Vespa Tunes XXV: Un Estate Italiana, Gianna Nannini & Edoardo Bennato, 1989

A visit this week to the super Burri Collection in the former tobacco drying sheds outside his home town of Città di Castello reminded me of the first World Cup I ever followed, Italia 90. Outside major tournaments I have less than zero interest in football, but I am an absolute sucker for a communal event.

One of Alberto Burri’s original poster designs for Italia 90, Fondazione Burri, Città di Castello

I was twelve, nearly thirteen, and that summer London was hit by the sort of heatwave that used to be an exciting break from the norm rather than alarming. There was something euphoric about the heatwaves of my youth. Rules seemed to melt a little in the heat too: our parents’ very careful attention to our teeth (for which I’m extremely grateful!) was temporarily waived, and impromptu unscheduled ice creams and glistening glass bottles of Coca Cola abounded. Weekday suppers on occasion became the greatest of treats: an array of delights from Olga, the long gone and very old school Italian delicatessen on Amwell Street. Olives and salami, gorgonzola and artichoke hearts (I was a sophisticated twelve year old, and this was, after all, Islington on the cusp of the nineties). Heavenly.

Windows and doors onto our small city garden were thrown open, and house and garden plants melded in a cacophony of greenery and flowers. Inside and outside merged, bedtimes became more malleable, and my siblings and I were allowed to stay out later than normal. Next to our house was the kind of odd open space that central London used to be full of, the vestiges of Second World War bomb sites; a city still riddled with cavities forty years on. My brother had recently been given a skateboard for his birthday and we took turns hurtling fearlessly around the desiccated dog turds that were also then a perpetual feature of London in the summer, occasionally skinning our knees on the unforgiving tarmac.

I remember my father calling us in to watch the opening show of the 1990 World Cup one exotically humid evening. This sticks in my mind not only for the occasion, but because we had only recently acquired a television. Much of my childhood was spent watching an eclectic selection of movies at cinemas across London from the Holloway Road Odeon to the National Film Theatre: Ghostbusters and Ladri di Biciclette; we rode horses and went ice-skating and spent our weekends in parks, museums, and restaurants across London; our dad took me and my siblings to and play snooker on full-size tables at a gloriously gloomy club in King’s Cross which we adored and which was frequented mostly by Chinese waiters between shifts; I devoured novels of all stripes with gusto. Our childhood was anything but puritanical, but until the summer I was twelve my parents had resisted having a television in the house. It was a great novelty.

Thus it was that as the World Cup got going in July of 1990 and Rome put on a spectacular show, the Three Tenors singing Nessun Dorma in the Baths of Caracalla, the combined excitement of the heatwave and the television marked the beginning of a memorable summer. We stayed up to watch every England game, late matches scheduled to mitigate the unforgiving heat of un estate italiana which our parents, with a casual anarchy I found thrilling beyond measure, allowed to lay waste to our usually rigid Anglo bedtimes. England made it to the semi-final, against West Germany (that’s how long ago it was). Gazza cried, and it went to penalties which I had secretly willed, yearning for a thrilling end to the game and to prolong the evening even further.

We may have been a thousand miles away, sotto un cielo londinese, but this song will forever resonate for me. It conjures up positively visceral recollections of bright warm evenings, the excitement of possibility and (relative) anarchy, and a long summer stretching ahead free from the tiresome rigidity of my very straight girls’ school with its scratchy uniform and the battery of rules—written and tacit—which I never quite got the hang of.

Forse non sarà una canzone
A cambiare le regole del gioco
Ma voglio viverla così quest'avventura
Senza frontiere e con il cuore in gola

Perhaps it won’t be a song

Which changes the rules of the game

But I want to experience this moment of excitement like this

Without borders and with my heart in my mouth

E il mondo in una giostra di colori
E il vento accarezza le bandiere
Arriva un brivido e ti trascina via
E scioglie in un abbraccio la follia

The world in a carousel of colours

The wind caressing flags

The shiver of excitement comes and it carries you away

And madness dissolves in an embrace

Notti magiche
Inseguendo un goal
Sotto il cielo
Di un'estate italiana
E negli occhi tuoi
Voglia di vincere
Un'estate
Un'avventura in più

Magical nights

Chasing a goal

Under the sky

Of an Italian summer

And in your eyes

The desire to win

A summer

An extra bit of excitement¹

Quel sogno che comincia da bambino
E che ti porta sempre più lontano
Non è una favola e dagli spogliatoi
Escono i ragazzi e siamo noi

That dream which begins in childhood

And which takes you ever further

It’s not a dream and from the changing rooms

The boys come out and we are they

Notti magiche
Inseguendo un goal
Sotto il cielo
Di un'estate italiana
E negli occhi tuoi
Voglia di vincere
Un'estate
Un'avventura in più

Notti magiche
Inseguendo un goal (inseguendo un goal)
Sotto il cielo
Di un'estate italiana
E negli occhi tuoi
Voglia di vincere
Un'estate
Un'avventura in più

Un'avventura
Un'avventura in più
Un'avventura
Goal!

1. As I have mentioned elsewhere, avventura also means a love affair