“Do the English really put pineapple on pizza?” asks the Italian daily La Repubblica in a piece by its London correspondent. “Rarely,” it concludes, “but the real problem is adding cream to spaghetti carbonara.”
Sunday’s Euro final is not just a clash of sport, but of cultures.
“The thing about us Italians is that we are a country of beauty,” says the newspaper Corriere della Sera. “We don’t just score goals, we score beautiful goals.” It adds: “There’s no such thing as a badly-dressed Italian, just some Italians who aren’t interested in dressing well.”
But for all that divides these markedly different countries – few Italians rave about British cuisine, in case you were wondering – there are many similarities.
Football runs through the veins of both nations. While England have been waiting for international football glory since 1966, Italy last won a European title in 1968 and are also impatient for triumph (though two World Cup wins since, in 1982 and 2006, have eased the pain).
And both teams have been revolutionised by their managers, with Gareth Southgate and Roberto Mancini bringing in younger players and laying ghosts of the past to rest – England with its failure to reach an international final for decades and Italy with its non-qualification for the 2018 World Cup, labelled “an apocalypse” by the country’s leading sports newspaper.
“Mancini is the central man of this Italian miracle,” says Alvaro Moretti, the deputy editor of the daily Il Messaggero and its former sports editor.
When he took over in 2018, he believed from the start that he would arrive at this point. He’s very charismatic, he’s very elegant. And he decided that his approach would be enjoyment, to bring happiness to the Italian team – and to the Italian people.”
That is, perhaps, the overriding feeling in Italy as it watches gli Azzurri (the Blues) go into this final – joy. The first country in the West to be crushed by the Coronavirus pandemic, whose inundated intensive care units forewarned others of what was to come, has seen infection levels drop sharply so as to be able to lift most restrictions and for Italians to watch their team’s triumphant performances in bars.
“I’m even happier about the rebirth of Italy than about the final itself,” says Gianluca Santangeli, sitting in his newspaper kiosk in the Trastevere district of Rome.