The region of Brescia famously doesn't like outsiders and votes for the Lega Nord. An old underground cartoon sums up the local attitude. It shows a deep trench at the edge of Northern Italy, with a clear message: Let's get rid of the Africans. The word "believe" is tattooed on his left hand.
Wealthy, engaged to a swimsuit model, he's left behind a childhood in the Berlin slums. The 9-year-old him would be awestruck by the room in his house completely filled with sneakers, which he cleans carefully with toothpaste. But the 9-year-old him also has scars, ripped open that afternoon on the Pro Patria pitch, when strangers looked him in the eye and called him a monkey.
He wasn't Boateng then, just a kid named Kevin with a German mother and a Ghanaian father. During an away game, the father of an opponent said, "Little n, for every goal you score, you're gonna get a banana. Boateng repeats those words sitting in the quiet, peaceful lounge.
He had a big beard and no hair. I even remember his son. I remember the face of his son. I wanted to kick his son so hard. I didn't. I scored a goal, and we won the game. This I remember. Boateng believed if he got rich enough, if he won enough games, scored enough goals, he could outrun the bald man with the big beard. For years, he did. During his first three seasons at AC Milan, he never was abused. A crowd at a match with Florence's team, Fiorentina, abused Balotelli.
At Juventus, Boateng looked up in the stands and saw two men wearing the team's famous black-and-white jerseys making the monkey chant: Oo -- oo -- oo -- oo. Boateng yelled at them in the stands, "Come down! Do it in front of me! Since then, he's been speaking out against racism, meeting with the head of FIFA, making a speech at the United Nations. He'd been known as a party boy, getting caught once in a nightclub the night before a game. That one day of monkey chants gave him focus, a way to honor a nine-year-old boy's fears, just as a room of sneakers honors that boy's hopes and dreams.
He's troubled by the racist chants coming from the terraces, which aren't new to Italy but are to him. Every week or two, it seems there's another news story about a crowd chanting vile things at soccer players, about clubs being fined or forced to play in empty stadiums.
Boateng can't figure out the reason so many seem directed at AC Milan. Why them? Why now? My train rattles through the Tuscan countryside traveled by Caesar and Charlemagne, creaking and swaying. I'm headed back in time, looking for an answer to Boateng's question. The genesis of almost everything that is happening in present day Italy can be found in the past. Tonight, Fiorentina is playing at Siena, a town surrounded by ancient city walls, with narrow turning lanes and steep alleys, all converging on the Piazza del Campo.
The two cities have been rivals for a thousand years, a reminder that every city in Italy is much older than the nation. My friend Fred Marconi picks me up at the station. A Siena native, he's wearing a Ramones T-shirt. Elvis glasses rest on the dashboard. We're going to the game. Siena needs to win at least two, and maybe all, of its final three games to avoid relegation.
The oldest bank in the world is in Siena, Monte dei Paschi, and for centuries it operated with caution, holding great wealth, becoming a benefactor for the town, even sponsoring the beloved soccer team, which wears the bank's name on its jerseys.
The bank invented the concept of credit, and the word bankruptcy, sending these ideas out into the world, where they began slowly working their way back. The circle took years. The managers got greedy, expanding, taking on debt. Then the financial crisis hit in , and after four years of hiding huge losses, the bank almost defaulted. Monte dei Paschi is now supported by the government. All told, the bank lost close to a billion dollars. An official jumped out his window into the piazza below, killing himself.
The bank is dropping its sponsorship of the team, which is close to being relegated. Italian soccer fans come from all political and economic backgrounds, often rooted in long-standing regional and family allegiances. It will be a disaster, a major disaster. He drives past the exit for the stadium. Rows of trees line the road, pine and cypress. Castles rise from the hilltops.
There's a place he wants to show me first. An old battlefield will help me understand the Florence-Siena rivalry, and to see how deep the roots of identity run in a land much older than the modern nation drawn on its surface. Marconi's family has lived in Siena for at least years -- the paper trail ran out before relatives did -- and he explains that the town is proud of its bitter and eternal feuds. Even today, the town is divided into neighborhoods, or contradas. Twice a year, the contradas compete in Il Palio, the oldest horse race in the world.
Each neighborhood is named for an animal or a powerful force in nature, and children are baptized into the contrada just as they are baptized into the church. But, honestly, I will have serious issues. I'll say that. I hope it never happens. This isn't some old man talking.
He is a year-old graffiti artist who makes wine and plays bass in a rock band. He's got a Ramones tattoo. He baptized his 3-year-old son on the th anniversary of the battle that took place on the peaceful field he is driving me to see. Dante talked about this battle in 'The Divine Comedy' and said that was a terrible day.
The Sienese turned the Arbia River into a red river of blood. We actually exterminated the Florentine army. After the battle, the city-state of Siena flourished. Work started on a cathedral, which would be the biggest in the world. Some businessmen founded a bank. The reign lasted almost years, then the Florentine army got its revenge, taking the town. Marconi barrels toward the battlefield crowned with cypress trees, and, just as he is crowing about the ancient victory, a car passes and he notices a flash of purple.
Fiorentina colors. My easygoing friend transforms, just for a moment, into a warrior, filled with hate. He leans on the horn, flipping them the bird. After the battlefield, we settle into the stadium. Fiorentina scores a quick goal, Siena never challenges, and, as the game ends, Marconi wheels around in his chair and bangs his head and fists against the wall. He climbs the hill toward the Campo. There's one home game left, in 11 days, against Milan.
It's gonna be the end of something. It could be the end of everything. A breeze blows, and he tries not to think about his team going bankrupt and ceasing to exist. Crossing a piazza, headed toward an unfinished cathedral, his phone rings.
It's his wife. Their 3-year-old got a haircut today, and he had a specific request for the barber. Immigrants have come to Italy to plant and pick tomatoes. Alessandro Penso. Everyone has talked to me about immigrants, but I haven't seen many of them. Where is this dangerous flood that so threatens the very foundations of Italian identity? Well, many live in transient villages, as far away from the sturdy stone walls of Siena as a human being can get, working as migrant field hands around Naples.
I travel south. A local doctor, Renato Natale, drives me into a world where outsiders rarely go. He parks his car behind a church-run shelter, the home of last resort for people who've come to plant and pick tomatoes. The smaller boy is the child of a prostitute. He was born in Italy and isn't a citizen, since the law demands children have an Italian parent to be Italian. His hair is cut into a mohawk, and he's got lines shaved beneath it.
I recognize it and tell him so. I follow him, meeting a young man on the porch whose biceps strain the fabric of his shirt. Eric Andrews is an athlete, and he speaks English, which surprises me after a week of translators. Kids here get mohawks, he explains. About eight years ago, Andrews came to Italy to play soccer. He brought big dreams with him, and a nomad's past -- born in Sierra Leone, he moved to Ghana, then wandered around Europe, trying to find a home.
They followed the same star in the sky, and now Muntari is married to the former Miss Ghana, living out "Gatsby," and Andrews is at this camp, living out "The Grapes of Wrath. A little fire smokes and smolders. Mattresses rest under trees with shapes on them. People sleep on the porch, and in chairs, wherever they can find a place that is either flat or soft. It's too much to hope for both. Most work the highway outside as prostitutes, or stand on the same blacktop and hope a farmer picks them up to earn a few euros a day in the fields.
On the chapel walls, murals show Jesus helping workers in the fields and ministering to hookers on the road. The priest tried to paint Jesus black, but the African residents protested. Someone puts cardboard on the fire, which pops and flames. There's a little girl, maybe 6 or 7, standing by the front door. Andrews tells me her mom is from Nigeria.
She was born here. Someone built a reed hut. A group from Mali recently arrived, trying to escape the war. The whole thing looks exactly like an African village. This small piece of Italy is their entire world.
The abuse begins when they cross that invisible line. Andrews has tried to understand his Italian neighbors, to dig down through the layers until he knows why the people who love tomatoes hate the people who pick them. This is it. Someone who was born here, even in this small village, he has never even gone to Napoli before. That is how they are. Sometimes they even ask me, how did I come to Italy? I tell them I walked.
He laughs, a deep booming laugh still untouched by the hardness and despair around him. Andrews doesn't sweat in the fields. When he's not working at the shelter, he plays soccer for the local team. They ride public buses to games, and he hears the abuse on the rides, and at the stadiums when he takes the pitch. That is what the referee tells me.
Are you kidding me? He's 28 now. People tell him he might still make it, but he knows the truth. His window is closed; he's too old to change his life with the game that brought him here. Now he plays because he loves the way he feels with a ball at his feet, eyes up, looking ahead.
He tries to ignore the monkey chants, and the slurs, even as he notices the abuse is getting worse. I've been experiencing many things. Balotelli understands the kids in the refugee camp. When he was their age, what he wanted most of all was to fit in, to be like the people around him.
A biographer, Mauro Valeri, told me that young Balotelli washed his hands in hot water to try to get the black off his skin. He also said Balotelli asked an elementary school teacher if his heart was black inside his chest.
I don't know if these stories are true; I'm somewhat suspicious, since they read like something a white liberal Italian would want to be true. A well-known Italian journalist told me to "triple check" those details because they did not sound like the Mario he knows. Balotelli has hidden his vulnerable younger self behind a peroxide blond mohawk and armor made of bravado. Well, almost hidden.
Buried in a tabloid tell-all from an ex-girlfriend was a detail that rings too true to be made up. As a gift, he gave her a box, and on it he had written, "Please never hurt me," with a sad face drawn on it. Like Eric Andrews, Balotelli liked how he felt with a ball at his feet. Across the street from the apartment building where he lived, in between the supermarket and the church, was a pitch. This was his real home. When he stepped in between the lines, he found a place where being different wasn't bad.
All he had to do was go down a flight of stairs, go out the gate, cross the road, and navigate a patch of tall weeds between the street and the stadium. He seemed safe there, creating an Italy where he belonged. Maybe that's why he's said he'll never be forced from a pitch by racist chants. He'd be letting the hatred drive him from his home. It wasn't officially his home, of course. He wasn't a citizen, kept from representing Italy at the Beijing Olympics in because his 18th birthday was four days after the opening ceremony.
Ghana tried to get him to play for its team, but he refused. Fabio Liverani, left, was the first black footballer to play for the Italian national team. He also was the second black player to sign with Lazio. The first was Aron Winter, who played from to '96 but left because of abuse from his own team's fans.
When he turned 18, Balotelli applied for citizenship, which he received in the city hall of Concesio, standing next to the family that took him in 15 years before. He posed for a picture with his mother and father, who both smiled, holding on to each other's arms.
Balotelli smiled, too, not a cover-boy shot but the modest smile of a son with his family. A month later, he debuted for the Italian U national team. Only four blacks have ever played for Italy, and Balotelli was the third. The first, Fabio Liverani, was only 12 years ago. People accepted him. His father was Italian. I visited Liverani in Rome, and he took me into a storage room off a hallway, where he keeps his jersey framed from that first game. Next to it, there are photographs, one taken during the national anthem.
His eyes are red. He'd looked in the stands and found his mother, who moved to Italy from Somalia to begin a new life. She was crying, and then he cried, too. When he first got the news that he'd represent his country, he'd called his mom. Every time Liverani hears the national anthem, he remembers that day. He'd never felt so Italian. During the European Championships, Valeri said his research showed some Italians saw Balotelli singing the national anthem before the game and turned the game off, disgusted.
Something about him is different. Even though he's not the first black player on the national team, he broke a much less known yet more significant barrier. Balotelli was 2 years old when the Italian parliament passed "Act No.
At one point, half the members of Parliament were under indictment, and the dominant political parties collapsed. Italy rebooted. The man who exploited the vacuum was Berlusconi, who took office two years later, ushering the era of the tabloid sex scandal.
There's something approaching performance art about the underage escorts in combination with a dying economy: While Berlusconi was screwing the youth, he was also literally screwing the youth.
The first article of Act No. The reason I know about this law is because a national shouting match has erupted over it. The week I arrived, a new government took over in Italy, and one of the new ministers was an African immigrant, a doctor named Cecile Kyenge. She is Italy's first black minister, which is like being a Cabinet secretary. Balotelli, who gives almost no interviews, offered public support, calling her appointment "another great step forward for an Italian society that is more civil, responsible and understanding of the need for better, definitive integration.
The Lega Nord opposed her agenda, a party leader asking her to come to Northern Italy "to see first-hand how mass immigration has turned Italians into a minority in the very neighborhoods in which they grew up. Unbelievably, one woman was seen shoving her fingers down her throat to make herself sick on the Welsh fans below.
Terrified children were led away by their shocked parents, fans were knocked to the ground as they dived for cover, but despite the repeated pleas to the hundreds of Carabinieri police that had encircled the away end, the bombardment continued. If in the UK zero tolerance, the filming of fans and the apportioning of banning orders was seen as the way forward to cut out the cancer of football hooliganism, in Italy the Carabinieri style was evidently to stand idly by and let it happen.
Row after row of Italians could easily be seen spitting, throwing objects and abusing fans, but when Welsh protests became too vociferous, the Italian police just shrugged their. He lit a cigarette, turned away from me, taking no notice while missiles continued to rain down. Shock then turned to anger when disbelieving Welsh supporters became incensed at the treatment they were receiving. Many forsaking the on field spectacle to harangue and implore police to take action.
But then should we really have been so surprised at what unfolded on the night? The evening before the match groups of Cardiff, Swansea and Newport fans had clashed in the city centre. Defeat in Milan by such a devastating scoreline was a bitter pill to swallow, but after the shameful show by the San Siro hordes, the Wales travelling army were left with unpleasant memories that would live on for decades.
In the aftermath of the game UEFA announced that they were to launch an investigation into the crowd trouble, while the Football Association of Wales lodged an official complaint about the treatment of their fans at the San Siro.
An UEFA spokesman confirmed that claims from Welsh fans that they were pelted with missiles from Italians in the upper tier above them would be investigated. We also asked for a police presence there. It would be another 12 years before Wales fans could finally taste the sweet experience of qualifying for a major tournament. The Euro clash with Italy in Rome this evening will no doubt evoke many memories of that night in Milan.
He didn't play soccer, didn't watch much soccer, didn't even particularly seem to like the sport—but he loved his little brothers. So on the morning of April 27 his father squeezed the three boys into his blue Chevy Cavalier and pointed the family car toward the Eisenhower fields. There would be two referees for the teen game rather than the standard three. And as James Yapias, an elementary school principal and part-time soccer coach, surveyed his shallow roster, he determined that he needed more kids.
It's not clear who exactly plucked him from the crowd to play in his first-ever competitive soccer match, but he ended up in the goalkeeper's box—perhaps the best place for a 5'8", pound novice—wearing a borrowed jersey. Somewhere around a.
Portillo flashed his yellow card and pulled out the form for tracking official cautions. The ref never saw it coming. Vazquez, the league administrator who'd been surveying the games from afar, ran toward the unfolding scene, dialing as he did so. At first Portillo remained standing, but as Vazquez closed the distance, the referee collapsed to the ground, complaining of nausea and dizziness and spitting blood. As tension mounted, the boys' father waved his three sons toward the blue Cavalier, and they drove off.
At Intermountain Medical Center she was bombarded with forms permitting doctors to drain the fluids building up in Ricardo's brain. But around 2 p.
We're going to get out of this. He squeezed her hand, and the machines monitoring his vitals barked. Doctors ushered Johana out. Her father had gone into shock. He would never wake up. One week later, on May 4—the day after Valeria's 15th birthday and what would have been Day 3 of Disney—doctors showed Portillo's daughters slides of the damage to their father's brain.
The girls already knew, from the bruises across his body and from the way his skin, when pressed, remained indented, that he would need a miracle to recover.
Later that day, they removed their father from life support. At p. Still, for them knowing how it happened does nothing to explain why it did. He's the motor of our family, and now he's not here. Meanwhile, the little nephew that he took care of asks, "Where my uncle? He would face a maximum of five years in prison if convicted.
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