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    A Season with Verona: A Soccer Fan Follows His Team Around Italy in Search of Dreams, National Character and . . . Goals!
    Unavailable
    A Season with Verona: A Soccer Fan Follows His Team Around Italy in Search of Dreams, National Character and . . . Goals!
    Unavailable
    A Season with Verona: A Soccer Fan Follows His Team Around Italy in Search of Dreams, National Character and . . . Goals!
    Ebook577 pages8 hours

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

    By Tim Parks

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcade Publishing
    Release dateJan 23, 2012
    ISBN9781611459777
    Unavailable
    A Season with Verona: A Soccer Fan Follows His Team Around Italy in Search of Dreams, National Character and . . . Goals!
    Author

    Tim Parks

    Tim Parks is the author of many novels, translations, and works of nonfiction, including Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness and Italian Life: A Modern Fable of Loyalty and Betrayal.

    Read more from Tim Parks

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    Reviews for A Season with Verona

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      I'm not a football fan, and this book didn't make me one. But it's fascinating, tells you a lot about day to day life in Italy, and gives you a massive vocabulary of italian swearwords. Dio boia!
    • 4/5
      Really enjoyed this, football mixed with travel what could be better ! Very enjoyable
    • 4/5
      I only knew Tim Parks from his occasional guardian columns. He's a good and entertaining writer, and not necessarily who you'd expect to find supporting a club with a reputation for having quite a right-wing fan base. However, that's football.This is part an account of a football season following Verona to every away game; this also makes it part travelogue (although football fans go to different places than your average tourist) and part an essay on Italian politics and society, particularly the regionalism etc.I found it fascinating (and in hindsight, given the outcome of the match-fixing trials two years ago, even the more paranoid musings of the smaller clubs are possibly well borne out).
    • 5/5
      Your typical story of an expat englishman who settles in a small Italian town, starts following the local team, becomes obsessed and has to write a book about it. Luckily Parks can write very well and you are soon drawn into the world of fanatical football supporters. Its not a big team either so there is plenty of pain as you watch the side struggle to avoid the drop. You keep thinking "there must be a better way" but in the end you end up empathizing with the supporters - who are the bad boys of Italian football. Think Millwall.