“If I’d been at his ‘Victory Rally’ in Nuremberg in 1933,” the poet John Cooper Clarke once remarked, referring to the rise of the Führer, “I could have told them there and then: this guy is a c***. And you know why? Because I judge by appearances.”
Even the harshest critics of Paolo Di Canio have never accused him of being an apologist for the Third Reich. But his appearance on Tuesday night on Sky Italia, wearing a short-sleeved shirt which revealed his infamous DVX tattoo undeniably didn’t look good. It was the latest in a series of incidents that have seen the ex-West Ham player, and former manager of Swindon and Sunderland, sullied by association with the legacy of fascism.
Di Canio’s ultimate allegiance has always been to Lazio, the club he supported as a boy. In 2005, while celebrating a victory in front of their notoriously right-wing fans, he was carried away to the point that he raised his right arm, and joined the supporters in their customary Roman salute. That gesture was sufficient for many to condemn him as a fully-fledged fascist. As a result of Di Canio’s perceived sympathies, David Miliband quit the Sunderland board after the Italian arrived as manager on 1 April 2013. Two years earlier, when Di Canio joined Swindon Town, the GMB Union withdrew its sponsorship.
The incident on Tuesday was less shocking than his gesture in 2005, but way more peculiar. The former player, 48, who has been a popular and highly regarded host of the Di Canio Premier Show (which offers analysis of games from England’s top tier: the league Di Canio still describes as “the best in the world”) has now been indefinitely suspended by Sky Italia. And yet it’s hardly a secret that he has the tattoo on his upper arm. (DVX, the Latin form of Duce, may date back beyond the days of Julius Caesar, but for a modern audience it evokes only one name: Mussolini.) Every Italian citizen, and most adult football fans on the planet are aware that the tattoo is there, but to wear a shirt with sleeves short enough to reveal it to a television audience constituted a bizarre kind of indecent exposure.
Under Italy’s legge Scelba 0f 20 June 1952 – an arcane statute that has largely fallen into disuse – it remains an offence to be a public apologist for Mussolini. (There is no indication that he is contravening the law, nor that any case will be brought against Di Canio.)
“We made an error of judgment,” said Jacques Raynaud, executive vice-president of sport channels and Sky Italia. “We would like to apologise to anyone who was offended.”
I first met Di Canio in 2006 at the start of his coaching career, at the tiny ground of Cisco Roma, in the third tier of the Italian league, and then again in the course of his eventful but ultimately ill-fated management adventure in England.
While I’ve encountered right-wing British politicians who, to use an ungrammatical phrase, I have not enjoyed breathing the same air as, I have to confess I have always got on extremely well with Paoli Di Canio. I have uncomfortable memories of saying as much to a table-full of Italians in the village where my wife grew up in Tuscany: a region that, while it immediately evokes images of affluent tourism, remains fiercely proud of its historic resistance to Mussolini. Their reaction was such that I might just as well have walked into a pub in Leeds and announced that Peter Sutcliffe was a basically decent man who had his faults.
“Red Tuscany?” says Di Canio. “I have a lot of friends who are communists. And socialists.”
Can you defend him? There’s no denying the DVX tattoo. Or the opinion he expresses in his 2000 autobiography, co-written with the distinguished journalist Gabriele Marcotti. It’s a short passage that is invariably edited down by British red-tops to appear more damaging than it is. “I am fascinated by Mussolini,” Di Canio wrote. “I think he was a deeply misunderstood individual. He deceived people. His actions were often vile. But all this was motivated by a higher purpose. He was basically a very principled individual. Yet he turned against his sense of right and wrong. He compromised his ethics.” This kind of opinion is not unknown in Italy. The Milan-based journalist Giordano Bruno Guerri wrote a book in which he transcribed advice he was given in the confessional, mainly in churches in the south of the country, while wired for sound.
“Mussolini,” one priest told him, “was a smashing lad. He’d have been fine if he hadn’t been led astray by that bastard Hitler.” The crucial thing about Di Canio is that you don’t have to spend long in his company to realise that he is not a political animal. Mention of Alessandra Mussolini of the far-right party Forza Italia, for instance, evokes nothing but a scornful snort.
Would he vote for the extreme right?
“No. Never, never, never. I am not a politically minded person. I’m more interested in sitting around a table for three hours over a glass or two of wine.”
Any views on multiculturalism?
“I am the least racist man in the world. I treat black guys, Jewish guys, Arabic people, Catholics, exactly the same. If I called somebody a ‘stupid black guy’, to me that betrays stupidity in the same way that if you call me a stupid ‘eye-tie’, ” Di Canio told me. “Black. White. Red. Stupid green. Stupid white. Stupid fucking Chinese. Stupid fucking Canadian. The common point in all that is not the racism, but the stupidity.”
Paolo Di Canio, inconveniently for his critics, has great sincerity, warmth, energy and humour. A few years ago an Italian journalist asked him about Francesco Totti: a player who attracted, at AS Roma, the same degree of worship that Di Canio engendered among fans of their detested rivals, Lazio. “Totti said he wouldn’t sit at the same table and have dinner with me,” Di Canio said. “I explained that was no great loss, because if you tell Totti there are tensions in the Middle East, he’ll assume that a fight has broken out on the right side of midfield.”
His attachment to Lazio and its associated traditions, distasteful as they may be, is emotional and tribal rather than ideological. When he has been given the opportunity to talk seriously about politics, as in the column he used to write in Corriere dello Sport, he has used it to lecture on the evils of racism.
When Di Canio was at Swindon in 2011, I asked one prominent figure in Italian football whether he truly believed the [then] manager to be a fascist. After exacting a firm assurance that his name would never appear on the record, he said: “The truth is very simple. Paolo is not a fascist and he never has been. Certain things he has said and done – the salute with the Lazio fans for instance – have to do with his compulsive tendencies, which in turn reflect his psychological history, particularly as it relates to extremes of enthusiasm, mood swings and depression.” In his 2000 autobiography, Di Canio recalls with great candour his bed-wetting, panic attacks, and a childhood addiction to high-calorie sodas that earned him the nickname lard-ball.
As a young man, he was one of the few hard-core Lazio fans, the Irriducibili, who would travel to away games: in those days most ultras had little enthusiasm for travel. “Those were our trains, we were Lazio and we were going off to battle. It was the best feeling in the world. I’ve had bricks and stones thrown at me by opposing fans. I’ve been teargassed and beaten up.” Di Canio has spoken of violence he witnessed, notably the stabbing of the Bergamo chief of police by his Lazio companions. He was five yards away. “I am not proud,” he said, “of what I saw.”
He wrote a 2005 memoir, unfortunately untranslated, called Il Ritorno (The Return), which described his emotions when he signed for Lazio for a second time.
“I had to fight back the tears,” di Canio wrote, in the book co-authored by Elisabetta Esposito, “though it seemed that they’d never stop. When I looked around the dressing room, I thought that the lump in my throat might choke me. I was overwhelmed. I wept and I trembled. My heart pounded. I felt I couldn’t control my thoughts or my actions. I lost the ability to speak. I kept on crying like a baby. I am not a man who cries a lot. But that day, everything was different.”
Listening to him talk about his childhood, I once told him, reminded me of a cartoon I once saw where a palmist is gazing down at a dog’s paw. “You are faithful,” she says. “You are affectionate. You make strong bonds very easily.” “I’ve always felt an affinity towards the weak and the disadvantaged,” Di Canio said.
His unusual – some would say pathological – capacity for loyalty was demonstrated at clubs other than Lazio, notably at West Ham United. Sir Alex Ferguson, I once told the Italian, told me that he had tried to sign the striker on two occasions. Who knows what effect working under Ferguson might have had both on his collection of medals, and on his temperament?
“I can’t say that isn’t flattering,” Di Canio told me. “But I could never, ever have betrayed West Ham. I could never have let down my team-mates, and especially the supporters, at West Ham United. They were the people who gave me the chance to feel at home. I had to finish my career in a place that I respected and a place that felt like home.”
West Ham, as he told me repeatedly, was very special. But he developed a deep affection for Britain in general. “The only performance-enhancing drugs in English football,” he wrote in Il Ritorno, “are lager, baked beans and sausages. After which the players run onto the pitch belching and farting. I have always preferred English football to the Italian game.”
Like Eric Cantona, another player who tended to polarise public opinion, Di Canio was no stranger to the rush of blood. His admirers remember his exquisite volley for West Ham against Wimbledon in the 1999-2000 season – one of the finest goals in the history of the Premier League – and his 2001 FIFA Fair Play medal, awarded after picking up the ball rather than putting it into the unguarded net when he saw Everton goalkeeper Paul Gerrard lying badly injured. The broader public tend to recall his decision, having just been shown a red card while playing for Sheffield Wednesday against Arsenal in 1998, to shove referee Paul Alcock in the chest. The official toppled over in a spiralling comedy fall worthy of Oliver Hardy.
“I was banned for eleven games. People said I was a barbarian.” And mad. And a gypsy: his own former manager David Pleat called him that. “I took that as a compliment.” You make a mistake in life, Di Canio told me, “and you take your punishment.” But one moment of foolishness, he added, “can wipe out everything else that you’ve achieved.”
If his latest misadventure with Sky seems unlikely to be a sin of that magnitude, the sense of potential detonation has never left the man once described as having “a mind like a blast furnace”.
“There are a few things I’d like people to understand,” Di Canio once told me. “I have a family,” he said. “I pay my taxes. I read. I go on days out. I am,” he added, referring to an aspect of his character that may still be something of a work in progress, “a very normal kind of a guy.”
