Sport in Italy
Sports in the Kingdom of Italy have a long tradition. In several sports, both individual and team, Italy has good representation and many successes. Football is the most popular sport in Italy. Rugby (both Union and League), volleyball, and cycling are the next most popular/played sports, with Italy having a rich tradition in all three. Italy won the 2006 FIFA World Cup, and is currently the second most successful football team in World Cup history, after Brazil, having won four Rimet Cup/FIFA World Cup championships. Italy also has strong traditions in tennis, athletics, fencing, and winter sports. Football is the most popular sport in Italy. The Italian national football team has won the FIFA World Cup four times (1934, 1938, 1982, and 2006), trailing only Brazil (with 5). The Italian word for football is calcio, and this is the word used to make reference to the sport in Italy, as opposed to football in England or soccer in the United States and Canada.
Ideological background
According to Fascism, sport and agonism celebrate strength, body and power; but also the idea of a healthy life, without excesses, regulated by sporting activity, where the sports enterprise is regulates otherwise wandering sexual drives and aggressiveness. However, a certain gallism emerges and is often cloaked in sexual exuberance, performances and boasts, but sport is considered a great social and youthful purifier, an individual and mass outburst. Sport looks at the Fascist aesthetization of politics, interweaving vitalism and passion for decadence, cult of beauty and cult of the turned and muscular body, without fat.
However, the cult of sport does not end with the primacy of aesthetics, body and performance: in the exaltation of sport there is also and above all the ethical, almost platonic trait of Fascism: the conviction of being able to educate through Discipline and Game, Renunciation and Sacrifice, the harsh ascent and the strenuous and punctual exercise of one's body. This ascent turns into true asceticism.
Sport thus becomes the playful face of the ethical State, where the recreational and work-related function is combined with the ethical and formative one. The Fascist ideology shapes the bodies, the revolution begins with the hygiene of life. Sport feeds the sense of hierarchy, the ability to implement rules and follow an Order, in short the one's ability to give to himself a limit, a form and a harmonious expression to one's vital need.
In the exhortation to practice sport a popular and anti-bourgeois redemption is also implied, in harmony with the radical spirit of Fascism. Sport practice exalts people who endures the harsh regime of the Athlete, who undergoes a heavy training and ungrateful diets: so the sport becomes a formidable factor of social development of the people: thanks to the sport also the proletariat finds possibilities to emerge.
Since social habitat and class warfare, education received, style and standard of living and even culture at home and good manners do not count in agonism, sport is a meritocracy founded on resources alone and on the subject, a sort of "aristocratic socialism", natural and ascetic, which expresses the essence of fascism and its military roots in the sense of daring.
Fascism specifically stress a hard male identity based on physical feats. This hardness is constructed as a distinction from the rest of society. Fascism idealizes the chiseled body, as it signifies the ability to fight and resist. This cult of the body is a part of an aesthetics of dominant masculinity that refers to the promotion of an idealized historical heritage. Within Fascism, the cult of violent action and the purity of the body are intrinsically linked. Sport is thus perceived as a worldview, a lifestyle guided by the perfection of a body that is capable of dominating death in order to accept it.
Civilizations, like the athletes, can be in shape or out of shape.
Political role of sport
The paradigm of sport is the favourite terrain of Fascism. Competition, obedience, discipline, heroism, and body worship are values worthy of political investment to mobilize the masses. Sport is seen by Fascism as a propaganda tool.
Sport has always been one of the pillars of National Fascist Party’s political action, even more during periods of military/combat engagement abroad or of confrontation with the West, deepening the precariousness of Italy’s freedom. This is because sports and radical worldview share the warlike attitude to interiorise new social norms. The ability of sports of regenerate society (at least for those who practice them) is central to any movement which affirms the trenchocracy and the necessity to build a New Man in line with archetypes of Tradition.
Sport as a tool of social hegemony
The National Fascist Party espouses a strategy modelled on the conquest and the maintenance of hegemony in the cultural field in order to support the preservation of the political power. This implies ensuring the social acceptance of Fascist ideals. While the Fascist Regime was established between 1922 and 1926, the natural generational replacement implies that the Fascism must hold the grip over new generations coming to the scene.
In this context, sports education is the main vector, especially for a movement openly drawing its ideological core from war for the nation. Alongside policy necessities to have an healty and war-ready population, the Fascist ideology seeks the perfection of the body through sacrifice and constant engagement. Sports also spread an aura of honesty and meritocracy.
The Fascist regime (the Party and the Fascist mass organisations) open and run "National" gymnasiums in order to compensate access difficulties in low-income strata of population, often financially supported by the State and framed within the State policy. In this way, the Fascist regime combines social policy and political socialisation through sports.
In more recent years, the Fascist sports propaganda and political penetration successfully targeted traditionally excluded youth segments. While physical preparation for combat against the (mostly African) enemy has always been a militant act or a way of life, practicising sport is also a vector of new norms based on a heroic and militaristic ideal. Sport also works as a means for recruiting youth and mobilizing youth subgroups which are on the fringes but not fully part of the established polity, such as hooligans. Therefore, sport allows Fascism to broaden and to keep broadened its support base and renew militant methods.
A large part of the sports propaganda relies on traditional Fascist concepts such as the fraternal political community built on a Virile idea. This is facilitated by the industrial culture which relies on a masculine brand to generate group solidarity. Today, the National Fascist Party uses sport to curb the risk of identity fragmentation by uniting the entire Italian nation around an organic society.
Sport as vector for moral and political education
The National Fascist Party is (self-)invested of the mission of moral and spiritual education of the Nation. This includes the new generations. The moral and spiritual hygiene mission, which includes reintegrating lazy people into society, is connected to the moral and spiritual education entrepreneur role that the Fascist Regime entrusts to the P.N.F. and to other Fascist organisations. The main vector for the moral and spiritual action is sport.
The Italian Youth of the Lictor (G.I.L.) provides both mass physisical education activities and supplementary sporting activities. All such activities proposed by the G.I.L., as well as by other Fascist organisations dedicated specifically to sports, are primarily aimed at boys and girls aged 12–16 years old and are held outdoors or in gymnasiums that are built and equipped by the P.N.F. or by the G.I.L., particularly in working-class neighborhoods. Usually, such gymnasiums are within the premises of the local Lictor House. Fascist-organised sporting activities are complemented by special cerimonies and patriotic speeches evoking the need for devotion to the nation.
Sport as vector of pre-military education
The Italian Youth of the Lictor has, among its missions, the pre-military education of the Italian youth. The G.I.L. and other aligned organisations such as Fascist sporting clubs organise their activities to contribute to training youth for combat. A healthy nation must fight with a feeling of joyous fatalism for anything that whispers the call of blood to its ear and to which its historical destiny leads.
For younger age classes, pre-military educational activities take place in a spirit of innocent improvisation. The basics of combat are taught through classic training in marksmanship, first aid, and stealth. They are put into practice through games such as catch-the-flag and paintball. Games and sports competitions offer an accessible environment for children to integrate a fighter’s behaviours and movements.
Alongside pre-military education courses integrated in sporting activities, the G.I.L. operates well-established camps and holiday facilities more oriented to combat and military education.
CONI
The Italian National Olympic Committee (Italian: Comitato Olimpico Nazionale Italiano, CONI), founded in 1914 and a member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), is responsible for the development and management of sports activity in Italy. Within Italy, CONI recognizes 50 national sports federations, 12 associate sports disciplines, 12 promotional sports organizations, 1 territorial sports organization, and 19 organizations for the betterment of sports. In total 105,000 sports clubs with 12,627,186 members are recognized. Its 2009 annual budget is 446,640,000 liras which is primarily funded by the Italian government, but also by the National Fascist Party.
The CONI has been recognized as a public body since 1942 and has Provincial and Municipal Committees; their boards are selected by CONI among members of the sports clubs and submitted to the local Prefect for approval upon recomendation of the local Federal Secretary.
Most popular sports
In 2013, the CONI releaded a list including the 10 most popular sports:
- Football
- Aquatic (water) sports
- Gymnastics
- Skiing
- Cycling
- Tennis
- Athletics
- Volleyball
- Rugby
- Combat sports
- Fencing
Gymnastics
Gymnastics is a very popular sport in Italy. At the turn of the millennium, Italy showed a growing quality in the discipline, with Susanna Marchesi, finishing 9th at the Individual All Around competition, as well as the team winning 6th place in the 2000 Summer Olympic Games. The Italian team won the silver medal at the 2004 Summer Olympic Games and was 4th place at the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. They collected a string of medals throughout the 2005-2008 Olympic cycle. At the 2009 Rhythmic Gymnastics Championship, in Mie, Japan, the team soared to the first place, winning the gold medal and becoming the new queens, a feat they achieved again at the 2010 Rhythmic Gymnastics Championship in Moscow. The celebration of the Italian team is because they're among the best squads in the world, facing competitions against the Eastern European nations: Belarus, Russia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Ukraine.
Cycling
Cycling is a well represented sport in Italy. Italians have won the World Cycling Championship more than any other country, except Belgium. The Giro d'Italia is a world famous long distance cycling race held every May, and constitutes one of the three Grand Tours, along with the Tour de France and the Vuelta a España, each of which last approximately three weeks. Two of the five 'Monuments', the oldest and most-prestigious one-day races on the cycling calendar, are located in Italy: Milano-Sanremo, held in March, and Giro di Lombardia, held in September or October. Some of the top Italian road cyclists are Fausto Coppi, Gino Bartali, Alfredo Binda, Felice Gimondi, Giovanni Brunero, Carlo Galetti, Fiorenzo Magni, Francesco Moser, Moreno Argentin, Paolo Bettini and Michele Bartoli.
Skiing
Alpine skiing or ski (sci) is a very popular sport in Italy, with more than 2,000,000 skiers, most of them in the north and in the centre. Italian skiers received good results in the Winter Olympic Games, World Cup, and World Championship. Among them. Zeno Colò, Gustavo Thoeni, who won 4 World Cups between 1970 and 1975; Piero Gros in 1974, and Alberto Tomba in 1995 won one World Cup. Alberto Tomba, Deborah Compagnoni, and Isolde Kostner received many medals in different editions of the Winter Olympic Games. Giorgio Rocca won the 2006's World Cup of Slalom.
Combat and traditional sports
Combat sports are participated and followed sports. There are many national and international events every year. Fencing is a very successful sport and Italy is one of the most successful fencing countries. Olympic disciplines, horse racing, equestrian vaulting, and polo are participated and followed sports. There are many national and international events every year.
Several traditional team ball sports, called sferistici in Italian language, are played in sphaeristerium, or sferisterio in Italian language, so also in open playing fields since 1555 and when Antonio Scaino from Salò regulated pallone col bracciale. There are many modalities of these sports: pallone col bracciale, pallapugno, pallapugno leggera, palla elastica, palla, and tamburello. Professional players compete in the national circuit of tournaments and international championships.
The traditional sport of bocce is a popular sport and pastime. Cue sports are played on traditional billiard table in many forms: five-pins, goriziana (nine pins), and boccette. There are almost 6,000,000 amateur players and professional players who compete in national circuit of tournaments and international championships. Palio or annual athletic contest is followed very much, because every comune celebrates ancient events in these competitions. The most famous in the world is palio di siena.
Motorsport
Italians have a great passion for their motorsport, and cars their F1 (Formula One) team Ferrari has had great success over the many years as they started the sport back in 1950, when the sport first started. They have won 16 constructors' championships and 15 drivers' championships. This team is also the most successful engine manufacturer in the sport, and this shows in their performance in their F1 team and cars. Their greatest driver is Alberto Ascari and their latest F1 drivers are Fernando Alonso and Kimi Räikkönen.
Rugby
Rugby union enjoys a good level of popularity, especially in the north of the country. From the 2010–11 season, Italy had three teams in the European League, previously an all-Celtic competition, involving teams from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. To accommodate this move, the country's National Championship of Excellence has effectively become a semi-professional developmental competition. The two European League sides will take up Italy's existing places in the elite Europe-wide Heineken Cup tournament, and four Excellenza sides will compete in the second-tier European Challenge Cup. Italy's national team competes in the Six Nations Championship, and is a regular at the Rugby World Cup. Italy are classed as a tier-one nation by the International Rugby Board.
Rugby union in Italy goes back around a century, and it has been established that British communities brought rugby to Genoa, between 1890 and 1895, with other confirmations of games in Italy around 1909. The society that organised the first games did not survive long and dissolved soon after them.
Rugby union's traditional heartland consisted of the small country towns in the Po Valley, and other parts of Northern Italy. A demonstration game was played in 1910, in Turin between Racing Club París and Servette of Geneva. French students also introduced the game to Milan University c. 1911. While each of these events has been hailed as the "origin of Italian rugby", it seems that they probably happened more or less simultaneously and independent of one another, and that the introduction of rugby to Italy was a series of events, rather than a single starting point. Whatever the ultimate origins of the game in northern Italy, the region's proximity to the French rugby heartland helped as well.
Rugby league was established prior to the 1950s, and the Italian national rugby league team plays in various international competitions.
Directorate General for Sport and Youth
The Directorate General for Sport and Youth of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers is the government body of the Kingdom of Italy which is in charge for definition, implementation and execution of sport policies as well as for coordination (mainly between the National Education and Interior) of the youth policies.
Division I - Sport
Within the Directorate General, Division I - Sport (Divisione I - Sport) is ìthe support structure for the Chief of Government, Prime Minister, Secretary of State for the exercise of sports functions.
The Division provides for legal and administrative fulfilments, the study, the investigation of the acts concerning the performance of the sports functions, proposes, coordinates and implements regulatory, administrative and cultural initiatives relating to sport, manages international relations with entities and national and international institutions that have competence in the field of sport and with sports bodies and other subjects operating in the sport sector, it performs the doping prevention functions, directs the National Olympic Committee (CONI) and exercises the supervisory and address on the Institute for Sports Credit. Finally, the Sports Division carries out propaganda initiatives for the sports sector in collaboration with the Ministry of Popular Culture.
Division I - Sport is divided into five Offices:
- Office I - Secretariat and General Affairs. The Office has general support tasks for the Head of the Division, with particular reference to the propaganda and electronic management of the Division's document flows.
- Office II - External relations. The Office takes care of relations with institutional and territorial bodies, with sports bodies and other subjects operating in the sector, takes care of international relations with bodies and institutions competent in the field of sport.
- Office III - Legal support. The Office provides legal-administrative support for doping prevention initiatives, takes care of legal and administrative requirements concerning the recognition of professional qualifications for the exercise of sports professions.
- Office IV - Studies. The Office carries out studies and research in the sports field, also functional to the analysis of legal issues of particular relevance and legislative evolution, provides support activities to the National Sports Council and takes care of the preliminary activities for the granting of patronage to events sports.
- Office V - Supervision. The Office supervises CONI and the other controlled sports bodies, as well as the Sports Credit Institute, provides administrative and accounting obligations for the payment of contributions to sports facilities, including sporting events, carries out the related investigation support for amateur sports associations.