The Miracle of Castel di Sangro

Joe McGinniss

If the three loves of your life are books, Italy and football, how long does it take you to work out you urgently need to buy and read a book about Italian football? That was me in Waterstones a short while ago and the answer is about one and a half seconds. The Miracle of Castel di Sangro is nearly as good as I could have dared hoped for.

Here's the story. Joe McGinniss, bored shitless at the OJ Simpson trial and despairing of the verdict, spurns the $1 million advance he's been offered to write about OJ and instead hurries to the Abruzzo region in Central Italy where the town of Castel di Sangro is celebrating its football team's first ever promotion to Italy's Serie B.

McGinniss is American, right, so he knows nothing about football (soccer)? Welllll... certainly he's a late convert to the game, but he makes up for it with a passion that many Europeans couldn't match.

He speaks Italian, right? Nope. At least, not at first. But he quickly improves. The Abruzzo is one of Italy's least accessible and least visited regions and McGinniss reckons himself to be one of the first Americans to pass through Castel di Sangro itself since the last GI left in 1946. English is not much spoken. One of the things that jumped out at me from this book is the efficacy of the "total immersion" method of language learning.

Serie B is Italy's equivalent of the English first division. In the elaborate pyramid of Italian football it's almost at the top, one league down from the glamourous and hugely wealthy Serie A. For nondescript Castel di Sangro, with its population of just 5000, to have climbed to these rarified heights, well, it was regarded throughout Italy as nothing short of a "miracolo".

The story of that season, the search for just enough points to ensure "salvezza" and avoid relegation back down to Serie C1 is part of the story of this book. But it's not really a football book, and certainly there isn't much pitch action in the text. McGinniss knows the appeal of football is cultural and has nothing to do with sporting excellence. There is remarkably little skillful play involved. As one of the players puts it "Serie B ... where there is never a dull moment, except for the 90 minutes of a match." I enjoyed it very much.

This is also one of those books where the book itself has become part of the story. Critical acclaim and commercial success followed the UK publication but McGinniss is in dispute with his American publishers over the feebleness of their markeing effort in the US. His website shows two of the covers Little, Brown produced for the American market and I have to agree, they are indeed terrible. As McGinniss puts it, "if any reader has an example of a worse cover ever proposed for a new work by a major American author, please email me".

Worse is the news from Italy. McGinniss has pushed hard for the book to be translated and marketed in Italy but Castel di Sangro's owners have leant heavily on the Italian publishers, Garzanti, and have filed criminal charges against the author. McGinniss faces a possible 12 years in prison for Italy unless he abandons plans for an Italian edition. Watch this space.