Turin in 1919 was a city of ghosts. The bombs had fallen in the summers of 1917 and 1918, reducing entire neighbourhoods to rubble and leaving behind a population that moved through the streets with the careful, haunted gait of people who had learned that buildings can fall without warning and therefore nothing is permanent except the people you love and the people you lose. Giuseppe Moretti walked through these streets every morning on his way to the river, a man of thirty-four who had come back from the Piave river with one good leg, a cough that the doctors called military bronchitis and which everyone knew was the mustard gas, and a determination to build something from the rubble that would outlast the rubble itself.

Giuseppe had been a bricklayer before the war, and when the war took his leg and his youth and half his lungs, he returned to the trade because it was the only thing he knew that involved building things that stood up. But the buildings he had built before the war were gone, and the buildings that remained were cracked and leaking and held together by temporary fixes and hope. So Giuseppe began building something else. He began building a football team.

It started with the boys. The boys the war had left behind, which was to say the boys who had been too young to fight and too old to be spared the consequences. They ranged from fifteen to eighteen, scrawny and fierce and carrying around with them the particular anger of a generation that had been robbed of its childhood by men in offices who signed papers in Rome. Giuseppe found them in the streets and the squares and the ruins where they played football with balls made from rags and rope, and he told them to meet him on a patch of ground near the Dora River that used to be a garden and was now a field of weeds and broken glass.

They came, tentatively at first, six boys and then ten and then twenty, boys from the working-class neighbourhoods of Lingotto and San Salvario and Coppa, boys whose fathers had died in the trenches and whose mothers worked in the Fiat factories until their hands were raw and whose brothers had been taken by the war and might come back with holes in them that would never heal. Giuseppe taught them to pass and to run and to shoot, and he taught them, without saying it, that football was a place where they could be more than what the war had made them, more than orphans and refugees and survivors, more than the word casualties that the newspapers used when they wrote about Italy's损失.

The team was called something simple, something that would become famous and something that would be claimed by fascist propagandists who did not understand what it meant. They called themselves the people, because that is what they were and that is what the game was. Football, Giuseppe would say in the bars after training, when the boys were drinking water and arguing about whether they were better than the teams from Milan, football belongs to the people. It was not invented by kings or generals or men who signed papers. It was invented by boys in fields who wanted to kick a round object as far and as fast as they could.

The team was terrible. They lost their first thirty matches, some by narrow margins and most by scores that were humiliating. But they played with something that could not be taught or purchased or mandated. They played with the fury of boys who had lost everything and were playing for the chance, for ninety minutes at a time, to feel like they had something. Giuseppe coached them with the patience of a man who had spent his life building walls and knew that walls are built one brick at a time and that the mortar takes time to dry and that rushing the process guarantees collapse.

By 1921, the team was good enough to play in official competitions. They entered a regional league and began to win, not many matches but enough, and the people who came to watch were not football fans in the traditional sense. They were workers from the Fiat factories and shopkeepers and laundry women and unemployed veterans and boys who had never had anything and found, on Saturday afternoons, that they could sit in a field and watch their team play and feel for two hours that the world was not entirely broken.

Giuseppe became something he never expected to become, a figure of authority and affection in a neighbourhood that had lost all faith in authority. He was not a politician and had no interest in politics, or so he told anyone who asked. He was a bricklayer with a wooden leg and a cough who believed that football was the most important thing in the world and that anyone who disagreed simply did not understand what football was for.

The city of Turin embraced the team. They became a religion for a grieving city, a place where people went on Sunday afternoons to feel something other than grief. They won promotions and moved into larger stadiums and the crowds grew and the newspapers wrote about them and Giuseppe, who had never wanted anything beyond teaching boys to pass a ball, found himself at the centre of something he could no longer control.

The fascists came in 1922, men in black shirts who understood immediately what Giuseppe had built and wanted to claim it for themselves. They did not ask permission. They arrived at training with Mussolini's photographs tucked into their jackets and speeches about national strength and the glory of struggle and the necessity of order. They spoke to Giuseppe in the tone that men in power always use with men who do not yet understand that they have already lost.

Giuseppe refused them. He refused them publicly, at a match when a fascist official stood up in the stands and shouted about the team's duty to the nation and Giuseppe stopped the match, walked to the edge of the pitch, and told the official that his team played for the people of Turin and the people of Turin alone and that if he interrupted them again he would be thrown out of the stadium, which the official did not do, partly because Giuseppe's players, now young men with shoulders broad from years of carrying footballs and anger, lined up along the touchline and looked at the official in a way that suggested violence was an option he should consider carefully.

But the pressure continued. The fascists controlled the local football federation, which meant they controlled which teams played whom and when and under what conditions. They applied it slowly, insidiously, the way water finds the weakest point in a wall and then destroys it from the inside. Giuseppe resisted for two years, and then the federation banned his team from a crucial match on the grounds of security, which was code for politics, and Giuseppe understood, with the clarity of a man who has spent his life building things and knows exactly how fragile buildings are, that he was losing.

He tried to fight it. He wrote letters to Rome and spoke to journalists and organized public meetings in the squares where the war memorials stood, monuments to the men who had died in the trenches and whose deaths had been turned into propaganda by men who had never held a rifle. But the fascists were organized and ruthless and patient, and Giuseppe was a bricklayer with a wooden leg and a cough and a team of boys who loved him and a city that was tired of fighting.

The end came in the autumn of 1924, when the federation required all teams to display fascist symbols on their shirts and swear allegiance to the regime. Giuseppe stood in the dressing room before a match and looked at his players, young men who had found something in football that they had not found anywhere else, and he saw their faces crumble one by one as they understood what was being asked.

He took the shirts off the hooks and walked out of the dressing room and into the stadium and onto the pitch and he stood in the centre circle and looked at the stands, which were full of people who had come to watch a game and had found themselves in the middle of something larger and more terrible than football.

He did not say anything. He simply turned his back on the crowd and walked off the pitch and did not look back. His players followed him, one by one, until the stadium was empty except for the fascist officials and the police and the people, the real people, who sat in the stands and watched their team walk away and understood, without anyone explaining it to them, that this was what losing looked like.

Giuseppe went back to bricklaying. He built walls in the neighbourhoods he had always built walls in, walls that stood up and stayed up and provided shelter and security, the way walls are supposed to do. He coached the boys on Sundays, unofficially, on the same patch of ground near the Dora River where it had all begun, and they played football the way football is meant to be played, without symbols or oaths or the weight of politics pressing down on their shoulders.

He died in 1943, during the bombing, in a street that collapsed while he was walking home from buying bread. The team he had built survived him, changed hands multiple times, became famous and then infamous and then famous again, carrying within it, beneath the politics and the propaganda and the corruption, the same thing Giuseppe had built it with in 1919: the fierce, unteachable belief that a game can be more than a game, that it can belong to the people, and that the people, when they play together, are something that no wall and no bomb and no regime can entirely destroy.

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# OTMES-v2 Objective Codes

**Code**: OTMES-v2-K03C012-012-01E-083DA **Tragedy Index (TI)**: 0.82 **Tragedy Rank**: T5 **E_total**: 13.16 **Dominant Mode**: M9 **Irreversibility**: 0.6 **Redemption**: 0.3

**M Vector**: [5.0, 2.0, 3.0, 3.0, 5.0, 3.0, 1.0, 0.0, 3.0, 9.0] **N Vector**: [0.65, 0.35] **K Vector**: [0.3, 0.7] **Direction Angle**: 28.0 degrees