Seven for Udinese, Seven from Barcelona

A Ruled Line Against the Lombard Sky

The Pirelli skyscraper was rising in those years floor by floor, a ruled line drawn against the Lombard sky, a thing so slender and so confident that the old men who had seen the city battered and patched and rebuilt tipped their hats to it as though it were a bishop. Everything else in Milan was moving at the same tilt. The trains from the south arrived full and left empty; the scaffolding climbed faster than the ivy ever had; in the bars the espresso machines hissed through the early shift and the Vespas went out afterwards in their dozens. Historians would later file all of it — steel, industry, migration — under the boom economico, the economic miracle, and those living inside it measured the same thing in the simpler currency of full stomachs and Sunday football. Milan was the engine room. The Milanese, being Milanese, worked six days with their sleeves rolled and reserved the seventh for San Siro, where they have never been a merciful congregation.

Understand the decade to understand the year. The rossoneri had taken the scudetto in 1951, in 1955, in 1957; they had carried off two Latin Cups, in 1951 and 1956, a handsome competition that by 1959 had already been quietly discontinued, the way good trattorie close when the landlord's sons prefer other trades. And they carried one wound that would not close: the European Cup final of 1958, lost 3-2 to Real Madrid after extra time — a defeat of the sort that does not humiliate but haunts, since it whispers forever that the difference was a hair's breadth and the hair belonged to fortune. Football then was a domestic religion with a single foreign pilgrimage: two points for a win, the league its own justification, Europe an examination one sat only by right of being champion. In 1959 Milan would earn the right to sit it again, and would learn that examiners change and that mercy is not on the syllabus.

The Loan of a Name

Every great Milan side has at its centre a story that sounds invented, and the 1959 champions carried theirs in the person of José Altafini — the twenty-year-old Brazilian who had arrived from Palmeiras the previous summer wearing a dead captain's name, Mazzola, and who reached Milan a world champion before he had kicked a ball in Serie A. How the name was hung on him, what it cost him in Sweden and what it promised, the last chapter has already set down. This one is concerned with the other half of the bargain: what the boy did once the borrowed name was on his back in red and black.

The debut, back in September, had been goalless, which proves only that even volcanoes take a moment to clear their throats. What followed was eruption: twenty-eight league goals in thirty-two appearances, four more in the Coppa Italia, thirty-two in all competitions — the beating heart of an attack that would finish the season with 84 goals, a figure that reads less like a statistic than like a menu. The capocannoniere's crown that year went across the city, to Inter's Antonio Angelillo with his thirty-three, and Milan begrudged him nothing: a title for one man is a trinket, a title for eleven is a scudetto.

A Spring Taken at a Run

The new year opened at a gallop. Padova were dispatched 4-1 on the 11th of January; a 2-2 in Udine on the 18th was the only pause for breath; Bologna were outlasted 4-3 on the 25th, on one of those afternoons when both defences appear to have stayed at home by the stove; and February went further still — Napoli beaten 6-1 on the 8th, Sampdoria 4-1 on the 22nd. This was not caution's football. Bonizzoni's Milan attacked the way the city built: everywhere at once, on credit if necessary, trusting the returns to justify the outlay. The returns came in at 84 goals scored against 32 conceded, and no rival in Italy could answer either number.

There was a wobble, because there is always a wobble. On the 22nd of March the Diavolo went to the derby and lost it 1-0 — one of only two defeats the whole campaign would permit itself — and a week later Juventus were held 1-1. The city's other half allowed itself a fortnight of dreams. Then came the 12th of April, Florence, and the match that settled the question of character: Fiorentina, the season's one true rival, beaten 3-1 in their own house. After that the spring was a procession — Genoa put away 4-0 on the 24th of May, a single professional goal carried out of Padova on the 28th — and the table became a matter not of hope but of schedule.

The coronation had the excess of the age about it. On the 2nd of June 1959, with a round still to spare, Milan met Udinese at San Siro needing only sobriety and chose splendour instead: seven goals to none, a rout so complete it felt less like a match than a civic ceremony, the crowd over the barriers and the players up on shoulders, the seventh scudetto sealed with seven goals as though the number itself had demanded the rhyme. Afterwards the flashbulbs found the president, Andrea Rizzoli, in the dressing room with both arms round his twenty-year-old Brazilian. The campaign closed quietly on the 7th of June with a 1-1 draw in Bologna: 52 points from twenty wins, twelve draws and two defeats, three clear of Fiorentina's 49. Seven titles on the honours board now, and the fourth of them gathered inside a single golden decade.

The Last Swede Standing

And who lifted it? Nils Liedholm, captain, some thirty-six years old, and the last of them — the last of Gre-No-Li, that Swedish trinity whose very syllables once made the defenders of Serie A sleep badly. Gunnar Gren had gone as early as 1953; Gunnar Nordahl, the great goalscorer, had departed for Roma in 1956; their golden years together belonged to the early fifties, to another Milan, almost to another city. Only Liedholm remained, and there is a justice worth savouring in the image: the trio's elegant survivor, the midfielder who treated a misplaced pass as a personal disgrace, raising the trophy that his two countrymen had first taught this club to expect.

Around him the architecture was sound. Luigi Bonizzoni held the bench; above him, in the office the age called technical director, sat Giuseppe Viani — Gipo to all of Italy — with Rizzoli supplying the lire and the ambition; and the eleven came off the team sheet like a well-made sentence: Buffon in goal, the vice-captain; Fontana, Zagatti and Cesare Maldini marshalling the rear alongside Occhetta; Liedholm governing the middle of the pitch; Schiaffino the clockmaker conducting; and ahead of them Danova, Galli, Grillo and the boy called Mazzola, who between them shared out the 84 goals.

The tally of comings and goings tells its own quiet story. Altafini and Occhetta had arrived for the campaign; Cucchiaroni had left for Sampdoria. And already the next partings were arranging themselves in the wings: Schiaffino, vice-captain in the season that began that autumn, was approaching the end of his Milan years, bound in time for Roma; while Buffon, the champion goalkeeper, left for Genoa, and the gloves passed to Giorgio Ghezzi.

The Lesson Posted from Catalonia

Autumn began with a pratfall of the purest Italian comedy: on the 16th of September, at home, in the Coppa Italia, the champions of Italy lost 1-0 to Como and were out of the competition before the leaves were down. San Siro filed out muttering, as San Siro does, but the muttering was indulgent, because everyone understood where the season's true examination lay.

The European Cup — the return, the first since the heartbreak of '58. The preliminary round sent Milan to Greece, where Olympiacos held them 2-2 on the 13th of September; the reply at San Siro on the 23rd was won 3-1, and the tie closed 5-3 on aggregate. Routine, one thought. Passage secured, appetite whetted, and in the round of sixteen waited Barcelona.

What followed must be written plainly, because embroidery would be cowardice. On the 4th of November, at San Siro, Milan lost the first leg 0-2; on the 25th, in Catalonia, they were taken apart 5-1; the aggregate read 1-7, and there is no honest way to pronounce that number softly. The side that had scored 84 goals in a domestic season had been handed a cold instruction: that the league is a marathon and Europe is a duel, and the duellist across the sand does not care how beautifully you ran your marathon. After 1958, lost to Madrid by a whisker after extra time, this was a different kind of pain — not the hair's breadth but the open ditch — and it would take root in the club's memory as such lessons do, slowly and usefully, the way frost prepares a field for what is planted next.

A Goalless Mass, and What the Decade Left

The domestic autumn, by contrast, kept its dignity. Udinese — poor Udinese, cast all year as this chapter's sparring partner — were beaten 3-1 on the 25th of October; and on the 8th of November came the autumn's only derby, which finished 0-0, a goalless Mass, all incense and no communion. Those who craved fireworks from the boy called Mazzola against Inter would have to be patient; his derby of legend belonged to a later spring, not to this year, and 1959 gave the city only this: two rivals circling, neither blinking. December was kinder — Sampdoria dismissed 4-0 on the 20th, a single goal brought home from the visit to Lazio on the 27th — and the year closed with Milan in the hunt, though how far short that hunt would fall, and by how many points behind whom, is an accounting the following year's chapter must render.

The trophies of 1959 are quickly counted: one scudetto, the seventh, won by three clear points and sealed with a 7-0 flourish; one Coppa Italia mislaid at home to Como; one European journey that began in Greece with promise and ended in Barcelona with a lesson written in very large letters. The truer register is human: a twenty-year-old Brazilian carrying a dead captain's name who scored twenty-eight times in his first Italian league season; a thirty-six-year-old Swede lifting the trophy as the last survivor of the trio that first made this club continental; a playmaker of genius quietly beginning his farewell; a goalkeeper handing on his gloves.

Four scudetti in a single decade — 1951, 1955, 1957, 1959 — with two Latin Cups standing beside them: that is what the Golden Fifties left in the cabinet, and no rival in Italy filled a cabinet faster in those years. What 1959 really announced, to those with ears for it, was succession: the old order taking its bow while the new one, twenty years old and answering to a ghost's name, waited in the wings with its coat already off. Through the winter the tower went on rising above the rooftops, floor by floor, indifferent to football. The wind out of Catalonia blew cold through all that new construction. In the bars the machines hissed and the talk was already of spring.