HAPPY BIRTHDAY BOLOGNA F.C. – 3 ott

THOSE MADMEN OF RONZANI

In Bologna took place the formation of a group of Italians and strangers of the upper-class who went to the café of Sciences and met in Piazza d’Armi, in the Prati di Caprara, outside Porta Saffi, to play football. Among them there was a young Bohemian of 23 years old, Emilio Arnstein, pervaded with the taste of the adventure. He studied at the University of Prague and Vienna, he worked a bit in Trieste as a foreign correspondent and here he founded with some English friends a first football association, the Black Star Foot Ball Club.

He arrived in Bologna in 1908 and he followed immediately the tracks of the beloved sport. One day he asked a tram driver for some information and he gave him a curious…address: outside the town, in the Prati di Caprara, you’ll find «chi mat, chi córren drì a una bàla», those madmen running after a ball. Well, the driver had all understood. And as he explained him how to get there by tram, the scene succumbed to the iconographic fascination of the finger outstretched to generate the spark of creation. Reached his goal, Arnstein met immediately a group of young men engaged on sweating and competing for a strange object: the ball.

Its form was spherical but also lumpy. It was a kind of hard, dark and very heavy sphere having an external relief seam. There was also a string compressing a pig bladder serving as an air chamber, which was blown up and then covered with raw hide; the object ended in a little narrow tube of linen rubber in which there was a brass valve that was screwed on the bicycle pump and let it blow up. To manage it but especially to deal hard blows it was necessary to have some special shoes: they had a reinforced toe, they were thick and had a rough sole to avoid slipping in case of wet grass and mud.   

The ground too was really precarious; it was a large green area where a shepherd, who hired it from the state property, brought his sheep to graze. It was necessary to ask his permission to play and if he was in a good mood, come on!, they put four jackets to create the two goals and they “worked” hard. They ran, they kicked, they knocked and banged and sometimes they quarrelled.

Emilio Arnstein became immediately familiar with the whole group. Here he also met a Spanish law student, Antonio Bernabeu, who was the son of a famous lawyer of Madrid, and who had just become a boarder of the Collegio di Spagna. He was a fellow countryman of don Manuel Carrasco, student and then rector of the same old institute, founded by the cardinal Albornoz: Antonio was just the “custodian” of the ball, which had been bought with a whip-round. 

In short, football in the true sense of the term or just football in a clumsy sense of the term, it was necessary to do the utmost and obviously to achieve all this, money was needed. It was essential to convene a general meeting, to prepare the statute, to register the society. So someone tried to set wheels in motion. The idea was to involve the Tourist Club of Bologna, well known in the town and having a certain propensity for the sport disciplines. Its president, the Knight Carlo Sandoni, who was also the representative of the Italian General Sailing, appreciated the idea and expressed his commitment. After a few weeks of heated discussions, a meeting was convened on October 3^rd, 1909, at the address of the Club, at the first floor of the “Birraria” Ronzani, in Spaderie street.

During an afternoon at the beginning of the autumn, 25 young men met in front of the club, climbed the stairs and sat down. On that occasion, they produced and read the first draft of the statute; then they voted and elected the first positions, signing as founding members. The name of the society was Bologna Foot Ball Club, section of the Tourist Club of Bologna. The first president was Louis Rauch, a talented Swiss odontologist settled in Italy for some years. The vice-president was the aristocrat Guido Della Valle. Enrico Penaglia was the secretary, Sergio Lampronti the treasurer. The members of the board of directors were two: Emilio Arnstein, the “mastermind” of the operation, and Leone Vincenzi. Three members of the Tourist Club of Bologna, Centofanti, Tampellini and Zecchi, were the delegates in the new association. The two councillors together with Pietro Bagaglia were responsible for the “direction of the playgrounds”; the captain was Arrigo Gradi, who knew the rules, as he had already played football abroad.

The selection of the club colours was delegated to him and it imitated the playing kits of the Swiss institute where he studied, the Schönberg College in Rossbach. It was a red and blue chequered shirt with buttons: he had kept two exemplars as souvenirs. It was very beautiful, everyone liked it and also the poor company’s cash on hand was happy, as two fewer shirts were to be manufactured. The shorts, or rather we should say a kind of calf-length long johns, were colour of choice, but preferably white or black.  

The day after, a paragraph on the daily “Il Resto del Carlino” announced the event to the world: «Yesterday morning, at the Tourist Club of Bologna, was founded the section for the open-field sport exercises and precisely the Foot Ball Club. Many young people desired this initiative for football, slingball and tennis and as some exercises had already been executed for some time, now a precise order has been established, through the foundation of the section at the Tourist Club of Bologna, which already gained greater importance».

In the pages of “La Gazzetta dello Sport” the correspondent Eraldo Mandrioli added a commentary and an omen: «The name and the reliability of people called to steer the fortunes of the new society are hopeful signs which lead us to believe that also this wonderful sport will be usefully introduced here in this town. And we do not have any doubts that Bologna will raise the other towns that have been practicing the football for some time. So, we wait and hope that the Foot-ball Club Bologna is put to the test in this sport».  

Another qualitative shift was achieved by the Foot Ball Club Bologna on January 31^th, 1911, when the Shareholders’ Meeting approved the new Statute, signed by the vice-president Domenico Gori, responding to the wish of the Football Association. The Foot Ball Club Bologna was no more a “section” of the Tourist Club of Bologna and became a great sporting reality of the town.

Scritto da Lamberto Bertozzi, tradotto da Stefania Stefani

Bologna 1909-10: In piedi: Guido Della Valle, Orlandi, Gradi, Bernabeu, Donati, Bignardi, Pessarelli; in ginocchio: Saguatti, Rivas, Chiara, Venzo, Nanni

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