Milan, Spelled the Old Way

The Last Days of April

The twenty-fifth of April, and the days that followed it to the thirtieth: dates that generation of Milanese would carry ever afterwards like a rosary. The city rose and was liberated, and the occupation and the puppet republic that had squatted in its shadow were swept away together; by May the war in Europe was finished, and by August, with Japan's surrender, the whole monstrous business was over at last. Milan dug itself out of the rubble the bombers had left it, counted its dead, patched its tram lines, and discovered that beneath the dust the old appetites had survived intact: for work, for bread that no longer had to be weighed against the coupons in a ration book, for an evening that did not end with a siren, and — sooner than the moralists expected, though never sooner than the footballers did — for the ball.

The club performed its own small act of liberation that year, and it is the kind of gesture history remembers longer than any league table. In 1939 the regime, which legislated against foreign words with the same solemnity it brought to invading other people's countries, had forced the club to call itself Associazione Calcio Milano — the anglicised name of the founders sacrificed on the altar of autarchy. In 1945, with the fascist years thrown off, the club quietly took its name back: Associazione Calcio Milan, the English spelling restored, the debt to the Englishmen who had planted the game here acknowledged once more in the very sound of the word. It cost nothing and it meant everything. A city that had spent six years being told what it might be called reclaimed, in the difference of a single letter, the right to name itself; and the Diavolo was the Diavolo again.

A Federation in Halves

The championship, like everything else in Italy, had to be reassembled from salvaged parts. There had been no national title contested in 1944-45 — the peninsula was a battlefield, and even Italian football, which had survived a great deal in its half-century, could not survive a front line running through its middle. The federation itself had fractured along with the country: a northern FIGC under the Social Republic ran its wartime competitions from Milan, while the south lay under the Kingdom, and the game, like the nation, was governed in halves. That northern federation had even run a wartime championship whose final round was staged in the city of Milan while the club — still yoked then to the name Milano — watched from its own doorway; the previous year's chapter has already counted what that cost.

So when the reunified federation restarted competition in the autumn of 1945, it did so with a compromise that only a war could excuse and perhaps only Italy could design: a Divisione Nazionale split by geography. In the north, where the railways more or less ran, a Serie A 'Campionato Alta Italia' of fourteen clubs; in the centre and south, a mixed Serie A-B section; and the best of each to meet in a national final round the following summer to decide the scudetto. It was improvised, lopsided and occasionally absurd. It was also, amid bomb-scarred stadiums and ration books, the most eloquent proof on offer that ordinary life intended to resume — that a man might again waste a Sunday afternoon on twenty-two other men and a ball, which is one workable definition of peace.

October, and the Lesson at the Filadelfia

The club that stepped into this improvised championship had been kept alive through the war by Umberto Trabattoni, a president who had minded Milan through the dark years the way one minds a candle in a draught, and who now steered it into the restart. On the bench sat Adolfo Baloncieri, with Antonio Busini beside him as technical director — a division of labour typical of the era, the tactician and the administrator sharing the burden of rebuilding a squad while the city rebuilt everything else.

And the squad was rebuilt, with the brisk unsentimentality that famine teaches. In came Omero Tognon from Padova, a midfielder who would prove tireless; in came Aredio Gimona from Pro Gorizia, a forward with goals in his boots; and already in the house was Héctor Puricelli, the Uruguayan-Italian striker who had arrived from Bologna in the strange wartime window of 1944 and for whom this restarted season was the first full argument of his Milanese case. Out, in the other direction, went Bruno Arcari to Bologna — and out went Aldo Boffi to Atalanta, a departure to which we must return, because it is the human hinge on which this whole year turns.

The football itself began on the 21st of October, when Milan held Juventus, one apiece, an honourable afternoon against aristocracy; and on the 2nd of December, at the Filadelfia in Turin, came the lesson, administered without anaesthetic: Torino 4, Milan 0. The reigning powerhouse — already becoming what history would canonise as the Grande Torino — passed through the rossonero defence the way the tramontana passes through a worn overcoat. A wise observer took the point: the war was over, but in Italian football a new occupation had begun, and its capital was Turin.

Boffi Goes to Bergamo

Aldo Boffi was born at Giussano in 1915, and he had been, quite simply, Milan's attack for the better part of a decade: 109 league goals in 163 Serie A appearances between 1936 and 1945, and three times top scorer of Serie A — 19 goals in 1938-39, a crown shared that year with Ettore Puricelli of all people, then 24 in 1939-40 and 22 in 1941-42, both his alone. They called him il Bombardiere, a name the war years would load with an irony nobody asked for; and he did his work in a Milan that gave him nothing back, a team of the long grey interlude, without a scudetto to hang the numbers on.

Consider the cruelty of the timing. A centre-forward's empire is brief — a few seasons either side of his twenty-fifth birthday, when the legs and the appetite and the nerve are all in the same room at the same time. Boffi's empire fell precisely across the years when the championship itself was dissolving: his 24 goals of 1939-40 rang out as Europe caught fire, his 22 of 1941-42 as the lists of the fallen lengthened in the newspapers beside the league tables. The war did not take his life, for which one gives thanks; it took instead his context, which for an athlete is a subtler confiscation. He was Milan's whole attack in the years when it mattered least to the statisticians and most to the people in the stands, who kept coming because a man who scores is a promise that the world still works.

And so in 1945, with the guns silent and football returning, the club and its bomber parted. He went to Atalanta at thirty, and the season that followed gave him three goals in seventeen matches — the yield of a man who had spent his best currency in a shop that was shut. There was no farewell worthy of the service, no trophy-lit ceremony; the era did not go in for such things, having buried too many actual soldiers to sentimentalise the metaphorical kind. Say it plainly, then, since nobody said it then: Boffi carried Milan through its bleakest decade on his shoulders, and when at last the blackout cloth came down and the lights came on again, he had earned the right to be remembered in their glow.

Brescia at the Door, and the Long Spring

The northern championship resolved itself by April 1946 into a table that told the truth about the new order: Torino first with 42 points, Internazionale second with 39, Juventus third with 35 — and Milan fourth with 30, from twelve wins, six draws and eight defeats, thirty-eight goals scored and thirty-six conceded, a margin of two. But fourth place, the last ticket to the national final round, was not conceded gracefully: Brescia had finished level on 30 points, and the two clubs were sent to a play-off. Between the 20th and 24th of April they fought it out on neutral grounds, both matches dragged into extra time — a 1-1 draw at Bologna first, then a 2-1 replay at Modena in Milan's favour — and by that narrow gate the rossoneri passed into the summer, into the eight-team girone finale where the scudetto itself would be settled.

What a summer it was: fourteen matches against the best of a reunited Italy, north meeting south across a bracket for the first time since the war had cut the country in two. Milan opened it badly — beaten by a single goal at Napoli on the 28th of April, then taken apart 3-0 in Turin a week on — before finding its feet: Roma beaten 2-0 on the 12th of May, a stumble at Livorno by a single goal a week later, a 1-1 draw with Juventus on the 26th. In June came the strangest entry of the season, a 2-0 result at Bari awarded after incidents, the kind of administrative goal that tastes of nothing — then a wild 2-3 home defeat to Napoli on the 16th. And then, on the 23rd of June, the afternoon that redeemed both the autumn and the spring: Milan 2, Torino 0. The team dismantled 0-4 at the Filadelfia in December turned the champions-elect over in the summer light, and if it changed nothing in the mathematics, it changed a great deal in the soul.

The final table read: Torino 22 points, Juventus 21, Milan 16 — seven wins, two draws, five defeats, twenty-five scored, sixteen conceded — then Internazionale on 14, Napoli 13, Roma 11, Pro Livorno 10, Bari 5. And there was a late flourish, dated the 21st of July 1946 but belonging in spirit to the restart: Inter 0, Milan 1, a derby won with one round still to play, the cousins beaten in the season's closing week. As for the men who did it: Gimona led the team's league scoring with 16, though the capocannoniere's crown itself went to Turin with Gabetto's 22; Puricelli struck 17 across all competitions, Tognon played a scarcely believable 40 league matches and 42 in all, missing next to nothing, Gianni Mattioni kept the goal and Gianni Toppan patrolled in front of him. The captaincy that season is entered in the records under Giuseppe Antonini; memory has more often given it to Andrea Bonomi, the Milanese one-club defender who led this generation in every sense that matters. Both names are in circulation, and both belong to the same team sheet, typed in a country that in 1945 had trouble finding carbon paper.

The Word at the Head of the List

Torino were champions, and deservedly: eleven wins in fourteen final-round matches, forty-three goals scored against fourteen conceded, the Grande Torino now fully itself, a side that would bend the next years of Italian football around its gravity. Against that measure, Milan's third place — behind only Torino and Juventus, ahead of Inter, ahead of all the south — was a genuinely strong showing for a club that twelve months earlier had no championship to play in, no certainty its stadium district would have electricity, and a name that was not yet its own. Fourth in the north by way of a play-off, third in Italy by way of a summer's hard grinding, a derby won as the curtain fell: these are not the numbers of glory, but they are the numbers of recovery, and in 1945 recovery was the only trophy on offer.

For what 1945 established is the thing that makes every later devotion possible at all: that the club is not a name granted by power, to be revoked or respelled at a dictator's pleasure, but a name chosen and defended, English vowels and all, by the people to whom it belongs. The scudetto went to Turin, and the storm gathering there would take some years to pass. But the city was free, the colours were intact, and when the teams were read out that season — over the loudspeakers, through the radio sets in the bars, in the columns of a press that had spent six years printing what it was told — the word at the head of the list was the one the founders had brought with them from England. Milan, spelled the old way.