Some of the critical readers that live here in Genova are reading the title of this post and shaking their heads. Seriously? In the aftermath of the flood, Frantz leads with soccer?

7-10 inches of rain deluges the area in a sixty minute span to come pouring off the mountains just to the north, funneling down to overcome the twenty foot levees of the normal trickle that is the Bisagno creek, causing massive damage, heartache, closed roads, traffic stops and blackouts and Frantz leads with soccer?

Yep. Hold on, it’ll come around. Wait for it, wait…

Genova has two top-level Seria A soccer teams: Genoa C.F.C and Sampdoria. Everyone who lives here supports one or the other. Even if ‘your team’ is another, either abroad or in Italy, even if you don’t like soccer, if you live here you have to choose who you are going to support.

I was almost immediately informed of this upon arrival, by the boyfriend of a colleague, a native Genovese. It was one of my first aperitivi here…

“Jeff, nice to meet you. So are you for Genoa or Sampdoria?”

“What?”

“It’s time to make up you mind.”

“About Genova or Sampdoria?”

At this point I get a finger wag. “You have to get one thing straight though first. There is Genova, the city. Genova. Then there is Genoa. Genoa is the football team.”

“Okay, sorry about that,” I said. “So I have to decide about Genoa and Sampdoria?”

A vigorous nodding of the head. “Of course.” A short pause followed. “Would you like a suggestion?”

“Sure.”

“You will be a Genoa fan.”

“I will?”

“Yes. Certainly.”

“Why? Who are Genoa fans?”

“The real Genovese are Genoa fans. Everyone else, the outsiders, the suburbs, they are for Sampdoria. Tell me Jeff, where do you live?”

“Foce, near Centro.”

“Ahhh, downtown. Okai. Yes. You are for Genoa.”

 

Then he turned to someone else and began talking. Apparently, it was settled. I was puzzled, but also intrigued.

Fast forward a week. Genoa’s season opener is the day before the first day of school. An 8:45 PM game against Napoli, one of their amici, or friends. I went. We sat in the Gradinata Sud or South stands, behind the goal, opposite the home side’s ‘twelfth man’, the raucous rossoblu season ticketholders, flag-wavers, flare-lighters, constant-standers, always-chanters.

Napoli scored in the 3^rd minute. Damn, I thought. Genoa is going to get murdered. Napoli has been very good recently, Genoa, not so much. But Genoa didn’t fold. In fact, they did the opposite. They pulled it together, actually stated stringing some passes together, actually started dominating possession and then, BAM! GOOOAAAL!!!! Tied up! The place went nuts! I have never heard such crowd noise. Not even when the Bulls came back against the Trailblazers in game six.

Second half. Back and forth. Still holding on, still holding up, until they didn’t. Napoli scored in the last minute of extra time to win 1-2.

Leaving the stadium beside a throng of sagging shoulders, I felt that strangely empty feeling one gets when their beloved team loses. I thought back to that conversation on my first day in Genova. Maybe I would be a Genoa fan.

Then I met a Sampdoria fan. How could I tell? He had a tattoo of the Sampdoria crest on his neck. A friend and I were having a beer at a bar outside the Luigi Ferraris stadium, before the Genoa v. Lazio game, talking quietly in a corner when this huge hulk of a human heard us speaking English and wanted to practice his own.

 

“Genoa or Sampdoria?” the large man said in stilted English.

“Undecided,” I said.

He shook his head. “You should decide now. You should decide for Sampdoria.”

I smiled, trying to keep things light. “Perché? Why is Sampdoria better?”

He began to speak in English, but his emotions got the better of him. After about a sentence and a half he switched back to Italian. Here’s the gist of what I got.

“Because a true Genovese loves Sampdoria. They are a pure Genovese team. They are a fusion of two teams, both Genovese, Sampiedarenese and Andrea Doria, and they bleed Genova.”

I cringed. There was no way I would be able to pronounce every letter in Sampiedarenese. “And Genoa CFC doesn’t? Forget about Genoa. Weren’t they the first football club in Italy? 1893?”

The man grumbled and made a combination of gestures that seemed vaguely obscene. “Yes. But they were founded by un inglese! Per solo inglese! Their color was England’s white for years! They might as well be English!”

He shook his head and continued, slowly, trying English again. “No. No. You live here, you are Sampdoria.”

 

He then took me in a bear hug and left without another word. Apparently it was settled.

These types of conversations happen constantly here, or at least they do to me. Yet regardless of the nuance or variation on the arguments, both Genoa and Sampdoria fans insist on one cold fact, “A true Genovese supports their team.”

So how then to decide, truly? The answer it seemed was in attending the local Derby, something the English would pronounce DARBY, the cross-town rivalry game. We sat on the long side because we were unable to get seats in any of the behind-the-goal stands, the only choice for true supporters. Why was this? As it turns out both Genoa and Sampdoria share the stadium, so when they play each other, one team is ‘home’ and their season ticket holders get their normal ‘home’ side, while the other team’s season ticket holders get the Gradinata Sud, and are temporary ‘visitors’. Since every team in Seria A soccer plays the other twice, both home and away, the derby teams swap sides the second time the see each other. For this game, Genoa was home, but our tickets were closer to the Sampdoria supporters…

Who were absolutely insane. They chanted, danced, bounced, hung over the mezzanine balconies, threw flares, tried to attack Genoa supporters, everything you could imagine. They were ravenous, rabid beasts. Animals. I imagined my neck tattooed, bear-hugging friend from the bar in there amongst them, clawing at the walls separating team fans, trying to get his mitts on a Genoa supporter to choke him out.

It was a little frightening.

Over the course of the game, I found myself rooting for Genoa. They were the underdog yet again. Come on civilized descendants of Englishmen! Beat back these wild hordes from the outlands! There was a comfort in this. Deciding to like Genoa. It felt right. I felt a kinship with the red and blue around me, these former strangers.

Still, because of the proximity of my seat to the Sampdoria side, I found myself tapping a foot along with the rhythm of their chants. Maybe it hadn’t yet been decided.

Then Sampdoria scored and their half of the stadium threatened structural collapse.

As I walked home that night, I reflected on the evening. 0-1 Sampdoria. Was I happy? Was I disappointed? Was I Genoa or Sampdoria? I felt uneasy, but was that because a wave of Sampdoria fans were behind me, drunk, loud and violent or was that because I was upset, or worse, still undecided.

Now, enter the flood.

It was horrible. Disastrous. A colossal terror. The water just kept coming. Sheets and sheets of it, hard, cold, pelting drops that instantly soaked you to the bone. Almost immediately small dogs had to be picked up, the narrow gutters and curbs began to fill and then overflow, seeking lower ground, seeking the sea.

And still the rain came. That lower ground, part of it anyway, is where I live, in a neighborhood called Foce (pronounced Foh-chay) on a street called Via Guiseppe Casaregis. That water, all that water, had to head through my neighborhood to get out of Genova. It didn’t go quietly.

As the water levels rose to waist high seemingly immovable, monstrous things suddenly became unstuck. Gravity became irrelevant. Cars and scooters, enormous garbage and recycling bins, earth, debris, street signs, a mailbox, a street barricade, everything began to become buoyant and float away, crashing into everything else, piling into and over and under other impossibly heavy, now moving things.

And still it rained more. And rained and rained. I slept fitfully. Why won’t these owners of cars go down and disarm their alarms? Why are all these sirens ringing incessantly? Let me sleep.

As dawn approached I was easily awoken by a steady stream of silenced vibrating text notifications. Groggily I checked them. School cancelled. Genova a disaster.

I got up and blearily stumbled for the light. When I flicked the switch, nothing happened. Shit. Power is out. I walked to the kitchen and waded through water. Alarm bells rang out in my mind. Water! But I’m on the fifth floor!

Just the ice melt from the back panel of my refrigerator. Oh thank god. Those poor people on the four floors below me…

Groggy, without coffee, I ventured outside, hoping for some sort of coffee bar. I wouldn’t last long without it. When I hit the street the idea of coffee disappeared. It was still raining and good ole Via Casaregis was destroyed. Where are all the cars? The scooters? To my right, the garden apartment turned nursery, looked like it had been eaten and thrown back up. Usually so orderly, now destroyed, and still covered in about two feet of water that looked more like chocolate milk than anything else.

All the garden level places were destroyed. Most of the first floor places were mucking out their spaces too. Sofas and upholstered things out on the curb to dry or rot. The antique store on the corner? The one with all the antique muskets and wooden figurines of the Han dynasty sitting in the glass display? It looked now more like an underwater wreck, some sunken ship seascape. An aquarium display.

I turned away and stepped into a stream of water. A few feet away, a green garbage bin, the huge ones as big as minivans, was turned over…and empty. I looked down at my bare, sandaled feet. I decided to go back to my dark apartment and wash my feet.

Hours passed. Still it rained, still no power. Eventually, I’m going to have to go out, if for nothing else but a cup of coffee. Then I could maybe buy a lighter, something to start the gas stove. If I could start that gas stove I really wouldn’t need electricity for a while. I could live on stovetop coffee and wine and bread for days. Hell. I’ve been doing that for weeks now.

But seriously, eventually I’ll need coffee. All the little shops are too damaged to serve, so if I can just find fire, I’ll be set.

Not even a day without electricity and I have been reduced to primitive thoughts. Fire. Need fire.

The headache was coming. I needed caffeine.

—–By the way…I know how this sounds. I am complaining about not having coffee when some people have lost family or business treasures, lost far more. I know this. But isn’t it in our nature to act in this way? Empathy and sympathy are all fine and good, but first and foremost we care most about ourselves and our immediate clan, and the things that don’t touch our life directly, can be sad, or happy, but are rarely deeply felt. Or maybe that’s me. Comunque, if you are annoyed you can stop reading, but you’ll never find out how I knit together Soccer and floods so neatly at the end—–

I ventured out again. I walked for blocks and blocks. Nothing. All around me people were in knee-high rubber boots, or waders, sweeping or pumping water out of their shops and homes. I just wanted some place that could get me a coffee or a lighter for that gas stove. Meanwhile, the rain was picking up again, threatening to resume last night’s fury. I gotta find something soon or turn back and make for higher ground.

I passed a car whose back wheels were jacked up, sitting on a scooter. I passed an overturned truck. A passed a man with a vacant stare, trying to get a 2×4 out of his scooter wheel. I passed a crying woman, huddling over something indescribable.

I turned around. Near home I passed a little newspaper stand with a light on. No! Could it be? I ducked under the canopy and out of the rain.

“Scusate. Avete un accendino?”

The man behind the stacks of newspapers nodded and glared at my dripping, crippled umbrella. He left for a moment and came back with a white box.

What is this, I asked myself. Did I not just ask for a lighter?

The man fiddled with the lid of the box for a moment before he opened it to reveal a display of lighters….

…all adorned with the Sampdoria crest.

Head reeling from lack of caffeine, I reached forward greedily and then hesitated. The man said something unintelligible. I looked up at him and he repeated himself. Squinting hard at his lips, I understood.

“I’m sorry, it’s all I have. Sampdoria o niente.”

Still I hesitated. Fire. But….could I take fire from something advertising Sampdoria?

I guess I know my team.

 

 

More photos on the home page! Click around! Subscribe! Phone a friend!