The Fog, the Alias and the Carpenter of Giussano

The City Under Its Fog

There are years that arrive like thunder and years that arrive like the fog off the Navigli, sliding up from the water at dusk until the tram lamps wear halos and every footstep sounds like a confession, and 1937, in Milan, belonged entirely to the second kind. The city worked, the city queued, the city said in public what the regime preferred to hear; and its oldest footballing institution, christened at the century's turn by Englishmen with an English name it had worn for decades like a good tweed coat, now went about the town under an alias. By order of a government that mistrusted foreign words the way a village priest mistrusts strangers, Milan Football Club had become Milan Associazione Sportiva — M.A.S., initials with all the romance of a filing cabinet — and though the lettering on the door had changed, the fog, the red and the black, and the long hunger underneath them all remained precisely as before.

The hunger deserves its number, because numbers are the bones of every story: no scudetto since 1907, and — though no one leaning on a rail at San Siro that year could know it — none coming until 1951. This was the marrow of Milan's lean inter-war life, a proud old club become respectably mid-table in a Serie A that was itself a young invention, a single national round dating only from 1929-30 and sixteen clubs strong by now, two points for a win, the whole peninsula compressed into one table the way a region's harvest is compressed into one market square. Above everyone stood Bologna, the great machine of the age; below, the rest jostled for the honour of being tired in April.

And 1937, being a calendar year and not a season, must be read the way one reads a river at a confluence: the spring belonged to the campaign of 1936-37, which ended in May with Milan fourth; the autumn opened the campaign of 1937-38, which would end, the following spring, with a shared third place and a passport. Between the two ran the same city, the same fog, and one young centre-forward from the Brianza finding his range.

The Englishman's Spring

The 1936-37 season had begun in the worst manner available to it: on 13 September 1936, opening day, Lazio beat Milan 3-0, and a team that loses its first match by three has announced not merely a defeat but a philosophy in need of repair. Adolfo Baloncieri presided over the repairs until 5 December; from the 6th the bench passed to William Garbutt, an Englishman of the old school, and from there the season turned as a risotto turns when a patient hand finally takes the spoon — slowly, then unmistakably.

Under the Englishman Milan reeled off eleven matches without defeat, the kind of run that converts a league table from an accusation into an invitation, and as the season entered its final stretch the arithmetic had become almost indecent: second place, two points behind Bologna, six matches to play. For a club thirty years without a title, two points in April is a perfume more dangerous than any wine. But legs are honest even when hearts are not, and the fatigue of the climb presented its bill down the stretch: the wins thinned, the challenge faded, and when the round-robin closed on 16 May Milan stood fourth, with 36 points from a ledger of thirteen wins, ten draws and seven defeats, thirty-nine goals scored and twenty-nine conceded. Bologna took a second consecutive scudetto with 42; Lazio, the opening day's tormentor, finished with 39; Torino with 38.

One may be cruel about a fade or one may be accurate, and accuracy is kinder: this was a squad that had started the year needing a philosophy and ended it needing only a summer. The Englishman had not brought silver, but he had brought order, and in the lean years order is the first course of every feast to come.

Seven Goals and the Long Evenings

The Coppa Italia of that same season was a different kind of story, one told mostly after the ninetieth minute, in that extra half hour where football stops being sport and becomes endurance theatre. Milan opened generously — Alessandria dismissed 4-0, Venezia 2-0 — then met Bari in a quarter-final that ran to a 2-2 draw through extra time, and finally fell in the semifinal to Genova 1893, again after the long half hour, the cup slipping away in the manner of a train that leaves while you are still buying the newspaper.

Yet inside that run something permanent was forged. Aldo Boffi, a debutant of twenty-one, scored seven goals in the tournament — a figure for a single Coppa Italia that would stand as a club record, equalled in a later age only by Gianni Rivera and surpassed by no one. When a boy in his first season sets a mark that only the Golden Boy of a future generation will ever touch, the club may be forgiven for suspecting it has found something.

The Carpenter of Giussano

He came from Giussano, in the Brianza, that stretch of Lombardy north of the city where the fog thins against the first hills and where the workshops have always turned out solid, unornamented things built to last — and Boffi, whom this chronicle will call the Carpenter of Giussano, was exactly such an article. The record-keepers cannot even agree on his birthday: 26 January 1915 by one ledger, 26 February by another, the parish and the almanac quarrelling over a month while agreeing on the year and the town, which is, for the 1930s, practically notarised certainty.

His apprenticeship was served at hometown Vis Nova and then at Seregno, where he achieved the strange, sad honour of finishing top scorer even as his club sank out of Serie B beneath him — the purest audition a centre-forward can give, since goals scored on a sinking ship cannot be credited to the ship. Milan signed the twenty-one-year-old, and on 1 November 1936, away at Torino, he made his Serie A debut in a 3-1 defeat, which is the traditional welcome the game reserves for its future darlings.

Across 1937 the Carpenter came of age: eight league goals in the fourth-place spring by the count of one ledger, nine by another — for on Boffi's totals the era's ledgers politely disagree, though they agree that Egidio Capra, with a dozen, finished as Milan's leading league scorer that season — plus the seven of the cup, which nobody disputes. Whatever the arithmetic, the eye needed no ledger: Milan had found the man around whom its attack, and frankly its hope, would be built.

The chronicler, holding the unfair advantage of knowing how the story ends, may lean forward here: 136 goals in red and black, three Serie A capocannoniere crowns — 1938-39, 1939-40, 1941-42 — and a prime the war would cut short the way a late frost cuts an orchard in blossom. In the thirties, when Milan had no scudetto to chase, the Carpenter of Giussano was the reason a man buttoned his coat and went to San Siro.

New Names on the Door

Institutions, like risottos, are made in the pot and not on the menu, and Milan's pot had been given a steadier hand: on 22 October 1936 Emilio Colombo had assumed the presidency, replacing the consiglio di reggenza — that council of regents by which the club, like a duchy between dukes, had lately been governed — and through all of 1937 he presided while Luigi Perversi wore the captain's band, a captain of the old, punctual kind, the sort who is simply, reliably there, because being there is what a captain does.

In the autumn the bench changed again, and this time it changed in the direction of the Danube. József Bánás, a Hungarian, took the coaching role, with the Austrian Hermann Felsner alongside as technical director — Milan entrusting itself to the central European school at the very moment central Europe had most to teach about football and least to teach about peace.

The market brought reinforcements whose names the ledger records — Mario Loetti, Giuseppe Antonini, Leandro Remondini, Vicente Arnoni, Bruno Berra, Luigi Diamante — and one name at which the modern reader must pause: Ezio Loik, a teenager then, destined to become a pillar of the Grande Torino and to die with it at Superga in 1949. He passed through Milan the way certain comets pass through a sky that history has reserved for another constellation; the club may claim only the footnote, but footnotes, in the lean years, are treasures.

A Cold December and a Drawing of Lots

The campaign that opened in the autumn of 1937 carried its cup duties into the depths of winter. On 5 December Milan put Varese aside 2-0; on 26 December — Saint Stephen's Day, when a Milanese ought by rights to be at the table and not at the ground — Liguria held Milan 0-0 through yet another extra time; the replay, on 29 December, Milan won, closing the calendar year with the small, unglamorous virtue of refusing to be eliminated. That cup run would end only in the spring, against Torino, in a semifinal that itself required a replay and extra time — this Milan, evidently, could be beaten but never quickly.

And the league season those winter ties punctuated ended, the following April, in the strangest of prizes. Milan finished level with Genova 1893 on 38 points — thirteen wins, twelve draws, five defeats, forty-three goals scored, twenty-seven conceded — behind champions Ambrosiana-Inter on 41, third ex aequo under rules content to let tied clubs share the step. Only the Central European Cup's paperwork demanded a single ordering, so on 31 May 1938 the federation drew lots to separate the pair — the club's own ledgers keep Milan third, the league's table writes Genova's name above — and in the end fortune's bookkeeping scarcely mattered, because Italy sent four clubs to that summer's tournament and Milan was among them. The shared third place carried something the club had never in four decades possessed: qualification for an official international competition, the Central European Cup — the Mitropa — of 1938.

That first continental adventure would end at the hands of Ripensia Timișoara of Romania — a 3-0 defeat away that a 3-1 home reply could not mend; but the door had been opened, and doors, once opened, remember. A club that in 1937 wore a name imposed by decree had, by the fruit of the season begun that autumn, written itself for the first time into the ledger of Europe.

The Verdict

Judge 1937 by silverware and it is an empty year; judge it as one judges a vineyard, by what was planted, and it becomes one of the quietly decisive years of the whole lean age. It gave Milan order under the Englishman and then ambition under the Danubians; it gave the club a president in place of a regency; it gave the cup its long evenings and the table a near-miss to remember; above all it gave the Diavolo the Carpenter of Giussano, whose goals would carry the crest through war toward better days.

The fog lifted, eventually. The alias fell away, the name came home, and the club that in 1937 could not quite catch Bologna became, in time, a club followed before dawn on the far side of the world — its Australian faithful, first granted the sight of the Rossoneri in the flesh on an autumn afternoon in May 1980, when a touring Milan beat a South Australia XI 3-1 in Adelaide, keeping vigil through the small hours for a team that first learned, in years precisely like this one, how to endure. That is the verdict on 1937: nothing was won, and everything necessary was begun.