Posts Tagged ‘football’

(Image: Azzurri Team, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from laertes_za’s photostream)

The World Cup 2010 is in full swing! For those fans of the Azzuri who are in Rome and Florence and want to catch some of the football action, we’ve compiled this list of places where you can watch the matches with other Italia fans!

Rome

Villa Borghese – One of only 7 places where FIFA (World Cup Sponsor) is hosting their FanFest. With the FanFest, FIFA is trying to bring some of the atmosphere of the World Cup venues into some of the world’s largest and most football obsessed cities. Admission to the FanFest area is free and games are broadcast throughout the day on large, outdoor screens.

Florence

Florence has placed large outdoor screen throughout the city, including ones in Piazzale Michelangelo, Via Villamagna and Piazza Santo Spirito. Around Tuscany has a great Google Map with all the locations on their website.

Where ever you watch, make sure to enjoy the game and celebrate responsibly! Forza Azzuri!

While football (soccer, to Americans) is popular in many European countries, Italians rank up with Brits and Brazilians with their passion for the sport. With good reason, too; Italy has won four World Cup titles (second only to Brazil, with five), including the most recent and 27 various European titles. If you’re thinking of catching a match on your vacation to, here’s a quick guide to Italian football.

(Image: Italy v Ukraine, Koln 30 June – 7, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike (2.0) image from charlesfred’s photostream)

The first thing to know when you’re catching up on Italian Football is the difference between the National Team and the Club or League Teams. The Italian National Team is made up of Italian players from all different professional teams and competes in the World Cup and in the major European tournaments. Sort of like Team USA Basketball. When they’re not training for National Team matches, the players are employed by private teams throughout Italy (and other worldwide football teams). These League teams are broken up into different divisions (similar to American College Football where you have Division I, Division II, etc). The top tier of teams is called Serie A and is made up of 20 teams. I’ll let Wikipedia explain how the Serie A season works:

During the course of a season, from August to May, each club played each of the other teams twice; once at home and once away, totaling 38 games for each team by the end of the season. Therefore, in Italian football a true round-robin format is used. In the first half of the season, called the andata, each team played exactly one time against each league opponent, for a total of 19 games. In the second half of the season, called the ritorno, the teams played in exactly the same order that they did in the first half of the season, the only difference being that home and away situations are switched.

Just like catching a game of hockey in Canada or a baseball game in the US, if you’re a sports fan of any kind you want to catch an Italian football game while you’re over on your tour of Italy. Today, we had the pleasure of being the official transport for Italian football team Internazionale as they played the last game in a 3 game series against Roma. While the home team (Roma) lost, we cheer on both teams for a match well played.