A quiet soccer crowd

This year our apartment is on Via San Giuseppe with the great Franciscan cathedral, Santa Croce directly across the street from our doorway. Today was a quiet, sad day within the church, in the piazza, and in all of Florence.

During the morning people were streaming into the piazza wearing the purple and red colors of the local soccer team. It seemed like the day of a game in a place, Santa Croce piazza, where the games are never played.

All this happened because the captain of Florence’s soccer team, David Astori, died last Saturday, March 3, during the night while the team was getting ready for a match against Udine the next day, a match that would be played away from Florence. He was thirty-one years old and had two young children. People were shocked that a prominent athlete would die so suddenly from natural causes.

Italy is a soccer obsessed country but this event eclipsed the desire of Italians to see their Sunday soccer games. The league called off all the Italian games that day to be made up, perhaps, some day in the future. The game receded and grief came to the fore.

Today, March 8, a funeral mass was held in Florence in the city’s Santa Croce cathedral. This particular church holds a special place in Italy because luminaries are entombed here including Michelangelo, Ghiberti, Galileo, Machiavelli, and Dante, all Florentines. Astori wan’t be added to the list but he was honored by association with these renowned Florentines.

Dante, a Florentine, was on the wrong side of a political dispute in and was exiled in 1302. He died in 1321 and was buried in Ravenna. That city has refused to return his remains to Florence but there is something in Santa Croce that looks like an impressive tomb but is actually only a monument to the great Florentine poet.

ESPN has a story today  with a story and with a video showing the hearse stopping in front of the cathedral and pall bearers carrying the casket into the church. There was respective applause and then quiet as the funeral mass was broadcast to the crowd in the piazza.

After the mass concluded Astori's coffin reappeared in front of Santa Croce and now the crowd broke its silence and cheered for their captain. The cheering was exactly as it would have been at a home game with chants, singing, purple smoke bombs (the team colors are purple and red, remember?), and huge banners swaying back and forth. To see the send off, go to this fan website. 

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Update a few days later

We've just read a touching piece on ESPN that we'd like to share with you. Please visit this link:  'Our captain forever': Fiorentina says goodbye to Davide Astori. It's a beautiful piece of writing that describes just what we observed. 

By the way, the butcher mentioned in the story is a young man we see when we shop at the Sant'Ambrogio market. And we visited the restaurant mentioned in the article, Trattoria da Rocco, only a few days ago. An earlier blog post regarding coccoli was about an experience we had in that trattoria. Have we taken you there?