San Siro and the cultural decline in Italy

The lack of outrage from the Milanese over the feared demolition of San Siro is the flip side of the gesture with which the Red Stars set fire to the Fedayn banner: the sporting architecture and the historical-artistic value of Italian football do not enjoy the recognition they deserve at home as in much of Europe. The inertia about what is happening with the San Siro underscores the mockery that Brutalist and Modernist architecture faces in Belpaese.

As an abstract and untouchable element (the reader will recall the outcry following the Superlega proposal), football seems to be recognized solely through its dissenting basic socio-architectural and political context. A business dedicated to entertainment, regardless of its necessary existence as a secular cult, as an ecstatic collective phenomenon. A similar mentality that leads to over-celebration of the lone South Tyrol fan in Benevento, rather than raising doubts about how unthinkable times and often prohibitive costs quash the otherwise fervent (and natural) desire to run away from one’s side.

Isn’t that attitude the same, not only from Red Star fans, but also
by Italian commentators who failed to recognize the historical-artistic value of the banner
the Fedayn, stolen from the Roman fans and then burned?

It is a Way of thinkingone might think, daughter of an education in which compulsory school students are embroidered with Zebedee in the splendor of Italian Baroque or with rock paintings, which leaves them completely in the dark, say, about the work of BBPR, about the importance of Olivetti building industry, the reasons for the Sequestro Moro or Mani Pulite: in short, all useful tools to decipher the present and to make Milanese youngsters understand that a sala who wanders observing “Nobody wants the old San Siro anymore‘ would be hunted covered in pitch and feathers, as was the case with the medieval lords so studied in the works of Manzoni, as the first responsible for the stalemate of San Siro.

The mayor, who told Sky Sport, is “part of the city council […] the new stadium actually never wanted it,” he seems more interested in avoiding criticism, in calming his conscience, without actually arguing about the value that the renovation and preservation of the building will have as a priority in the future to brighten . One of the most important banners of Italian football, lost forever, is to live the same fate shared by the peninsula’s most famous stadium.

San Siro has nothing to do with the accelerationist Milan, who wants to speak English even when cloaked in Barbinic characters, and who has replaced Jannacci and the Trani with Myss Keta and the Poké Takeaways. San Siro is no match for the presidency of this inter-investor in Bitcoinnot to this Milan, which seems primarily interested in seeing its players walk the catwalk in dresses Off white. Least of all in Sala, whose hunger to catch up in the rubble of a globalized Europe is destroying the last fires of Milanese authenticity and hiding major social unrest under the carpet of gentrification and insane rents.

We Italians, who love to show off our cultural superiority in the eyes of the world, we die of empty words. One might therefore wonder why we came close to the diplomatic confrontation around Barcaccia damaged by the Feyenoord fans, while there are niches on the San Siro slandered by the Italians themselves in the name of who knows what progress. An even more serious hesitation when you consider that not even the Italian architects – who, together with the fans of the two Milanese should be the patron gods of the stadium – have taken a categorical position. Manchester has had the Museum of British Football for decades, and we who are called Robert from the drunk English, so much is their love for Baggio and Serie A, We can’t wait to inaugurate a new stadium supermarketon the ruins of one of the most famous Milanese buildings in the world.

Photo Ryan Klaus/Pexels