The classic trio of Italian cities for tourism are of course Roma, Firenze and Venezia. Each and everyone of them is absolutely amazing, and certainly if you have never been, even to one of them, I would implore ticking that box. Curiously, football in cities of great beauty rarely converts too much in the way of silverware. Yes all three of these wonderful Italian cities are unusually all in Serie A this term, but if you counted up how many trophies they’ve collectively won, it wouldn’t come to a pantheon of success. The four “classic” sides representing the tre citta have all won trophies, so at least that is something.
If you were to expand the classic trio to a spectacular six, which other three places would fit the bill to make almost the Serie B of Italian tourism? Verona would certainly have to be one, Romeo and Juilet has seen to that, as well as the magnificent Arena. It is another city with limited calcio silverware courtesy of Hellas, but at least they have some, whereas my other two picks have barely scratched the surface of Serie A, let alone Serie B. The next tourism hub isn’t so much a specific town, but an entire area, known as the Amalfi Coast, a region just to the east of Napoli and Salerno. There is more than one famous town here, with Amalfi town and Positano being very popular places to stay complete with spectacular views, but neither really has enough flatland to contemplate hosting a football team. The well known capital of the region is Sorrento, and here you will find a football club. Occasionally they have hit the giddy heights of the third tier, but presently Sorrento Calcio are in Serie D the fourth tier for now.
The last of this additional trio is my feature town/club, and we are back in Tuscany, in its southern reaches in the stunning town of Siena. I am sure Siena thinks it is pretty much the fourth tourist town of Italy, it certainly has lifted the prices for accommodation and restaurants to the giddy heights of a bed on the Grand Canal for example. That might well be due to the fact that demand outstrips supply, but don’t expect cheap lodgings right in the old town of Siena if you fancy bunking down here and doing the full cultural immersion as well as calcio. If you want to gazump Helena Bonham-Carter and Julian Sands for A Room with a View, as a football fan, get yourself a room in the NH hotel with a room overlooking the football stadium! Move over the rolling Tuscan hills, a football fan would more greatly appreciate a stadio view. Some of the rooms afford such a full on view, if you were that stingy when a game was on, you’d see the whole game without moving far from your minibar fridge!
With a population of just short of 54,000, Siena isn’t huge, but in the height of the tourist season, especially around the twice annually ran horse race, the population could easily be tripled. Il Palio is the famous bareback horse race around the crazy undulations of the main square, Piazza Del Campo. A number of main squares in Tuscany aren’t flat, but this one has to be seen to be believed, and once you have seen it, pause for a moment and think how hard it must be to race a horse around its perimeter bareback. This race is huge in Siena, probably bigger than if Siena Calcio were playing Juventus. The town is divided up into 12 different areas, each with its own horse that participates in the Palio, and each one of them proud of its distinctive name and individual emblem. As you walk around the town you’ll notice a shift in the ornamentation of the street lights and flags as you cross into rival territories for the locals!
The centre of Siena is beautifully preserved, with its wonderful Cathedral perhaps the other gem aside from the Del Campo. Given the fiefdoms of yesteryear in Italy, especially prevalent in Tuscany, it’ll come as no surprise that old Siena has a heavy walled fortification. Right in the shadow of the wall at the main gate to old Siena sits the now named Montepaschi Arena, but was more commonly known as the Stadio Artemio Franchi for a long time. This is the same name as Fiorentina’s ground, who was the former president of Italian Football, and while he was born in the Tuscan capital, he passed away in Siena having lived there for a number of years.
The stadium is a curious thing, not only because of its unusual location, and the hotch potch of predominantly scaffolded seating areas, but more because you have to almost climb down from above to get in, with significantly steep steps leading from street above down to the stadium. Whether the stadium is located in what was once a moat for added defences in front of the city walls I am unsure, but it is rare to have to descend into a stadium. The Montepaschi Arena holds 15,373, more than adequate even should they make it back to Serie A, and while they announced plans to move to a 20,000 new stadium on the outskirts of modern Siena, that was in 2011 as AC Siena, and as they’ve been through two owners since then, don’t hold your breath on that plan! When Siena were flying high they did host a friendly International between Italy and South Africa in 2010.
Even if you don’t like football and just pitched up here for a day trip by bus from Florence for example, all these day tripper buses park in and around the ground, so you couldn’t help but notice the picturesque location of the stadium. In days of old when Siena graced Serie A, a huge visiting support arriving on a Sunday as well as the regular tourist day trippers, that was a car crash in terms of busy, busy.
Monte Paschi di Siena is the oldest bank in the world, starting out in 1472. It is today still the fourth largest bank in Italy, but in recent years it has had a lot of financial problems, something that coincided with similar issues at the local football team. I used to pride myself in finding a football story for Football Weekends from Italy that didn’t include the word bankrupt, but let’s go to the other end of the spectrum and rattle off a tale about the modern day king of bust! Welcome to the whacky and many names of a football club in Siena.
Here we are in another tourist rich town, and yet again a largely ambivalent citizenry that has watched a tumultuous 20 years of calcio unfold just outside the ramparts of Siena. There has been a team in Siena since 1904, and for near on a century it just ticking along, occasionally it popped into the second tier, starting in 1934/35, and again in the late forties, but after 55 years when it was back in Serie B for the 2000/01 season, this is when the story really took off in a good and a bad way. Maybe Midge Ure and Ultravox might have chosen a different location for their big hit years ago with “oh Siena” certainly being appropriate for this tale.
That tricky second season syndrome in Serie B started to show the financial chasm in terms of being able to compete at this level, and panicky owners sacked, then re-hired Guiseppe Papadopulo in a desperate bid to save the club from relegation. The man worked a minor miracle, and not only did they stay up, the very next season, they dusted themselves off and won promotion to Serie A for the very first time in the club’s history, where they finished a very creditable 13th in 2003/04. Luigi Di Canio was then employed to oversee the tricky second season, and for long periods AC Siena were favourites for the drop, with hardly a win to their name, and when they didn’t lose it invariably ended up a draw. However, a 2-1 win on the last day against already doomed Atalanta (changed days), saw them rise to 14th, just one slot below the year before. They kept surviving, and another two Serie A terms were guaranteed by the skin of their teeth, before they finally succumbed to the drop.
While things were going along nicely on the pitch, the long serving Chairman Paolo de Luca was in fragile health and he started to look for a new buyer, a transaction that was signed with a conglomeration of Tuscan businessmen just the day before he sadly passed away. They wanted to change the club name to include Monte Paschi, but the authorities rightly refused and they soon lost interest in the venture selling Siena on to the Mezzaroma family. They immediately oversaw the return of Siena to the top flight, finishing second in Serie B in 2010/11. They played two seasons in Serie A before waving goodbye for the last time thus far in the clubs history with a 19th placing in 2013/14.
Where are the tales of woe I hear you cry, fear ye not, they are coming! They couldn’t even raise the necessary Guarantee Bond to participate in Serie B the next season and the club were declared bankrupt. Mezzaroma was also sued for false accounting, something that ultimately passed without prosecution due to the time limitations on such affairs, but not before the Guardia di Finanza grabbed £8.5m from him relating to the bankruptcy.
Robur Siena was formed and allowed to participate two leagues down in Serie D for the 2014/15 campaign, which saw the club immediately promoted to Serie C as champions. They went from strength to strength, reaching the Coppa Italia C final versus Foggia and going all the way to the final of the Serie C promotion play offs before losing to Cosenza at Pescara. The story didn’t end there as they were one of a gaggle of clubs looking to replace three Serie B clubs who had gone bust, but ultimately none of them were successfully promoted.
That said, it was maybe just as well because Siena failed to pay the necessary Bond for the following third tier campaign, and they’d once again landed on a snake and relegated for going bust. This time the drop of one league was deemed enough and the newly coined ACN Siena were off and running for the 2019/20 campaign in Serie D. The new owners, who remain at the club to this day are an Armenian business group, who also own that biblically known side, FC Noah in Yerevan.
The rise from the fourth tier wasn’t immediate, sticking plasters and steadying the financial ship seemed prudent, but in merely finishing in the potentially redundant play off places last term looked as if Siena were going to be consigned to a third term at this level. However, they did what was asked of them, and won the mini 4 team play off for their division and joined a ranking system along with 8 other play off winners waiting with baited breath as to whether clubs in C would fail to make the necessary financial commitments. In a season where finances were stretched to the limit at every club with no gate revenues etc, there was always likely to be a few, and true to form there were some failing teams, although in truth not as many as you’d have thought for Italy. However Siena got the nod and are now playing in Serie C, Girone B along with a veritable smorgasbord of other Tuscan clubs, including Lucchese, Pontedera, Pistoiese, Grosseto and Aquila Montevarchi. The last name forms part of a southern Tuscan triumvirate of rivalry, with just one of the constituent parts missing in the shape of Arezzo. As the other two stepped up, much to the distress of Arezzo fans they went the other way, and missed out on some fabulous derby days.
It is hoped that Siena’s finances are now more reliable and perhaps in the coming seasons they’ll be looking to get up to Serie B once more, but the third tier is where Siena are traditionally most at home, and airbrushing the mad first decade of the new century out and this is where they’ve largely always been.
Football Adventures with James Rendall 