instituted late in 1903 and was broken in among the Ligurians in the last days of that December, Genoa and Andrea Doria trading a 1–1, a 0–0 and a 1–0 between the 20th and the 27th. Then, on 17 January 1904, Milan went down to the Campo di Ponte Carrega to challenge for it and came home empty-handed, beaten 2–1 with Suter scoring, and that January afternoon fixed Milan's place for the season: runners-up in the competition. Genoa, in truth, spent that whole winter swatting away the peninsula: Andrea Doria dispatched 6–2 on 3 January, Torinese 2–0 on the 10th, Juventus 2–0 on 21 February. Not one Palla Dapples travelled to Milan in all of 1904 — a detail worth savouring precisely because of what followed, for from 1905 the rossoneri would begin to hoard that silver ball with such appetite that they had twenty-three challenges won by 1909, more than any club in Italy. Every feast, the Lombard cooks will tell you, begins with a lean year.

March, and the Same Old Mountain

The championship, being five clubs, was less a league than a duel with preliminaries, and its format had the elegance of an old duelling code: the three-time holders, Genoa, sat apart and waited while the rest of Italy eliminated itself for the honour of facing them. Milan's part began on 6 March at the Acquabella, the interregional eliminator against Andrea Doria, and it was settled the old way — by the old man himself. On seventy-five minutes Kilpin scored the only goal of the afternoon, 1–0, and Milan advanced; the same Sunday, on the Piazza d'Armi in Turin, Juventus beat Torinese 3–2, and so the semi-final was made: Milan against Juventus, at the Acquabella, on 13 March.

They could not be separated. One goal apiece — Umberto Scotti for Milan, Streule for Juventus — then extra time, and still nothing, and so the whole apparatus was wound up again for a replay on the same ground the following Sunday. Here the story turns cruel with the suddenness these pioneer springs specialised in: 20 March 1904, Milan 0, Juventus 3 — Streule, Ferraris I, Gibezzi — and the season's great ambition dissolved inside ninety minutes. Somewhere in the red and black on those two Sundays stood Enrico Canfari, who had helped found Juventus in 1897 and crossed to Milan the year before — the previous chapter tells that crossing, and the end it came to — and who now watched his own creation put his adopted club out of the championship. The chronicler of magliarossonera, a man after my own heart, needed eight words where I have needed a paragraph: '0-3 and everyone went home.' It was the second year running that Milan's championship had died at the semi-final stage, and there is no lonelier way to lose than at home, in March, to a team you had held only a week before.

The rest belonged, as the whole era belonged, to Genoa. On 27 March, at the Campo di Ponte Carrega, they beat Juventus 1–0 — Bugnion, on sixty-five minutes — and were champions of Italy for the sixth time in seven editions, their third in a row. Against that mountain the rest of the peninsula measured itself and despaired; only once had anyone planted a different flag on the summit, and that flag was Milan's, in 1901. By 1904 it was a memory — and a flag planted once is not a garrison.

The Expedition to Tuscany

But 1904 refuses to be read as an elegy, because in May the season produced its most romantic chapter. The Italian Gymnastics Federation — the FGNI, that older, sterner body which regarded football as one gymnastic exercise among many — held its tournament in Florence, and Milan resolved to go. First came the Lombard eliminations of 22 May, which tell you how crowded the city's football had already grown: Milan 2–0 against Mediolanum, Milan 2–1 against Sempione, rivals sprouting in the home streets like mushrooms after autumn rain. Then the journey itself, an expedition in the full steam-age sense of the word — and here the historians reach for their superlatives, one calling it the club's first outing beyond the industrial triangle, another the first match Milan ever played outside the regions of northern Italy. Choose whichever formula you prefer; the substance is identical. For a club whose entire competitive universe had been Milan, Turin and Genoa, the crossing of the Apennines was a genuine adventure — and there is a private joke in it that I cannot resist: the club that received its post at a Tuscan wine-shop had finally gone to see Tuscany for itself.

In Florence, where only three clubs — Milan, Andrea Doria and Vicenza — had answered the federation's roll, waited Andrea Doria, who had thrashed Vicenza 5–0 in the semi-final while Milan passed straight to the decider. The final — 3 June 1904, by the season pages' reckoning, inside the tournament's window of mid-May to early June — was the second meeting of the year between the two clubs and comfortably the better of them: Milan 3, Andrea Doria 2, and the cup came home over the Apennines. The footballers' own federation, the FIGC, never recognised the gymnasts' tournaments as official titles, and the purists are welcome to their asterisk; I merely observe that medals do not know which federation minted them, and that a young club learns more from one long journey won than from ten short ones lost.

The Twentieth of September

The year kept one act in reserve, and the country itself supplied the scenery. In mid-September, after soldiers had shot down striking miners at Buggerru in Sardinia and carabinieri had fired on peasants at Castelluzzo in Sicily, the Milan Chamber of Labour proclaimed the first general strike in Italy's history: from 15 to 21 September the country stood still, and Milan — always Milan — was its organisational heart. It was in the last days of that strike, on 20 September — the patriotic feast of the XX Settembre — that the rossoneri travelled into the Oltrepò Pavese for a one-day tournament at Casteggio, filed by the season's record-keepers under the name of Coppa Lombardia. While the nation argued furiously about its future, eleven men in red and black went off to play football.

They played it rather well. In the semi-final Milan beat Pro Vercelli 2–1 — and mark that opponent, because the Vercelli histories record that it was for this very tournament that their players first adopted the white shirt which would soon become the most feared kit in Italy; dynasties, like rivers, begin as trickles nobody thinks to dam. In the final, Unione Sportiva Milanese were dismantled 3–0, the goals arriving with indecent promptness in the fifth, eighteenth and twentieth minutes, under the whistle of Luigi Bosisio of Milan. The eleven of that Casteggio day has come down to us entire: Ermolli; Pedroni I, G. Colombo, Scotti, Canfari II, Angeloni, Haberlin, Walty, Sala, Suter and Kilpin — the founder still there at the end of the line, in his sixth season, as he had been at the beginning of everything. And a caution for anyone tempted to gloat over that 3–0: the beaten Milanese would grow strong enough to knock Milan out of the championship a mere five months later. In the city of looms, rivals were woven quickly.

So Milan came home from Casteggio with the year's last prize, and the year closed with no official title beside its name — the semi-final lost for a second spring running, the silver ball still down by the sea, the Florence cup uncounted by the keepers of the official rolls. But the club had become Italian by design; it had learned to travel and to come home with something; and the game around it was outgrowing its little rooms, for in Paris, on 21 May 1904, FIFA itself had been founded, with Italy's federation to join the year after. And through the door of the new season, quietly, walked the next Milan: Alessandro Trerè, who would finish 1904-05 as the team's top scorer with three goals; his brother Attilio, who began between the posts and whom the Gazzetta would soon be saluting as quick and mightily strong; and the defender Guido Moda — the generation that would carry the red and black to the scudetti of 1906 and 1907. The mud of the Acquabella held no treasure that winter. It held seed; and seed, in Lombardy, is the one crop that never fails.