Pallone, Calcio i ciasteczka Liedholma
Pallone, Calcio and Liedholm’s Cakes

Summary/Abstract: An expansive – in reference to the author’s personal recollections – study on the transformations of Italian football. The text shows the enormous change of two forms: post-war Italian football (1945-1880) and an edition whose beginnings go back to the turn of the 1970s. The first form (pallone) was a sport strongly enrooted in plebeian festivities and folk competition, watched “live” on the stadiums. The second (calcio) is already a fully professional sport subjected to the laws of business and commercialised and, most importantly, followed to a great extent through the intermediary of television. Did the “modernisation” of football have to take place at the cost of annihilating Pallone culture and the desacralisation of Sunday, robbed of the afternoon ritual in order to fill the whole weekend and Monday with matches so that as many spectators as possible could watch them on pay television channels?

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