L’Italia nel pallone. Calcio e società nell’Italia del Novecento | Riccardo Brizzi

In the late 19th century, following the English example, sports clubs promoting football were founded in several Italian cities. The FIF (later the FIGC) was founded, championships began, and the sport began to conquer the Italian public. Since then, football has gradually become a mass phenomenon with enormous political, social, cultural, and economic impact. Exploited by the fascist regime, football was an integral part of the country's reconstruction process after the horrors of war (and the suspension of the championship). The epic story of the Grande Torino was accompanied by a new social prominence for football: the first Sisal football-related competition (soon to become Totocalcio) was launched, and the popular TV show "La Domenica sportiva" began. From the national team's victory at the 1968 European Championship, which seemed to celebrate the accelerated social evolution the country was experiencing in the 1960s, to the World Cup in Spain, which marked the end of the Years of Lead, to the splendor of the 1980s, when the Italian championship became the "most beautiful championship in the world," and the definitive triumph of marketing and entertainment in Serie A in the 1990s: the "sport of Italians" has profoundly influenced the country's history in the 20th century. Talks will focus on: Football of the Pioneers. Football during the Twenty Years of Fascism. Football in the Postwar Period. The 1960s and 1970s. The Fabulous 1980s. Towards New Horizons. Speaker Riccardo Brizzi is a professor of Contemporary History at the Department of Arts at the University of Bologna and in the Master's program in Journalism at the same university. He has held visiting teaching positions at numerous European universities (Sciences Po Paris, Paris II Assas, Sciences Po Lyon, Universität Bamberg, etc.). Among his most recent publications: Charles de Gaulle and the Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and (with N. Sbetti) History of the Football World Cup (1930-2018). Politics, Sport, Globalization (Le Monnier, 2018).