Five Brothers and a Locked Gate

A Tournament Kept by One Brother

Italy entered 1918 on its knees but facing forward, dug in along the Piave, and Milan the city entered it under lock and key: after Caporetto the Prefect had banned public sporting gatherings, and the football that survived was played behind closed doors, to no crowd and for no gate money, in the cold bowl of the Velodromo Sempione. The national championship slept its fourth winter. In its place Lombardy contested the Coppa Mauro, a wartime tournament dressed in Prima Categoria clothes, its trophy put up by the engineer Francesco Mauro, vice-president and acting regent of a federation running on whatever hands the army had not taken; Mauro was exempt from service and often in Milan, while his brother Giovanni, a lieutenant and then captain of the Alpini, had gone to the mountains and, in 1917, into enemy captivity — one brother administering the game from a city desk, the other a prisoner of the war he had climbed to fight, and between the two of them you have as honest a portrait of that winter's Italy as any painter left us. Seven clubs had entered: Milan, Internazionale, Legnano, US Milanese, Nazionale Lombardia, Enotria, Saronno. The Regional Committee no longer ran a tournament of its own; it blessed the clubs' cups and lent them official referees, which is bureaucracy's way of saying it still believed.

Milan's share of the 1918 round-robin amounted, on paper, to a single afternoon: 13 January, Saronno-Milan 0-2, awarded without a ball kicked because Saronno had withdrawn. The real work had been done in December, in the closed-doors derby and the Enotria forfeit that the previous chapter has already accounted for, and when the table was ruled off, Milan and Internazionale stood level on twenty points. Read the columns coldly and Inter were the better side: thirty-six scored against eight conceded, where Milan's twelve matches had yielded ten wins, two defeats and a more modest twenty-seven against ten, with Legnano third on fourteen. But the table itself limped to the line: a Legnano-Inter result annulled by the federation — after, the chronicles insist, the referee Trezzi was leaned on to confess an error he had not made — had set off protests and withdrawals, accusations flew at the Lombard commissioner Mario Trinchieri and his collaborators, and Legnano — at first Milan's chief rival for the cup — found itself ruled out of the race at the green table rather than on the grass. By whatever road the table reached its last line, it came out level, and level meant a playoff; and a playoff between Milan and Inter meant a derby with everything riding on it, in a city where nobody would be allowed through the gates to watch.

The House of Cevenini

The beating heart of Milan's 1918 is not a tactic but a family. Five brothers of one Milanese household — a dairyman's, raised amid churns and the smell of the latteria, on milk and butter, the north's true currency — all wore the rossonero in that wartime season: Aldo the first and centre-forward, Mario the second at the back, Luigi the third, Cesare the fourth in midfield, Carlo the fifth up front, the Roman numerals of the era turning a family into a dynasty, an entire forward line from a single house while other houses were sending their sons to the Piave. Aldo, Cevenini I, born on 8 November 1889 at Arona on the lake, sat at the head of the table: captain, top scorer, and with the manager's chair empty, coach in everything but title, picking the team he then led out and finishing the moves he had himself designed. The Coppa Mauro record credits him with around nineteen goals in eleven appearances; his own player's page insists on twenty-one; the difference is two goals nobody who was locked outside could have counted anyway.

The strangest of the five was Luigi, Cevenini III, twenty-two years old and, by love and by registration, Inter's man: sixty-five goals in fifty-five matches across three seasons had made him the darling of the other shore before the war swallowed the championship whole. With nothing left to play for in his own colours he had come home — provisionally, the record is careful to say — to play beside his brothers, and there is the whole moral of wartime football in one transfer that was not a transfer: the prodigal did not desert his club, he merely went back to his family, because when the world is burning a man plays football with his brothers. Milan's histories log him at seven matches and five goals in the improvised competitions of those years, numbers small enough to miss and impossible, as we are about to see, to forget.

The Derby Nobody Saw

On 3 March 1918, at the Velodromo Sempione, with the gates locked by decree and the war standing on the Piave, Milan and Internazionale played off for the Coppa Mauro, and Milan won 8-1. More than a century later it remains the widest margin ever recorded in an official derby of Milano, and it was witnessed by almost no one: the greatest derby scoreline in the history of the city fell in silence, like the tree in the proverb. The match sheet reads like a family album. Aldo Cevenini scored five — at eleven minutes, at twenty-five, at sixty-two, at sixty-six, at eighty; Luigi scored twice, at sixty-eight and at seventy-three, against the club of his life; and Marini finished the eighth at eighty-eight. Inter's single reply came from Scheidler at fifty-five, one goal marooned in a rout. At the hour it had still been a match, 2-1; it was the six goals of the final half-hour that turned an afternoon into a record. Seven of the eight rossonero goals bore a Cevenini signature — five from the captain, two from the returned son — and this was, almost from first minute to last, one household's afternoon; in a season of protests and annulments, it is the one result no one has ever disputed.

Behind the brothers stood the plainer trades of the side: Guido Ribera, who kept Milan's goal in all eleven matches of the season; the half-backs Lovati, Scarioni and Soldera, of whom more later; Marini finishing what others began. The cup completed a sequence — Coppa Federale in 1915-16, Coppa Regionale Lombarda in 1916-17, Coppa Mauro in 1917-18, three wartime trophies in three years — though honesty obliges the chronicle to note that the tournament closed amid annulled results, withdrawals in protest and hot words for the commissioner, and there is a strand of the record which doubts the prize was ever formally assigned at all. Milan's cabinets count it, and after an 8-1 the objection feels like arguing with the weather; but the reader should know that even Milan's brightest wartime afternoon carries a smudge of the green table, because nothing in 1918, not even joy, arrived unrationed.

The War in Miniature

Around the one match that mattered, the year filled itself with the fixtures of an improvising world, and you can read the whole war in Milan's friendly list the way you can read a household's fortunes in its shopping. On 6 January a Milan representative eleven beat a Lombardy selection 3-2; on 27 January Inter took a friendly 4-3; on 3 February Legnano were outlasted 6-5 after extra time, eleven goals shared by men playing for nothing but the habit of playing; Nazionale Lombardia were edged 2-1 in February and US Milanese beaten 3-1 in March, a 4-2 defeat at Saronno followed, and Liberi Calciatori were beaten 7-1 on the last day of the month. Then, on 14 April, an English Military Selection came to the Velodromo Sempione and won 1-4 — the schoolmasters of the game, in uniform now, calling in to remind the pupils who had invented the lesson. In May came the Coppa Sala: Saronno beaten 4-2 in the semifinal on the 19th, and a final against Nazionale Lombardia, fixed for the 26th, that was simply never played — a cup without a final, which may be the most 1918 sentence in this chronicle. On 30 May a Milanese eleven beat FIAT 3-1, the factory itself fielding a team as factories then did; on 9 June the 24th Infantry Novara were beaten 5-2, in the very month the Austrian army's last throw was breaking on the Piave; in July Legnano and a Milan eleven shared six goals and went home. Soldiers' sides, factory sides, regimental sides: the war in miniature, played out at walking pace on Lombard grass.

The absences told the same story as the fixtures. Piero Pirelli, president since 1909, had enlisted as a cavalry officer and served in the war while the family firm's works ran swollen with army orders for tyres and rubberised aircraft fabric — the president of a football club and a supplier of the means of war under the same family signature, which is Milan, city of work, compressed into a single clause. Louis Van Hege, the Belgian, was home under arms — he had led a Belgian soldiers' eleven to Italy in 1917 to play charity matches against Milan and against Italy — his ninety-seven goals in eighty-eight league matches, by one count, suspended with everything else, and the Olympic gold of Antwerp 1920 still two years off. And Attilio Trerè, a pillar of the pre-war side, would come through the war alive but not intact as a footballer: the fighting ended his playing days as surely as any tackle, without leaving a mark the record can name.

Counting, Not Adding

By 1918 the club's roll of the fallen was long, and the terrible mercy of the year is grammatical: the record pins no named rossonero death to the calendar of 1918 itself. Milan had passed from adding to its dead to counting them. Fourteen names by war's end, players, members, directors: Erminio Brevedan the first to fall, on Monte Piana in the July of 1915, his regiment and his rank set down in their own year; the goalkeeper Domenico Moda, brother of the veteran defender Guido, dead in the Isonzo war zone as an artillery sergeant in October 1915; Mario Azzolini, killed in an aviation accident at Busto Arsizio on 25 November 1916; Glauco Nulli on his mountain and the vice-president Gilberto Porro Lambertenghi on his plateau, whom the year before has already buried at length and who are named here only to be counted; and behind them Canfari, Colombo, Rovelli, Soldera, Calderari, Carito, Forlano, Wilmant — names the record keeps more surely than it keeps their dates, which is its own kind of epitaph.

And there is Lorenzo Gaslini, the airman-goalkeeper, who came through the whole catalogue of ways the war had of killing a man — and whom it reached anyway, after the silence, in a January that falls outside this year's calendar and will be given its due at the opening of the next. Set these names beside the eight goals of March and you have the year in its true proportions: a club that could still put five brothers on a pitch had already given the ground fourteen of its men, and every wartime trophy Milan lifted was lifted with those hands somewhere in the grip.

Three Weeks Before the Silence

Autumn came, and with it — though no one on via Goldoni could yet have counted the days — the end. On 29 September Milan won a friendly at Inter, 2-1. Then the Coppa Giuriati, put up by Enotria Goliardo: US Milanese beaten 4-1 in the opening round on 6 October; and on 13 October, at Inter's own ground on via Goldoni, Milan won 0-4 — a second derby demolition in a single calendar year, this one away from home, exactly three weeks before the armistice. On 27 October, back at the Velodromo Sempione, Legnano were beaten 3-2 and the cup was won, in the very days the army was breaking through at Vittorio Veneto; Milan's footballers completed their autumn trophy, so to speak, within earshot of the last offensive.

On 3 and 4 November, at Villa Giusti, the armistice; Diaz's victory bulletin; Italy's war over, at a cost of around six hundred and fifty thousand dead. Beside such a number a football chronicle should lower its voice, and this one does — but it does not stop, because not stopping had been the whole point. The game had kept the city company through the locked-gate winters, and now it would keep the peace company too.

The Trains Run Again

The Coppa Nino Biffi, offered by Saronno, straddled the peace itself, and its dates read like a country exhaling: Enotria beaten 4-1 on 3 November, as Italy's war entered its last hours; a 2-1 defeat at Inter on 10 November, six days after the silence fell — the world restored to normal enough that Inter were permitted to win a derby again; Saronno beaten 5-1 in their own town on the 17th; a 1-3 home stumble against US Milanese on 8 December; Legnano beaten 1-0 on the 15th; and third place at the end of it, which mattered less than any third place has ever mattered. Because the true fixtures of December were elsewhere: on 1 December Milan travelled — travelled, on a train, in peacetime — to Genoa, and beat Sampierdarenese 8-2 by the sea; and on 29 December an English Military Team from Genoa came to the Velodromo Sempione and drew 1-1, soldiers still for opponents, but soldiers with somewhere, at last, to go home to.

The club, too, began coming home. Men returned from the front and the squad swelled; in the season now opening the veterans Morandi and Mariani would reappear in rossonero like furniture brought down from the attic, Mariani unseen in the shirt since 1910. Cesare Lovati — born, with a fine sense of occasion, on Christmas Day 1891 in Buenos Aires — carried the thread forward: fourteen seasons and 119 official appearances between 1910 and 1924, the wartime gap in his record the conflict's fingerprint on it, and by 18 January 1920 a debut for Italy in a 9-4 win over France. Scarioni and Soldera, the chroniclers wrote, played the new season with infinite heart. As for what else the winter was carrying towards the club — another tournament, another name, another parting, a president home from his cavalry war — those are not 1918's to spend, and the year that follows will spend them properly.

What 1918 leaves behind is this. A derby won 8-1 in an empty velodrome, by a forward line that was mostly one family, with two of the goals scored by the enemy's own beloved son, home on the war's strange loan; a trophy counted in Milan's cabinet whether or not the federation's paperwork ever quite let go of it; a second derby won 0-4 three weeks before the armistice; a cup that straddled the peace; a train to Genoa; a list of names. And a family that the war had gathered under one shirt and the peace would scatter again just as easily, allegiance in that house being held in common like the surname — though where the brothers went, and how many, is an address the next chapter will have to write out. Milan kept what could be kept: the scoreline, the silence it was scored in, and the knowledge — worth more than any star stitched above a crest — that in the worst year of the modern world it had gone on playing, and that a club which plays through such a year has proved something no scudetto proves: not that it can win, but that it cannot be stopped. The peace, arriving in November, turned the city's lights back on and found the club exactly where it had been left — standing in the cold bowl of the Sempione, holding three small cups, counting its dead, waiting for the trains.