A different sort of right-winger

**In one of the more intimate passages of his autobiography, Paolo Di Canio ponders which person, living or dead, he would choose to meet with one-on-one given the opportunity. **

It’s a typically bland rhetorical discussion for a footballer’s memoir to contain, and anyone previously familiar with the literature of Beckham, Rooney et al would be anticipating a response such as ‘Maradona’, or perhaps ‘Pele’ for the more historically adventurous. Di Canio, however, is that rare anomaly of a modern sportsman to whom blandness and neutrality are alien concepts; ‘my choice would have been Mussolini’.

Having watched his new Sunderland side slump to defeat at Stamford Bridge on Saturday, Di Canio now has little time for abstract political debate with dead dictators. His meetings today are somewhat more imminent and real; he has six games to save a side that look destined for the cold isolation of lower league football from which he himself just recently escaped.

That alone is daunting enough, but Di Canio must also overcome a city divided by his appointment and his life. Local politicians have scorned him, the vice-chairman of the club has quit over him, supporters groups have organised against him and even the Bishop of Durham has called his appointment ‘deeply troubling’; if Di Canio was hoping for divine intervention this probably wasn’t what he had in mind. Add to this a rumoured contract clause that essentially nullifies the document in the event of relegation, then it is reasonable to believe that in the decades long Di Canio story of triumph through adversity, he is staring for the first time at abject failure.

{{ quote When the National Union of Miners withdrew their banner from the Stadium of Light this week, they did so in solidarity with those who fought and died in the fight against fascism }}

For his part, the self-confessed ‘fascist, not a racist’ seems both bemused and annoyed by the surrounding circus over ‘the values I have received from my parents’. He’s emphasised that he’s a football man who cares little about politics, but the problem, to paraphrase Trotsky, is that in Sunderland at least Politics still cares about him. When the National Union of Miners withdrew their banner from the Stadium of Light this week, they did so in solidarity with those who fought and died in the fight against fascism.

Frank Graham, a native of Sunderland, was one such example. In 1936, at the age of just 22, Graham recruited a small band of local men from the North East and took them to Madrid, where they help the International Brigade fight General Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War. The Fascists, for who’s defeat they were willing to risk their lives, were staunchly backed not only by their Nazi allies in Germany, but with the bombs, tanks and troops of the man who’s Latinate symbol permanently adorns Di Canios right bicep; Benito Mussolini.

By the time Frank returned to Sunderland in 1938, just a year before the next great clash against Fascism was to begin, he had been shot, paralysed and spent three months in hospital. The brutality of that experience never left him in later life, but neither did his unwavering belief in the Righteousness of the struggle; ‘I often think of the people I was close to, I don’t think one of them is alive today’.

Whilst Frank dedicated his youth to the defeat of Fascism, Di Canio spent it alongside some of the offshoots it had created, and fraternised with those who had helped keep its mythology and ideas alive after its humiliation in WW2. They were both, however, men who had found unquestionable loyalty for a cause that meant everything. For Di Canio, growing up in Rome’s Quarticciolo district, this cause was Lazio Football Club. From his early teens Lazio became part of who he was and it would never leave him. He was a youth player with the club, but more formatively he was embedded in the violent heart of its supporters; the notorious Ultras factions like ‘Eagles Supporters’ and later, after its formation in the late 80’s, ‘Irriducibili’.

Di Canio has shared few memories from his time with the groups, but those he have given an uncomfortable glimpse into the life of what was supposed to be a supremely talented teenager with the world at his feet. He once described seeing the Bergamo Chief of Police stabbed just yards away from him, and recalled how he ‘can still see him screaming in pain, holding a bloody hand above his head while running through the crowd’. Nor was he merely a passive observer, on another occasion Di Canio describes beating up a fan of rival club Padova in order to take his scarf as a trophy. After repeatedly kicking him the head, ‘he cried out in pain and rolled over’ until ‘we had what we wanted, sprinted off, laughing, till we were reunited with the rest of the Irriducibili.’

The Ultras were the young Di Canio’s closest friends, his neighbours and his mentors. Alongisde their support for Lazio, they frequently exerted a more political nostalgia for the Mussolini era and made themselves synonymous with the symbolism of Fascism. For the Ultras, Fascism was about belonging and solidarity; it was a badge of honour and it gave the impressionable a sense of identity. It was in these circles he befriended men like Paolo Signorelli, who had emerged from the embers of Mussolini’s fascist party to be linked to the atrocities of armed Paramilitary groups like NAR, which bombed the Bologna Train Station in 1980.

But Di Canio is no Signorelli. Instead, he is living proof of George Orwell’s famous remark that Fascism means so many different things to so many different people that the word ‘is almost entirely meaningless.’ The now infamous charge sheet of Di Canio’s quotes, regurgitated in the midst of this week’s chaos, is almost completely contrived and taken out of context. When he has actually elaborated on his political views in past discussions it has been mostly benign. He has spoken of Italy’s need to ‘do more to integrate immigrants’ and spoke in admiration of Britain’s integrated tapestry of different races and religions.

Yes, he called Mussolini misunderstood, but much less quoted is the latter part of the passage, where he described the Dictator as ‘vile’ and someone who ‘lost his sense of right and wrong’. Many prominent politicians with real Fascist tendencies do exist in Italy today, including the granddaughter of Il Duce himself, yet Di Canio shuns them and has even made clear in an interview with The Independent last year that he wouldn’t vote for them. When Di Canio has made political pronouncements, such as in his Italian newspaper column, they have almost exclusively come in the form of rants denouncing racism in his sport.

So the idea that a different Paolo Di Canio, in a different era, might have lined up on behalf of Fascism against men like Frank Graham is highly unlikely. He has none of the ideological zeal required for such a task. Like Frank, however, he still remains inextricably tied to the actions of his youth, and has made little attempt to distance himself from them. Kierkegaard said that ‘Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards’. Di Canio was a child of Lazio, who as an adult would score the winner in the Rome derby, before later taking a 75% pay cut to return to the club. They were with him through his darkest times, like his amputated leg surgery at the age of just 17 and his constant battles with anxiety that required therapy. His story was an unlikely one, and only Lazio made it possible.

Thus their flaws have always been his flaws, and he feels to repudiate the sins of his past would also be a repudiation of the very people he grew up alongside, who gave him everything. When he raised his arm outstretched as a salute in 2005, it wasn’t to Hitler, nor to Mussolini; but to his comrades and friends in the crowds. As his biographer, Gabrielle Marcotti, has said, it may look like a political act but ‘in the Lazio world, that’s not what it means’, and that was the only world Di Canio ever cared about.

After the past fortnight’s litany of staged press conferences, contrived and contradictory statements (‘I do not support the ideology of Fascism’) and seemingly forced denials about his past, it seems difficult to decipher who Di Canio really is anymore. One such moment of clarity can be seen last year however; when as Swindon manager he clinched the League 2 title with a 5-0 win at Port Vale’s country ground. Both Di Canio’s mother & father had died that year yet he had barely taken a day off for either funeral, determined not to be absent from his managerial duties.

When victory was secured, Di Canio walked over to the Swindon fans, bearing a t-shirt showing pictures of his parents and gestured towards the sky, as tears rolled down his cheeks. In this rare moment we can see Di Canio for all that he is; a product of his upbringing, a football fan and someone for whom there was no setback too great that it couldn’t be overcome by victory.

Before the 1938 World Cup final, whilst Civil War still raged in Spain and Frank Graham still lay in hospital, Mussolini sent a telegram to the Italian team with a clear message: ‘Win or die!’ If their mythical one on one encounter is still yet to occur, we know at least Di Canio would agree with him on that.