‘I’m not a person who puts up with rudeness’: unpicking fantasy and reality with an Italian football ultra
I’ve met many hardcore, violent fans, but the hostage-negotiating, cocaine-smuggling, Marxist-Leninist Alessandro Casolari still stood out I had heard the name Alessandro Casolari on and
I’ve met many hardcore, violent fans, but the hostage-negotiating, cocaine-smuggling, Marxist-Leninist Alessandro Casolari still stood out I had heard the name Alessandro Casolari on and off for years. From 2016 onwards, when I was researching my book on Italy’s ultras – a cross between English football hooligans and Hells Angels – the nickname “Caso” kept coming up.
In the late 80s and early 90s, he had led the ultras in Ferrara, whose football club is known as Spal. A red-brick city in northern Italy between Bologna and Venice, Ferrara has always felt sidelined, languishing in a marshy land of fog and floods.
I used to go there quite often, drawn by its festivals and famous writers and film directors. A few years ago, when I started writing another book, about the Po River, I hung out there again, but I never bumped into Caso.
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