Wembley in May, the Maracanã in November

One City, Both Crowns

Cars and refrigerators came off the lines all that year, and the trains from the south unloaded new Milanese by the thousand. This was the miracolo economico, the economic miracle that had turned the Lombard plain into a workshop for half of Europe, and Milan was its engine room: money, work, the constant percussion of construction that never seemed to stop. In 1963 the city acquired the one thing it did not yet own and wanted more than any of them — the mastery of European football.

Consider what stood in the city's window by December. In May the rossoneri had gone to Wembley and become the first Italian club to lift the European Cup. In the very same season, on the other side of the cathedral, Helenio Herrera's Inter had taken the scudetto with 49 points — the Grande Inter announcing itself with the subtlety of a factory whistle — so that one city could claim, without exaggeration, both the crown of Europe and the crown of Italy. No other place on the continent could say as much. And yet for the red-and-black half of that city the year was double-faced, a Janus in football boots: the greatest the club had ever known, and among its most bitter, because what Wembley gave in May, the Maracanã would take away in November — and not cleanly.

From Luxembourg to Dens Park

The road to Wembley had opened in September 1962, and it opened the way Nereo Rocco preferred all things to open: without romance. Rocco was a Triestine, a man of the borderlands, and he practised the border-guard's art — catenaccio, a system that fitted on half a chalkboard and defeated almost everything sent against it — while permitting himself, further up the pitch, luxuries the purists never credited him with. Above him in the club's architecture sat Giuseppe Viani, the technical director; behind his defenders stood Giorgio Ghezzi in goal; and in front of everything moved Gianni Rivera, l'abatino, not yet twenty-one, who handled a football the way careful men handle porcelain. Rocco had come from Padova in 1961, taken the scudetto of 1962 at the first attempt, and plainly stayed on to finish something.

The first round barely qualified as a contest — and the chroniclers cannot even agree what to call it, some registers filing it as a preliminary, others as the round of thirty-two, though a margin of that size hardly needs a label. Union Luxembourg were dispatched 8-0 at San Siro on 12 September and 6-0 in Luxembourg on 19 September — fourteen goals to none across the two legs, a tie so lopsided it remains among the most one-sided in the club's European history. Then the opposition acquired names. Ipswich Town arrived in November as reigning champions of England, and Milan settled the argument at once: 3-0 at San Siro on the 14th, under the floodlights and in the smoke of a November crowd, a scoreline stout enough to survive the 2-1 defeat at Portman Road on 28 November — an English evening, and an English lesson in discomfort. Through, 4-2 on aggregate, and into the winter.

Winter took Milan to Istanbul, where Galatasaray, champions of Turkey, were beaten 3-1 on 23 January; the return in March was 5-0, an aggregate of 8-1 delivered with the courtesy of an executioner who works quickly and goes home. April brought Dundee, champions of Scotland, who walked into a 5-1 first leg at San Siro on the 24th and discovered that the 1-0 they won at Dens Park on the first of May was a souvenir rather than a lifeline. Five-two on aggregate, and Milan were bound for Wembley — where, for the first time in the competition's short and Spanish-accented history, no club from Spain would contest the final.

Wembley, the Twenty-Second of May

The opponents were Benfica, holders of the cup for two years running, and they brought with them the most frightening young forward in the world. Eusébio needed less than twenty minutes to demonstrate why. The eighteenth minute, and on the matter that counted there was nothing to dispute at all. Benfica led, Milan trailed, and the 45,715 under the Wembley floodlights settled in to watch the champions of Europe defend their title against a footballing nation that had never once held it.

What followed belongs to José Altafini, and we shall come to him properly in a moment, because a man who does what he did that night has earned more than a match report. Twice in the second half he scored: the equaliser on 58 minutes, the winner on 66, and both goals came from the feet of Rivera — the pass weighed to the centimetre, the finish taken without ceremony. Two-one. When Arthur Holland of England blew the final whistle, he blew it on a new order of things: Milan were champions of Europe, the first Italian club to be so, and only the third club of any nation — after Real Madrid, after Benfica themselves — ever to hold the great trophy.

It was Cesare Maldini, the captain, who climbed the steps and lifted it: the first Italian hands on the European Cup, a photograph destined for half the bar-room walls of Lombardy before the summer was out. Rivera had been the campaign's quiet fulcrum, the server of every chance that mattered; Rocco, down near the touchline, had been right about all of it. And Italy, which received the news like a country receiving confirmation of something it had long suspected about itself, had scarcely finished celebrating when the bells changed their tone: on 3 June, twelve days after Wembley, Pope John XXIII died, and a peninsula that had been singing in its streets found itself praying. Glory and mourning inside a single fortnight — 1963 was already turning its second face to the light.

The Boy They Called Mazzola

The outline the reader carries by now — Piracicaba, 24 July 1938, and the dead captain's name the Brazilians hung on the living boy — these pages have told twice already; Wembley asks only for what the earlier tellings could not know. At nineteen, José João Altafini was already a world champion — part of Brazil's 1958 triumph in Sweden, the second-youngest man in that squad behind a teenager called Pelé, with two goals against Austria in the opening match to his name. Milan, who could smell a centre-forward across an ocean, had bought him before that tournament even began, for 135 million lire — one of the shrewder invoices in the club's long accounting, as 1958 counted it.

He crossed the water and did not pause to acclimatise: a scudetto in his very first season, 1958-59, with 28 goals to his name, and in time an oath of allegiance to Italy itself, whose blue shirt he wore at the 1962 World Cup. Italy also took the name away from him, or handed him back his own. The club let the Brazilian nickname fall quietly out of use and printed him on the team sheet as José Altafini, the surname on his birth certificate and nobody else's; and the historians of his own country, who go on calling him Mazzola to this day, read that small clerical act for exactly what it was — the moment the boy from Piracicaba was born again as an Italian star. But it is by the spring of 1963 that he must finally be judged. Thirty-one goals in all competitions that season, eleven of them in the league, and fourteen in the European Cup alone — fourteen in nine matches, the top scorer of the competition by a distance, a total for a single edition that no man had ever reached and that would stand as the mark for nearly half a century: equalled at last by Lionel Messi in 2011-12, surpassed only by Cristiano Ronaldo, with seventeen, in 2013-14, by which time nearly everyone who had witnessed the original had gone grey or gone altogether.

And then Wembley, where Benfica led and the night demanded an answer. Altafini gave the only kind he knew: two goals in the second half, the equaliser and the winner, both of them signed on 22 May 1963 in his own hand. The summit was also, as summits tend to be, the beginning of the descent — within two seasons the club would tilt its whole architecture toward the young Rivera, Altafini's room would narrow, and in 1965 he would carry his boots south to Napoli, and later north again to Juventus, leaving Milan with 155 goals in some 240 appearances behind him. It changes nothing. On the biggest night Italian club football had ever known, the boy they called Mazzola scored both goals, and no rearrangement of squads or seasons has ever managed to unwrite it.

Third at Home, and the House Sold

Domestically, the season of the first cup was a season of near-miss, and the numbers say why with Lombard bluntness: third place, 43 points from 34 matches — fifteen won, six lost, and thirteen drawn. Thirteen draws will not win a scudetto in any decade; Inter, six points clear at 49, took the wins instead. Milan scored 53 and conceded a mere 27, the figures of a well-governed house, but Herrera's machine across the city was entering its imperial phase, and the title stayed on the wrong side of the Duomo. The same city gained a European Cup and lost a scudetto in a single breath — Milan the pioneer, Inter the rival, the football capital of the continent arguing with itself over dinner.

Behind the trophies, the house itself changed hands. Andrea Rizzoli, president since 1954-55, chose the summit as his point of departure — and what a shelf he left behind: four scudetti, in 1954-55, 1956-57, 1958-59 and 1961-62; the Latin Cup of 1956; and now the European Cup itself. He sold the club to the industrialist Felice Riva, who would hold the presidency until the autumn of 1965. And Rocco — Rocco went too, off to Torino with the paint still wet on his masterpiece, leaving the bench to the Argentine Luis Carniglia, a man hired to defend a cathedral he had not built. He would not last the winter after this one.

The squad, too, was rearranged like furniture after a wedding and a funeral held in the same week. In came Amarildo from Botafogo — a World Cup winner with Brazil in 1962 — who would finish as the side's top league scorer with 14; out went Paolo Barison to Sampdoria, Emanuele Del Vecchio to Boca Juniors, Giorgio Rossano to Juventus. And beyond football, Italy's year turned grave and consequential at once: on 9 October the Vajont dam disaster killed some two thousand people in the Belluno valley, a catastrophe no economic miracle could answer for; in December, Aldo Moro formed the first centre-left government, opening the Christian Democrats to the Socialists. The country was becoming modern in every direction at the same time, and paying for it in more currencies than the lira.

The Ambush at the Maracanã

As champions of Europe, Milan were owed a meeting with the champions of South America for the Intercontinental Cup, the championship of the world, and the champions of South America were Santos — which is to say Pelé, which is to say the finest footballer alive. The first act, at San Siro on 16 October, was everything the fixture promised. Giovanni Trapattoni scored after three minutes; Amarildo, against his own countrymen, added two more, on 15 and 67; Mora struck on 82; and in between Pelé scored twice, once from the penalty spot. Four-two to Milan, before 51,917, under the whistle of the Austrian Alfred Haberfellner — a first leg won honestly and in the open, the way Milan preferred to believe a world title would be decided.

The second act, at the Maracanã on 14 November, began the same way and ended otherwise. Altafini on 12 minutes, Mora on 17 — two-nil to Milan inside the opening quarter of an hour, in front of 132,728 souls, and the world title very nearly in the hold of the ship home. Then the match turned, and turned, and kept on turning: Pepe twice, Almir, Lima — four goals between the 50th minute and the 68th — and Santos had it 4-2. The series stood level, the tie went to a playoff, and the name of the referee appointed to it, Juan Regis Brozzi of Argentina, did not yet mean anything to anyone in red and black.

Two days later — 16 November, same stadium, same referee, 120,421 in attendance — there was no Pelé, injured and absent, which ought to be recorded as Milan's great opportunity and instead became the frame for the bitterest hour of the club's year. Around the half-hour Brozzi awarded Santos a penalty for what a large part of the press corps judged to be a dive by Dorval; Dalmo converted it on 31 minutes; and in the protests that followed, Cesare Maldini — the captain whose hands had lifted the European Cup at Wembley in May — was sent off, so that the same hands that had raised the club's greatest trophy were, six months later, waved from the pitch in its darkest farce. One-nil. Santos were champions of the world.

The aftertaste never sweetened. Rivera would later describe the officiating as inconceivable — and l'abatino did not traffic in strong words, which is precisely what gave that one its weight — while Brozzi was afterwards disowned by his own federation, a sentence that reads like satire and is merely the record. Milan had sailed to Rio with the European Cup and come home with a grievance, and there is a school of thought — this chronicle belongs to it — that a grievance honestly earned becomes part of a club's patrimony too, an heirloom of the second drawer. But nobody in that dressing room was philosophical. The world title had been within reach, two goals up at the Maracanã, and it was carried off amid a controversy that has never entirely quieted.

Eleven Days Later, Norrköping

Before that wound had closed, the calendar demanded that the defence of the European title begin. On 27 November, eleven days after the Maracanã, Milan drew 1-1 away to IFK Norrköping; on 4 December, at San Siro, they finished the job 5-2, through 6-3 on aggregate — the defence alive as the year died, though the following winter Real Madrid would end it in the quarter-finals. That, however, is another chapter's grief.

Wembley in May, the Maracanã in November: 1963 carried Milan to both ends of the world's esteem. It gave the club the first European Cup ever brought to Italy, won in London against the holders, by a side built on Rocco's discipline, Rivera's porcelain touch and Altafini's fourteen-goal spring. And it charged for it: a scudetto conceded across the city, a president departing at the summit, the maestro of the whole enterprise leaving for Torino, and a world title lost two days after it was two goals from won, to a penalty half the press box did not believe in. One circuit of the sun, and Milan had been taught both the taste of the summit and its price: that Europe could be taken by intelligence and patience, and that the world beyond Europe answered to referees as well as to genius.

The trophy Cesare Maldini raised on 22 May was the first of its line in Italy, and every continental evening the club has known since descends from that one in London: the floodlights burning, the pass arriving from l'abatino, the boy called Mazzola finishing it twice, and an Italian captain at the top of the Wembley steps with both hands around a cup no Italian had ever held.