The Year with Two Faces

Two Seasons in One Winter Coat

The Italian football year has never respected the Italian calendar year, and 1932, like a man wearing one winter coat over two different suits, belonged half to one season and half to another: its spring was the closing act of the 1931-32 championship, its autumn the overture of 1932-33, and both were played inside the single national division born in 1929-30, an infant competition already learning to speak with a Turinese accent. Juventus were building their quinquennio d'oro, scudetto stacked upon scudetto with the regularity of a man laying bricks, and everyone else in Italy — Bologna, Roma, the two quarrelsome halves of Milan — was left to argue over the seating plan at somebody else's wedding.

Beyond the touchline, Italy was ten years into its Fascist experiment, and the regime spent October 1932 celebrating its Decennale with the mass choreography it preferred to conversation. In August, on the Lido, Giuseppe Volpi's new invention — the first Venice Film Festival, held from the sixth to the twenty-first of the month — offered the world a Venice of projectors and evening dress, a modern Italy for export. Milan itself had no time for lidos: it was the country's industrial furnace, all trams and looms and ledgers, a city where the fog off the Navigli was less a weather condition than a domestic arrangement, and where football was still wriggling out of its amateur skin while clubs elsewhere had begun to pay handsomely for the professional feet that were arriving in Italy from abroad.

Three Points from Six, and Then the Banquet

The 1931-32 Milan began the way a risotto begins when the cook abandons the pot: three points from the first six matches, a start so meagre that even mid-table looked, from down there, like alpine country, the Grigne seen from a cellar window. A club with Milan's appetite does not accept such rations for long, but nor does it always know how to refuse them, and the early part of the campaign was spent discovering which of those two truths would govern the year.

Then the pot was stirred. Torino were devoured 6-1, Modena 5-0, Bari 5-2, Napoli beaten 3-1, and the season that had opened as penance turned into a banquet served in courses, each heavier and more Lombard than the last. By the final day fourth place was there to be taken, and it was taken at home against Casale, 4-2, with two goals from the captain, Mario Magnozzi, to bolt the door on it — the captain's privilege and the captain's duty, discharged twice over in the same afternoon.

The final ledger read 39 points from fifteen wins, nine draws and ten defeats, 57 goals scored against 40 conceded: fourth, behind champions Juventus on 54, Bologna on 50 and Roma, level on points with Fiorentina, and — a detail no Milanese of either persuasion has ever considered a detail — ahead of Ambrosiana-Inter. It was the best finish Milan would manage in the whole of the lean early thirties, and like most best finishes of lean eras it was mistaken, briefly and forgivably, for the beginning of something.

Up front the goals had been shared like bread at a long table: Piero Pastore, the forward who had come from Lazio, led the count with thirteen; Magnozzi and Pietro Arcari III added eleven apiece; and Arcari, Magnozzi and Francesco Pomi each answered the bell thirty-three times, which in that era of mud, hemp lacing and sodden leather was a form of endurance the bare statistics only gesture at.

The Tripod

But the spring of 1932 was built from the back, on a trio the club's chroniclers say entered rossonera history entire: Dario Compiani in goal, and in front of him Luigi Perversi and Giuseppe Bonizzoni, the defender fetched from Cremonese. They were opposites bound into a single instrument — Perversi the clean marker, the correct one, the tackler whose conscience arrived half a second before his boot; Bonizzoni the other kind, the hard man of whom the old chronicle says, with the candour of the age, that any tackle was permitted so long as the opponent stopped. Every good defence in history has needed both the confessor and the executioner, and Milan, that spring, had them standing shoulder to shoulder.

I have always believed a defence reveals a club's character more honestly than its attack, because goals are gifts and clearances are wages, and this Milan earned its wages. Behind the tripod stood the institution: Mario Benazzoli in the president's chair, Anteo Carapezzi as sporting director, and on the bench the Magyar, József Bánás — Giuseppe, the registry insisted — a Hungarian who had once worn the shirt as a player and now taught in it, one of that itinerant priesthood of Danubian masters who carried the game's grammar across Europe in a suitcase. His classroom was San Siro, six years old that year, still smelling of new concrete out beyond the edge of the city, waiting for the decades that would make it a cathedral.

Two Derbies, Nine Goals, Badly Distributed

The city's private argument was staged twice in the calendar year, and the two derbies of 1932 divided their goals with a perversity to make a mathematician weep: none in the first, nine in the second. In early March, at the Arena Civica — the archives still quarrel over whether it was the fifth or the sixth of the month, though they agree to the last decimal on the nothing-nothing — Milan and Ambrosiana-Inter contested matchday 22 under the whistle of Francesco Mattea and produced a goalless draw, one of those derbies played with the handbrake of fear fully engaged, in which the fixture matters too much for the football to break out of it.

The autumn instalment repaid that debt with usury. On 6 November 1932, again at the Arena, the new season's derby finished Ambrosiana-Inter 5, Milan 4 — a scoreline from the age of innocence dropped into the age of order — with Attilio Demaría striking twice for the hosts and Giuseppe Meazza, the boy-king across the city, adding another. To score four goals in a derby and still lose it is a particular refinement of suffering, and it sat inside a longer sentence being served: from 1930-31 all the way to 1937-38, Inter would not lose to Milan at all, and the rossoneri of these years learned to treat the fixture as one treats a rich relative — visited faithfully, argued with loudly, and always left poorer.

The Summer Ledger

Between the two halves of the year the club held its market, and the ledger reads like the accounts of a house still counting its lire twice. Out went Pastore — Piero to some registries, Pietro to others, thirteen goals that season either way and fifty-three across his three Milan years — and with him Giuseppe Fiammenghi, Arrigo Fibbi, Giuseppe Santagostino, Roberto Sternisa and Giuseppe Carmignato: a whole generation shown the door in a single summer.

In came the provinces, which is how Milan preferred to shop in those years: Aldo Biffi from Como, Guerrino Cattaneo from Varese, Luigi Cresta from Vogherese, Mario Malatesta from Lazio, and Pietro Maestroni straight from Pirelli — from the factory, that is, as if the city's industry had decided to second one of its own to the football. And in came the one purchase around which the whole grey autumn would arrange itself: Mario Romani, bought from SPAL, a centre-forward carrying his goals the way a commercial traveller carries samples — always with him, always ready to be produced.

The Goal-Machine of Ferrara

Romani was born in Ferrara on 16 December 1907, in that flat, misted Po country that breeds cyclists, painters and centre-forwards, and by 1932 he had written himself into SPAL's book more deeply than any man before or since: the capocannoniere crown of his division in 1930 with twenty-nine goals in twenty-eight games, thirty-two more in 1931, twenty-three in 1932, on the way to the hundred and twenty-nine that remain SPAL's all-time record to this day. He scored the way the Po rises in autumn — regularly, unhurriedly, as a property of the landscape rather than an act of will.

Milan finally prised him loose in the summer of 1932, and he made his debut in the red and black on 18 September, away at Bari, the opening day of the new season. What followed was the golden season of his life: nineteen goals in thirty-one matches for a side that would finish eleventh — nineteen goals scored, as it were, into a headwind — and only two fewer than the twenty-one of Meazza himself, who across the city had an altogether better orchestra playing behind him. There is a special tenderness owed to the great scorer in the mediocre team, the man who goes on producing bread in a house where nobody has thought to lay the table, and the Milanisti of 1932 owed it to Romani weekly.

He stayed at Milan until 1936, wound down at Palermo, then went home to SPAL as men from Ferrara tend to do, and hung up his boots in 1938. He died in his own city on 26 May 1977, and if the grand histories give him a line where Meazza gets a chapter, the autumn of 1932 belongs to him as surely as the fog belongs to the Po.

The Verdict of the Fog

For the team entire, that autumn opened a season that would close in eleventh place: 32 points from eleven wins, ten draws and thirteen defeats, 57 goals scored — the identical 57 of the season before, note the symmetry — but now 62 conceded where there had been 40. The attack had kept its word; the house behind it had subsided. And the chroniclers knew where to send the bill: to a stewardship they called autarchic and dilettante, tied by sentiment to the amateur past, folding its arms against the foreign stars beginning to light up the peninsula, while Juventus, requiring no lectures on modernity, went on stacking scudetti in Turin.

So 1932 stands in the club's story as a year with two faces, like the god on the old Roman coins: in spring, a fourth place clawed back from a ruinous start by sheer appetite and sealed by a captain's final-day goal; in autumn, a slow subsidence into the middle of the table, relieved only by the metronome from Ferrara. The lesson it left is the oldest in football and the hardest to enter in any ledger: a club can buy a scorer, and Milan had bought a very fine one, but no club has ever economised its way to a defence, a midfield and an idea all at the same time. Milan tried. The table, which reads no propaganda and attends no film festivals, returned its verdict without ceremony — fourth, then eleventh — and the fog came down again over the Madonnina, patient, Lombard, entirely certain of its own return.