Thursday, November 15, 2007

Italy -Scot European Championship Soccer Qualifier on Saturday - High Stakes !!!!!!!!

The ANNOTICO Report

 

The standings in Group B as of  today ...France 25, Scotland 24 points, Italy 23,,with only the top 2 going forward in the Qualifiers !!!!!        [The Group also includes Ukraine (16) , Lithuania (10), Georgia (10), Faroe (0)]

 

Group B is called "The Group of Death" with BOTH World Cup Finalists (Italy and France).The  Scots were initially very pessimistic, and could not have imagined that they would beat France, BOTH Home and Away, and be in second place in  the group at this point 

 

The result of the Italy -Scot Soccer Match on Saturday will decide whether France and Italy OR France and Scotland advance. !!!!.

So the stakes are immense!!!  

 

Scotland striker James McFadden knows the hopes of the nation are resting on his shoulders but insists he would have it no other way.The Everton frontman admits this weekend's clash with Italy will be the biggest game of his career.

 "We've read about it in the newspapers and, when you meet people, it's all they talk about. Even back in England, it's all they speak about.  

Making the match particularly interesting is the Scots, who are seldom among the qualifiers, usually root for the Italians, partially because there are 50,000 Scots who are of Italian ancestry, and that the Italians have had a presence in Scotland going back to the Romans.

 

Also the Italian cafes, provided Scot couples a romantic place to get acquainted as an alternative to the noisy macho pubs. Italians quite apart from revolutionising the Scots  eating habits they have also inordinately significant.impacted the Scots artistic life.

 

The different phases of recent Italian immigration are described, but the Italian community prefers not to recall the dark days of WWII, when   Churchill's "collar the lot" directive in June 1940, referred to internment on the Isle of Man of Britons of Italian ancestry, mobs smashed Italian businesses, and anti-Italian riots took place all over Britain.

 

The darkest day was as while many of their fellow Italians, some with family serving in the British Army, died when the Arandora Star, a converted liner taking "enemy aliens" - Italians internees (including, indiscriminately, both fascists and anti-fascists) - to Canada, was torpedoed by a U-boat 125 miles west of Ireland. Of the estimated 1,564 men on board, as many as 734 were Italian, of whom 446  died.

All in the Game for Scots with their Roots in Italy

Scotsman - United Kingdom
By Jim Gilchrist

Wednesday November 14, 2007

IN THE bustling culinary grotto of Sarti in Glasgow's Bath Street, the saltire and Il Tricolore hang side-by-side in the window, while wide-screen TVs and a special menu are primed for Saturday evening's European Championship qualifier between Scotland and Italy at Hampden. Along with the two other Glasgow restaurants run under the Fratelli Sarti banner by Piero and Sandro Sarti, it is booked out for the occasion - largely by Scots, the brothers report with some glee.

Says Piero. "Even during last year's World Cup - when Scotland had nothing to do with it - we were really busy and, again, the majority of customers, especially for the final, were Scots, supporting Italy."

Piero , 51, is the one who's fitba' daft, recalling with unabashed nostalgia the time his father took him to watch Celtic play AC Milan in 1969 - "AC Milan won one-nil; Celtic attacked for 90 minutes, then Milan broke away and scored the goal." Sandro, 56, smiles indulgently, but lets on that he used to astound his classmates in the Sixties by sporting an Inter Milan shirt.

Ask the two brothers who they'll be rooting for on Saturday, and you get to the nub of second-generation identity. "Italy," smiles Piero. "After all," explains Sandro, "imagine yourself brought up in a family of Italian parents and grandparents. The minute we stepped off the street, we were in Italy. My first language was Italian, even though I was born here."

They put me in mind of past conversations with Joe Pieri, the now elderly scion of a well-known Glasgow cafi-owning clan, who has written several books about the Italian experience in Scotland. Pieri once told me that, even in his eighties, he still did a double take if someone asked him if he was going "home" to Italy for his holidays, yet when he arrived at his hometown of Barga, Tuscany, he'd be greeted by cries of "H arrivato il vechio Scozzese" - "The old Scotsman has arrived."

The Sartis' mother came from just outside Lucca, half an hour away from Barga (where English is inevitably spoken with a Glasgow accent), while their father hailed from La Spezia on the Ligurian coast. Today, they are thriving entrepreneurs in the traditional Scots-Italian occupation of catering and theirs can be seen as the classic experience of the successful Italian immigrant to this country. Yet life was much less assured for their maternal grandfather, Pietro Fazzi, when he arrived in Scotland at the beginning of the 20th century.

He had initially taken the emigrant's passage to the United States, but was turned back at Ellis Island as he had contracted TB. He ended up in Motherwell, running a fish and chip shop and billiard hall for another Italian. "He was originally going to Sacramento to grow pinto beans," smiles Sandro, "so we might never have been here."

Fazzi bought out the Motherwell establishment, and started selling Italian produce such as tomato puree and pasta to immigrant families in his area, but finding the coal and steel town a bit rough for his liking, he moved to Glasgow.

Like other Scots-Italians of his generation, Fazzi was rounded up under Churchill's "collar the lot" directive in June 1940, when Mussolini declared war, and interred with his brothers on the Isle of Man. It was a dark period in the history of the British-Italian communities, described by both Pieri, whose family business, the Savoy Cafi, was smashed up by a Glasgow mob, and Mary Contini of the famous Valvona & Crolla delicatessen, whose book Dear Olivia, evokes the anti-Italian riots in Edinburgh which were possibly the worst in Britain.

The Fazzis, however, were lucky. Many of their fellow Italians, some with family serving in the British Army, died when the Arandora Star, a converted liner taking "enemy aliens" - Italians and German internees (including, indiscriminately, both fascists and anti-fascists) - to Canada, was torpedoed by a U-boat 125 miles west of Ireland. Of the estimated 1,564 men on board, as many as 734 were Italian, of whom 446 are thought to have died.

While some older folk still find it hard to talk about that traumatic episode, the community has put it well behind them, and the contribution of Scotland's longest-settled "ethnic" group has been inordinately significant. Quite apart from revolutionising our eating habits through their traditional roles as fryers of fish, vendors of ice cream and restaurateurs, they have impacted vigorously on our artistic life, through the likes of arts activist Richard Demarco, the late sculptor Sir Eduardo Paolozzi (whose father went down with the Arandora Star), painter Alberto Morrocco, actors such as Tom Conti and Daniela Nardini, and musicians like the young, prizewinning violinist Nicola Benedetti and the Paisley-born singer-song-writer Paolo Nutini.

"I think the Italian community has made a huge contribution to the way of life in Scotland, and the big one, of course, is the cafi," says Mike Maran, the Edinburgh-born, Cambridge-based writer-actor who has been bringing his own brand of minimalist music theatre to the Fringe for three decades, including shows relating to his Italian antecedents such as Caledonia n' Italia, Captain Corelli's Mandolin and, this year, a musical about Garibaldi.

"In the1950s, there was nowhere you could take your girl. You couldn't take her into a pub, but, especially when rock 'n' roll started, you would go into an Italian cafi, rent a table for the price of a coffee and stay there all night listening to the jukebox."

But the cafi opened up more than the prospect of a romantic soiree: it provided grey Presbyterian Scotland with what Maran calls "a window on to the Mediterranean. From Gretna to Stornoway you opened the door and there was a noisy coffee machine, people talking in Italian, maybe a Sacred Heart on the wall ... really quite exotic."

One well-known Edinburgh-Italian entrepreneur told Maran that the Scottish Italians were the best Italians in the world. "He said the Italians in Italy were all crooks, the Italians in America were all gangsters, but the Italians in Scotland were beautiful people and for this he thanked Scotland, which had given the Italians a just, democratic civil society where it was possible to get on without cheating.

"Clearly this is seen through rose-tinted spectacles - but however false the myths might be, when two communities think highly of each other, then relationships are easy."

A 50,000- strong 'family' here since Roman times

STATISTICS from the Italian Consulate General in Edinburgh list 5,779 families in Scotland registered as Italian citizens, of whom just under 50 per cent were born in Italy - reflecting a more recent wave of doctors, other professionals and students arriving here.

Figures covering Scotland and Northern Ireland record 10,428 second- or third-generation Italians. Further, independent, research suggests a total of between 40,000 and 50,000 individuals of Italian origin resident in Scotland.

Discounting the Roman occupation, there have been sporadic Italian incursions into Britain since medieval times, including Venetian and Genovese traders.

Scholars arrived too, such as the Piedmontese humanist Giovanni Ferreri, who taught at Kinloss Abbey in Moray in the mid-16th century. Musicians ranged from the hapless David Rizzio - murdered secretary of Mary, Queen of Scots - to the Italian baroque musicians resident in 18th-century Edinburgh.

However, so far as significant immigration is concerned, in her book "The Italian Factor", Dr Terri Colpi (herself a member of a long-established Glasgow Italian business family) identifies four main groups who arrived during the 19th century.

The first were skilled craftsmen, such as scientific instrument makers or decorative specialists such as carvers, gilders and framers. By the 1830s, says Colpi, they were working in all the urban centres. Then, around the 1820s, there came a wave of refugees fleeing the political turbulence of their homeland. Later, in the 1880s, there was an influx of skilled and semi-skilled travelling craftsmen.

The origins of today's Italian community in Scotland and elsewhere in the UK, however, can be found in the masses of poor and unskilled immigrants who arrived during the second half of the 19th century.

http://news.scotsman.com/scotland.cfm?id=1801442007

 

The ANNOTICO Reports Can be Viewed (and are Archived) on:

Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com [Formerly Italy at St Louis] (7 years)

Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com (3 years)

Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net