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Arcade

A Season with Verona: A Soccer Fan Follows His Team Around Italy in Search of Dreams, National Character and . . . Goals!

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Format: Paperback


Description

Is Italy a united country, or a loose affiliation of warring states? Is Italian football (which we Americans know as “soccer”) a sport, or an ill- disguised protraction of ancient enmities? After twenty years in the bel paese, Tim Parks goes on the road to follow the fortunes of his hometown soccer club, Hellas Verona, to pay a different kind of visit to some of the world’s most beautiful cities, and to get a fresh take on the conundrum that is national character. From Udine to Catania, from the San Siro to the Olimpico, traveling with the raucous and unruly Verona fans—whose conduct is a cross between that of asylum inmates and the Keystone Kops—Tim Parks offers his highly personal account of one man’s relationship with a country, its people, and its national sport. The clubs are struggling, as always, to keep their heads above water in Series A. The fans, as always, are accused of vulgarity, racism, and violence. It’s an election year and politics encroaches. The police are ambiguous, the journeys exhausting, the referees unforgivable, the anecdotes hilarious. And behind it all is the growing intuition that in a world stripped of idealism and bereft of religion, soccer offers a new and fiercely ironic way of forming community and engaging with the sacred. Read more

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Arcade; 1st edition (November 13, 2012)


Language ‏ : ‎ English


Paperback ‏ : ‎ 464 pages


ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1611457335


ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 39


Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.38 pounds


Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 6 x 9 inches


Best Sellers Rank: #403,274 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #404 in general Italy Travel Guides #415 in Soccer (Books) #1,263 in Travelogues & Travel Essays


#404 in general Italy Travel Guides:


#415 in Soccer (Books):


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Top Amazon Reviews

    • Great Sports Read
If you are a sports fan, particularly football, then you will love this book. Yes, it's true that there is racist and sexist behavior on display in the behavior of the Italian soccer fans. I was shocked by how prevalent it is, but as a woman who has attended many games in America I know these seem attitudes exist and sometimes they are exhibited. I was more surprised by the violence that surrounds the fans and even the team members and staff. I have never felt unsafe at a game, home or away. Italian soccer fans run a gauntlet of threats and intimidation. But that's not why I read the book and loved it. Tim Parks articulates the almost religious intensity of football fandom, the superstitions, the crazy emotional highs and lows, the desire to always go back for more, even if it leads to defeat and heartbreak. If you empathize with that last sentence then buy this book. It was written for you. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on October 26, 2022 by rusty
    • This is why our world today is the way it is
Yes this book was written long before the #metoo movement and Black Lives Matter, so I’m really trying not to become a revisionist with this review. But with the benefit of hindsight, from Tim Parks’ own writing we can see why women and people of color are finally fed up with being mistreated. The team’s fans, whom Parks tries so desperately to befriend, make monkey noises every time a Black opponent takes the field. Yet Parks thinks it’s okay. Anyone opposing this racist behavior is too “pious.” And then about 88% through the book, Parks stands by while his friends sexually harass a 19-year-old woman on a train. “Open your legs, kid!, one shouts, while Parks just watches another friend hit on her. He seems to think mistreating her is fine, because in his words she has “very deliberately exposed cleavage.” Okay, Tim, she woke up that morning and got dressed purposely to expose herself on a train in hopes of getting hit on by strange men. Yep, you’re a mind reader, Tim. He goes on to describe how the women supposedly enjoyed all these men slobbering over her and asking her for sex. Well, maybe she went along because she was afraid, Tim. Disgusting. No more Tim Parks for me. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on August 15, 2021 by Amazon Customer
    • Perhaps not for everyone
Let me say first off that I am enamored with Italy/Sicily and the Italian culture having traveled extensively throughout the country, mingling with the natives. I had read another book by Tim Parks having to deal with Italian trains and their history along with his witticisms describing his commutes from his home in Verona to his employment in Milan. I found him specific at times but often hilarious as you can see the warm collision of Parks, an Englishman, trying to understand the sometimes incomparable logic of the Italians. I also gained an understanding of the foreign soccer fans; their importance to the sport as well as their passion for the game. Neither book was a page turner, rather an interesting book you could go back and pick up easily while following the continuity of the story line. I never considered not completing either book but often read something else in between. I plan to look for other books by this author as I think he mysteriously has me hooked. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on October 2, 2013 by R. Sheppard
    • Sickening Hellish Verona
Seldom has a book made me so angry. It is the narration of Tim Parks's being embedded, as we say now, with the fans of the Italian soccer team Hellas Verona during the 2000-2001 season. The book starts with recounting the bus trip of Parks and friends to the first away game, a trip during which many of them get drunk, high on cocaine, purposely harass and distract the driver with vile, unprovoked insults (thus potentially endangering themselves and others on the road), get in a fight for which the cops have to be called and arrive late for the game. And Parks wanted to take his teenage son on this trip, but didn't because the boy had to study his Latin. The behavior of the fans is an orgy of hatred toward whoever is different, particularly blacks and Southern Italians, but also the disabled ("mongolo!") and Jews. But what is truly sickening is the author's attempt to rationalize this behavior by ascribing any criticism to political correctness. This represents a degree of intellectual dishonesty and moral cowardice that I have rarely encountered. His book is punctuated by the cherry-picked tale of one Luis Marsiglia, a Jewish teacher who lies about being attacked by right-wingers in Verona. Yes, women (to provide an analogy) have lied about being the victim of violence and even rape- this does not preclude that violence against women is truly endemic. And so it is with anti-Semitism, racism and other forms of exclusion. What Parks did conveniently forget was the unbelievably appalling episode in 1996 when his beloved team brought into the stadium an effigy of a black man being hanged, with a sign saying "Negro go away." Nor does he bring out that banners are often written in characters that are meant to be like "Celtic" runes- an allusion to the neo-Fascist use of the Celtic cross and accompanying muddled racist folklore. Hellas Verona continues to this day with its revolting ways, stoking the fires of the present difficult situation in Italy with immigration. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on August 3, 2013 by Cynthia Hernandez
    • Great read for any sports fan
The book started a little slow, but drew in me in about 1/3 in. I couldn't put it down once i passed that threshold. Since I didn't really follow Serie A 10 years ago, I had no idea how things would turn out for Verona. It couldn't have been better scripted had it been fiction. Really great read. If you're any kind of sports fan but especially a fan of 2nd tier team, you can sympathize. Reminds me of the rabid Lions fans back in Detroit. Why follow them when they never succeed? Beside the story, Tim Parks is brilliant. The parallels he draws between a love a sport and other parts of life and entertainment. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on March 14, 2013 by Anthony

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