A Season with Verona: Travels around Italy in search of illusion, national character and goals - Hardcover

Parks, Tim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0436275953 ISBN 13: 9780436275951

Publisher: Secker & Warburg, 2002

Synopsis

Tim Parks goes on the road to follow the fortunes of Hellas Verona football club, to pay a different kind of visit to some of the world's most beautiful cities, and to get a fresh take on the conundrum that is national character. From Udine to Catania, from the San Siro to the Olimpico, travelling with the fans and the players, this is a highly personal account of one man's relationship with a country, its people and its national sport. The club are struggling, as always, to keep their heads above water in Serie A. The fans, as always, are accused of vulgarity, racism and violence. It's an election year and politics encroaches. The police are ambiguous, the journeys exhausting, the referees unforgivable, the anecdotes hilarious. Behind it all is the growing intuition that in a world stripped of idealism and bereft of religion, football offers a new and fiercely ironic way of forming community and engaging with the sacred.

About this title

Review:

For the last few months Anglo-Italian novelist Tim Parks has been writing of his devotion to Italian football club Hellas Verona in The Guardian. In A Season with Verona we get a chance to read the full and absorbing narrative that lay behind those short snippets.

In some ways the book is a standard travelogue. In following his lowly Series A team in their seasonal slog around Italy, Parks gets to visit all the famous sights and cities. What makes this journey so different and so interesting is that Parks is accompanied by vividly ordinary, honestly working-class, determinedly urban Italians and gets to share their Nick Hornbyish highs and lows. This in turn provides a credible, fresh and revealing insight into the Italian character. These fans do all the normal soccer-supporter things like fight, drink, despair, exult, rant and put each other in comas; but they also do more surprising things, like sing songs in praise of the murderous Liverpool fans of Heysel and give voice to racist feelings about their southern compatriots.

This may not sound like most people's image of southern loveliness. Indeed it isn't. But it is a much needed antidote to all that saccharine-sweet Under The Tuscan Sun stuff; and it also makes this book a splendid bedside companion to the Italian campaign in the next, or indeed any, World Cup. --Sean Thomas

Review:

‘Frankly, the best British author working today.’ -- Joseph Brodsky

About this edition

• Publisher: Secker & Warburg
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0436275953
• ISBN 13: 9780436275951
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 447