The Year of the Borrowed City

Two Winters, One War

There are years that belong to football and years that football merely borrows, the way a tenant borrows a room in a house that is burning, and 1942 was emphatically of the second kind. The club that gathered its boots that January was not, on paper, even called Milan: the regime had long since decided that an English word was an enemy alien, and so the red and black played under the stiff, notarised name of Associazione Calcio Milano — a name that sat on the club like a borrowed overcoat, correct in every seam and warm in none of them. The season that January belonged to, 1941-42, would end in the spring; another, 1942-43, would begin in the autumn; and between the two ran the deeper season nobody had chosen, the war, which was already deciding where matches could be played, who could travel to see them, and — before long — whether they could be played at all, for the championship that opened that October would be the last Serie A contested for three years.

Even the geography of Sunday had been requisitioned. San Siro, the cathedral in the meadows to the west, stood unusable for lack of electricity — a detail so perfectly of its time that one hesitates to embroider it, a great stadium silenced not by shells but by the absence of current in a wire — and so Milano carried its home matches into the centre of the city, to the old Arena Civica, where the fog off the Navigli could sit on the pitch like a lid on a pot of risotto left too long on the stove. The supporter of 1942 walked to football past shuttered windows and queued stomachs, and by the year's end the air-raid sirens were no longer a rumour: the bombing of Milan intensified as the months darkened. Against that sky, the results below must be read the way one reads a letter from the front — grateful for every ordinary sentence.

Tenth, by the Width of a Point

The league campaign that closed in the spring of 1942 was, viewed from the cold arithmetic of the table, a shrug: tenth place among sixteen, ten matches won, seven drawn, thirteen lost, twenty-seven points from thirty Sundays, and — with the tidiness of a bookkeeper who has given up on poetry — fifty-three goals scored and fifty-three conceded, a ledger balanced to the centesimo. Level on twenty-seven points sat Fiorentina above and Liguria below, ninth and eleventh by the ordering the tables prefer, with Milano wedged between them — for even the record-keepers of that era worked by candlelight. What no accounting disputes is the view beneath: four points separated this middling side from the trapdoor, a single point from Ambrosiana-Inter directly below, and a club of Milano's history spent its spring glancing downward, which is no posture for a thoroughbred.

Above them, meanwhile, history was being made by somebody else, and it is the chronicler's duty to report it without grinding his teeth: Roma won the scudetto with forty-two points, the first in their existence and — more remarkably — the first ever carried off by a club from outside the industrial north. The title, which Lombardy and Piedmont had passed between themselves like a family heirloom, had gone south. In a country at war there was something almost allegorical in it, the old order of the peninsula loosening at the seams; but the honest Milanese, trudging home from the Arena with his collar up, was permitted to feel that allegory is a poor substitute for points.

Boffi's Third Crown

And yet this shrugging, mid-table season contained, like a plain loaf hiding a coin, one treasure of the first rank: Aldo Boffi, the hammer of the Arena, won the capocannoniere title with twenty-two championship goals — twenty-eight in all competitions — finishing clear of Amadei, of Gei, and of Piola himself, each stranded on eighteen. Consider the shape of that sentence: a striker from a tenth-placed team outscoring the sharpest finishers of clubs above him, which is rather like a violinist playing flawlessly in an orchestra that keeps losing the tempo. It was Boffi's third scoring crown, after those of 1938-39 and 1939-40, and three capocannoniere titles is not form; it is identity, the signature of a man who could find the net the way a Lombard finds his way home in fog, by instinct older than sight.

The moralist notes, because the moralist must, that the war would not spare even this. In the season that began that autumn Boffi's scoring fell away sharply — the record says so with its usual indifference — and there is a whole essay of the era compressed in that decline: rationed bread makes rationed muscle, and the finisher's art, which lives on the last half-yard of explosion, is the first art the hard years tax. But in the spring of 1942 he was still the league's most dangerous man, and Milano, whatever else it lacked, kicked off every Sunday with the one argument no defence had yet answered.

The First Final

The true drama of the year, however, was played not in the league but in the cup, and it carried a superlative the club had never before possessed: in June 1942, having eliminated Fiorentina, Lazio, Reggiana and Venezia on the road through the bracket, Associazione Calcio Milano reached the final of the Coppa Italia for the first time in its history. A first final is a peculiar possession — it cannot be lost even when the match is — and the opponent waiting there was Juventus, which is to say the oldest of the aristocracies, the family at whose table one is always the guest and never the host.

The first leg, on 21 June 1942, was granted a stage worthy of it: San Siro itself, briefly awake, as if the old house had been opened for one evening with the dust-sheets pulled from the furniture. Juventus struck first through Bellini after thirty-seven minutes, and the guests held their lead deep into the night of the match until Cappello, in the eighty-third, dragged Milano level: one to one, a scoreline like a held breath, everything postponed to Turin.

In Turin, on 28 June at the stadium then bearing Mussolini's name — the era stamped even its arenas — the breath was released, and it came out as a sigh. Lushta took the final by the collar and shook it: goals in the twenty-ninth, the sixty-ninth and the seventy-first, a hat-trick built like a pincer around Sentimenti's penalty in the thirty-fourth. Boffi answered in the fifty-sixth, because Boffi in 1942 always answered, but the arithmetic was pitiless: four to one on the day, five to two across the two legs, and the Coppa — the second of Juventus's collection — went home with the hosts. The chronicler refuses, all the same, to file this under mere defeat. A club learns finals the way a boy learns cold water, by getting in; and the rossoneri of the war years, tenth in the league and playing home matches in a borrowed arena, had gotten in. The trophies of the distant future would be won by a club that had first taught itself the road to a final, and that road was surveyed in June 1942.

The Quiet Goodbye of the Old Enchanter

Woven through all of this, softly, runs the year's most human thread. Giuseppe Meazza — the greatest Italian footballer of his generation, an idol formed across the city at Ambrosiana-Inter and lent, at the ebb of his powers, to the other bank of the Milanese soul — spent the first half of 1942 as captain of Milano. He had arrived in November 1940 with a circulatory ailment in his foot that had very nearly ended not merely his career but his walking; he had made his rossonero debut on 12 January 1941 against Juventus, a 2-2 draw; and through 1941-42 he wore the armband as a diminished but still artful presence, an enchanter working with half his instruments, undermined by the injury and playing, one imagines, from memory — though the memory of Meazza was worth the present tense of most men.

His final match in red and black fell on 21 June 1942, and the calendar, which is usually a philistine, showed for once a sense of occasion: it was the first leg of that first Coppa Italia final, the 1-1 with Juventus at San Siro. Thus the old enchanter's last act for Milano was performed in the club's first final, on the great stage briefly relit for the evening — a coincidence no novelist would dare invent and no chronicler should pass without lifting his hat. That summer he left, and left for Juventus of all destinations, making his debut for the Turin club on 18 October 1942 in a derby against Torino, a few Sundays before the war swallowed the calendar whole.

How much did he give Milano, in the cold ledger? Here even the ledgers quarrel, as ledgers of that papered, bombed decade will: one careful source counts forty-two official appearances and eleven goals across his rossonero years, another thirty-seven and nine, and the honest historian records the dispute rather than adjudicating it, since the truth of Meazza at Milano was never going to be a number anyway. It was the sight of the era's supreme talent, hobbled and greying and still unmistakable, spending his twilight on the red-and-black side of the city before limping away into the summer — and this chronicle, sworn to its sources, simply stands at the Arena gate and watches him go.

Autumn at the Arena

The club that reassembled for 1942-43 did so under a leadership whose very titles smelled of the emergency: Umberto Trabattoni governed not as president but as Extraordinary Commissioner — the war had commissioners the way peace has chairmen — with Antonio Busini as technical director and, on the bench for the second consecutive season, Mario Magnozzi, a former player entrusted with keeping the machine running on rationed fuel. The armband, vacated by the departed Meazza, passed to Giuseppe Antonini, a defender; and there is a small tactical sermon in that succession, for when a team's captaincy moves from its most poetic forward to its most reliable stopper, the club is telling you, without a press release, what kind of years it expects.

The market, such as a wartime market could be, brought Edoardo Galimberti from Novara, Walter Del Medico from Udinese, Guido Corbelli from Atalanta and Luigi Zorzi, also from Udinese, while Arrigo Morselli followed Meazza out of the door, bound for Brescia. Del Medico, with Cappello, would end the season as the side's leading scorers — the succession to Boffi's fading hammer already, quietly, underway. The autumn itself opened like a man testing ice: a 1-1 at Juventus on 4 October, a goalless draw with Genova 1893 at home on the 11th, a 1-1 at Roma on 18 October, another 1-1 at Vicenza on the first of November — four draws in the first five Sundays, nothing given and little taken.

Yet the season those draws inaugurated would grow into the strangest of the era, a campaign that made a speciality of felling giants while tripping over its own doorstep. Milano beat Torino — the Torino then assembling itself into legend — by 1-0 not once but twice; beat Juventus 2-0; put four past Roma in a 4-1; outlasted Bologna 3-2. And the same team lost both derbies to Ambrosiana-Inter, 1-3 and 0-3 to the neighbours, which for the supporter is the one fixture where philosophy fails and only the scoreline is admitted as evidence. It finished with twenty-nine points from ten wins, nine draws and eleven defeats, thirty-nine scored against forty-four conceded, locked in a three-way knot with Bologna and Fiorentina that the record-keepers untie differently to this day — sixth by some orderings, eighth by others, and the fog, one feels, keeps the true answer for itself. Above them all, Torino took the title with forty-four points ahead of Livorno's forty-three, adding the Coppa Italia to complete the first double in the history of the Italian game: the grande squadra next door to immortality, twice beaten that season by a mid-table Milano, which is the kind of joke football tells only in wartime.

The Verdict of the Fog

Weigh the year, then, as the moralist must. On one pan of the scale: tenth place held by a single point, a final lost 5-2 on aggregate to the aristocrats, two derbies surrendered, a captain and colossus gone to Turin, a stadium dark, a name confiscated, and over everything the sirens. On the other: a third capocannoniere crown for Boffi, the club's first-ever cup final reached and contested, Torino and Juventus and Roma all beaten inside the same twelve months, and — least measurable, most valuable — the simple persistence of the thing itself, eleven men in red and black walking out at the Arena Civica every Sunday that the war permitted, keeping the idea of Milan alive under a name that denied it.

The championship begun in the autumn of 1942 would be the last for three years; the reader knows what the supporter at the Arena could not, that the lid was closing. From this distance — and your chronicler writes for the faithful of Adelaide, who follow the Diavolo across a hemisphere of clocks and know something themselves about loving this club through unsociable hours — the verdict is not difficult. Great clubs are not proven by their trophies, which any fortunate decade can supply, but by their winters; and in 1942, in a borrowed arena under a borrowed name in a city learning the sound of bombers, Milan wintered. That is the whole of the verdict, and it is enough.