The Banquet and the Bill

A Calendar That Comes Apart in the Hands

Take the calendar year 1932 down off the wall and it comes apart in the hands. Its spring is the closing act of the 1931-32 championship; its autumn is 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 irreconcilable 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 had no time for lidos. It was the country's industrial furnace, all trams and looms and night shifts, and its football was still wriggling out of an amateur skin while clubs elsewhere had begun to pay handsomely for the professional feet arriving in Italy from abroad.

The Banquet, Served in Courses

Three points from the first six matches: the 1931-32 Milan began the way a fire begins in a wet grate — though that autumn, its small coins and its slow redemption, is told where it happened, in the chapter before this one. Here the fire catches. Without warning, the table filled. 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. Replace with: "By the final day fourth place was there to be taken, and it was taken at home against Casale, 4-2 — Kossovel, then the captain Mario Magnozzi three minutes later, then Arcari and Sternisa after the interval — four scorers to bolt the door on it, which is the more honest way for a side to finish a season it had begun in the wet grate."

The season finished on 39 points from thirty-four matches — fifteen won, nine drawn, ten lost, 57 goals scored against 40 conceded: fourth of the eighteen, 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. Fifteen points separated fourth place from the title, which is to say a different province of the table altogether. 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. Behind the count led by Piero Pastore — whose tally is totted up with the rest of him a chapter earlier — 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 and unpacked it in whichever city had paid the fare. His classroom was San Siro, six years old that year, still smelling of new concrete out beyond the edge of the city, a building with far more history in front of it than behind.

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 records give the fifth of the month, or the sixth, though on the nothing-nothing there is no disagreement at all — 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 until a February afternoon deep in 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.

Shopping Along the Branch Lines

Between the two halves of the year the club held its market, and here the ledger is the honest word for it, because Milan kept its accounts like a house that counts 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, at the stations along the line: 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.

A Property of the Landscape

Romani was born in Ferrara on 16 December 1907, in that flat, low country of the Po 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, the length of the peninsula away at Bari, on the opening day of the new season. What began that afternoon was the golden season of his life, and the autumn was its better half: a clear voice coming out of a set otherwise full of static, on his way to nineteen by the following June, and to within two of the twenty-one that Meazza would gather across the city with better men bringing him the ball. Where that count came to rest, and in what company, is reckoned up under the following year's date. There is a special tenderness owed to the great scorer in a 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. The grand histories give him a line where Meazza gets a chapter; but the hundred and twenty-nine still stand in Ferrara, and the autumn of 1932 is his.

The Bill, and Where It Falls Due

For the team entire, that autumn was not a beginning but the first instalment on a debt. The attack went on keeping its word; the house behind it had already begun to subside; and the reckoning — the final placing, the figures that carry it, the verdict the chroniclers would write against the men in the offices, who were still running a semi-amateur club in a professional country — was not settled until June, and is settled in the chapter that carries June's date.

So the banquet of the spring would be paid for out of the autumn, and the club would pay in the currency it had least of. A club can buy a scorer, and Milan had bought a very fine one; no club has ever bought a defence, a midfield and an idea in the same summer, and Milan spent the autumn asking one centre-forward from Ferrara to stand in for all three. The table read no propaganda and went to no film festivals. It had printed one number already — fourth in the spring — and would print the other when the Sundays ran out; and between the two of them stands a derby of nine goals lost by one.