You can’t talk about Italy without talking about football. The Italians consider themselves the inventors of the sport, which they call 'calcio' (kicking), like the pitched battles with a ball born in medieval Florence, and have designed many of its political, economic and social characteristics around the sport.

Calcio contains large doses of violence, passion, fraud, money and absurdity. But it is also a complex mechanism of symbols, a social code and, ultimately, a language with which a historic and sceptical country expresses its ancient wisdom.