A Monarchy Voted Out, a Derby Won Back

The Second of June

On the second of June 1946 the Italians queued in their Sunday coats and put the monarchy out with the morning rubbish. The women queued with them — the first national vote in which they were counted — beside husbands and brothers, in the sort of daylight the newsreels were made for, and by the end of the counting Italy was a Republic. Milan, which had taken the bombs of 1943 on its shoulders and was still passing rubble along the pavements from hand to hand, understood the transaction better than most cities. Everything old had come down. Whatever came next would have to be put up by everybody, brick upon brick, the way you build a wall or a midfield.

Football kept the same calendar as the country, which is to say a provisional one. The championship that finished in the summer of 1946 — the forty-fourth, wearing the official name of Divisione Nazionale — had begun on the fourteenth of October 1945 and dragged its regional patchwork through to the twenty-eighth of July, north playing north and south playing south, the survivors decanted at last into a final national group like grapes into a shared vat. That patchwork had closed with Milan third in Italy, behind Torino and Juventus and ahead of everyone else — a summer whose telling belongs to the chapter just gone, and which this one is content to inherit. Only in the autumn of 1946 did the peninsula recover a single, twenty-team Serie A, the first truly national championship in three years. Milan, meanwhile, kept two homes as a prudent man keeps two coats: the old Arena Civica for the ordinary afternoons, San Siro for the days when the whole city wanted in.

One Metre Sixty-Eight

Riccardo Carapellese was born on the first of July 1922 at Cerignola, down in Puglia where the plain runs flat and golden and the sun does the work that in Lombardy is left to patience. He stood one metre sixty-eight in his boots, which is to say the crowd looked over his head until the ball arrived and then looked at nothing else. Those who watched him swore the ball travelled glued to his feet, and the nickname followed him about like a small loyal dog: Carappa.

He reached Serie A only in 1946, at twenty-four — an age at which lesser talents are already rehearsing their grievances — and the reason was simple and cruel: the invincible Grande Torino stood in the doorway, and nobody walks through a doorway occupied by the invincible. His last waystation before Milan comes down to us two ways. Some records have him stepping up from Como; others place him with Novara for the 1946 Coppa Alta Italia, reaching the final and losing it to Bologna without ever wearing that shirt in the league. Either road ended in the same city, and the shirt at the end of it was red and black.

For the reunified championship Milan changed the man on the bench — Giuseppe Bigogno replacing Adolfo Baloncieri, with the president Umberto Trabattoni, the captain Giuseppe Antonini and the technical director Antonio Busini all keeping their posts — and went to market with an appetite. Alongside Carapellese came Mario Tosolini from Pro Sesto, Mario Foglia from Brescia, Giovanni Busani from Ancona and Celso Battaia from Andrea Doria. But it was Carapellese and Puricelli, the Puglian sprite and the Uruguayan artisan, who would become the season's twin spearheads: between them, by the following summer, forty-one of Milan's seventy-five goals — more than half a season's supply out of two pairs of boots.

The Twenty-Second of September

Serie A came home on the twenty-second of September 1946, and Milan marked the occasion with the perversity football reserves for its most anticipated afternoons: they lost at home, two goals to Vicenza's three. It was Carapellese's debut, and there is a certain Lombard honesty in that — the first day here hands out work, not garlands. A debut in defeat is a contract written in small print: prove it again tomorrow.

He and his teammates read the small print. A week later Triestina were dispatched three-nil; on the sixth of October Juventus came to Milan and left with a three-all draw that tasted of salt on both benches; at Sampdoria on the thirteenth the Rossoneri stumbled, two-one. Autumn football in those years was a negotiation with the weather and with one's own lungs, and Milan were negotiating well enough. But the fixture list had saved its theatre for the fifth round.

Fourteen Minutes in the Second Half

On the twentieth of October 1946 the derby returned to the national championship — the first Milan–Inter of the reunified Serie A, the first since the peninsula had been stitched back into one football country. A derby after a war is not merely a match; it is a census. The city came to count itself: to see who had come home, whose lungs still worked on the terraces, whose voice had survived the years of sirens.

The count favoured the red and black, and it was finished inside fourteen minutes of the second half. On fifty-four minutes Tosolini, the new man from Pro Sesto, struck first; on fifty-nine Puricelli doubled it with the composure of a professional putting in a familiar day's work; and on sixty-eight, inevitably, Carapellese — one month a Milan player, already a derby scorer. Cerioni pulled one back for Inter on seventy-one, which is the cousin's eternal prerogative, and it finished three-one. If September had asked the little Puglian to prove it again, October watched him do it in the space of a quarter of an hour.

The autumn then unrolled like a bolt of decent cloth, sturdy if not yet silken. Brescia held Milan to one-all on the twenty-seventh of October; Atalanta were beaten three-one on their own ground on the third of November; Roma were seen off three-one a week later; Livorno took a point from a two-all; at Modena on the twenty-fourth of November the thread snagged, two-one to the hosts. December brought a three-two over Venezia, a four-one over Genoa, and, on the twenty-second, a one-all draw with Lazio — a Christmas point carried home like a panettone under the arm. Milan closed the calendar year with the derby banked and a forward line that had learned one another's dialects.

Fourth, and the Ploughing

The season itself would run on into the spring of 1947, beyond the border of our calendar year, and it landed — this much can be promised now and paid out later — at fourth, behind the untouchable Torino; the accounting of that spring is kept in the next chapter, not this one. A respectable landing; but respectable landings are what a club endures while it builds the aircraft for higher flight.

And the aircraft was coming, though nobody on the benches of the Arena could yet name its engines. The era this chapter belongs to takes its name from three Swedes, and in 1946 not one of them had crossed the Alps: Gunnar Nordahl would not sign until the twenty-second of January 1949, from IFK Norrköping, with Gunnar Gren and Nils Liedholm following in that same year. 1946 was not the harvest. It was the ploughing — the referendum, the reunified championship, the derby recaptured, the crowd relearning the way to San Siro. You do not get the Golden Fifties without somebody first turning over the cold, wet, stubborn soil of the Forties, and that is what this Milan did, match by match, with mud to the knee.

As for Carappa, his story runs ahead of us and deserves the telling. In three seasons in red and black, from 1946 to 1949, he would play one hundred and six official matches and score fifty-two goals. On the ninth of November 1947 Italy called him for the first time, in Vienna; Austria won five-one that afternoon and the lone Italian goal was his, a debutant's signature on a lost match. By 1949 he would wear the captain's band of the Azzurri themselves. And then the turn that belongs to life rather than to fiction: after the hill at Superga took the Grande Torino in May 1949 — the very team that had barred his door as a young man — it was Carapellese whom Torino summoned to succeed the fallen Valentino Mazzola as captain of both club and country. Football is rarely just. Now and then it is symmetrical.

None of that was legible in the October of 1946. There was only the small man from the wheat plains with the ball glued to his feet, a city walking back out to San Siro in its good coats, and the sound — after three years of a country playing its football to itself in pieces — of one whole championship starting again.