L’AQUILA – If you are near Piazza d’Armi on a Monday afternoon it has been easy, for some years, to meet Bangladeshi kids playing cricket. He talked about it years ago Angelo De Nicola on the Messengerten years later the tradition remains.
The Monday It’s not a random day. For all of them it is the weekly rest day from work. There are about twenty of them and they are all busy, they tell us, in the restaurant world which is closed on Mondays. In Italy we call them economic migrants in a derogatory and hypocritical way, almost as if they were second-class or superfluous human beings. During the week there are those who cook kebabs for tourists, those who cook hamburgers for the people of L’Aquila: go and understand something, it’s globalisation, beauty.
I don’t even get to the camp and they ask me if I know what they are doing, the Bangladeshis are extremely nice. “It’s cricket”, and so far everything is ok. For us, cricket perhaps resembles baseball, or perhaps ju zirè who knows.
Cricket is one of those sports that the English invented and exported as a simulacrum of their imperial power, only to then get beaten down in every part of the globe. It also happened with football. The English brought it to us, remember the Football and Cricket clubs? The Italians liked football a lot, cricket obviously less but a second attempt is in order. Even the fascist regime, which really didn’t want to know about the English, had to surrender to the evidence and overcome its initial coldness.
Meanwhile, with millions of Italians – economic migrants – crammed into ocean liners departing from Naples or Genoa, football landed in the Americas, but without Englishmen.
Before the invention of football, our overseas migrants played bowls and bracelet football. Things changed immediately and many pieces of football history will be linked to Italian migrants. In the South Americas just think of Palmeiras, the Gym Italy founded by our compatriots in Brazil. The two Argentine clubs are also very Italian Barrio of Boca, River and Boca. The examples could go on forever.
It went less well for Italians in North America. In the borroughs of New York, in Saint Louis or in the big factory cities where they lived, Italians were worth less than a penny and even less than African Americans and the Americans they didn’t want to know about football. Let’s add that the energy, space and time to play football were what they were. They didn’t want to know because imperial ambitions required safer sports in which to excel (I think I’ve heard it before), so they invented a few dozen to be on the safe side.
For Italians things will only improve after the war. To deal with the protests against the racial segregation of blacks, Italians were suddenly recognized as white, so white that the children of that migration were now playing American football which, in fact, is only played in the USA and whoever wins the NFL is proclaimed world champion. (ps since history always repeats itself, it happened that the Cubans are particularly good at baseball, the Slavs at basketball and the Nordics at hockey).
For migrant communities, sport it has always been a way of integration but also of maintaining one’s culture. This can also be clearly felt among Bangladeshi friends. A boy tries to explain the rules to me, the enthusiasm with which he does it is exactly the example of the desire to integrate but also not to lose the connection with one’s own culture: “It’s my first time playing” it makes me. “That is, you came from Bangladesh to discover cricket?” I ask like the perfect comedic sidekick. “No no, it’s the first time I’ve come to play here”, Ah here.
The rules are simple (No, they’re not). The match is very friendly and so they are happy to explain the rudiments to me. I understood that it is played 11 against 11. There is a team that throws a ball and defends the field, and one that bats with a bat. Six innings and then we change. If the ball hit by the batsman crosses any line, points are awarded: “if the ball goes over it’s six points” a boy says to me, raising his arm, “if it goes under, four points”.
I didn’t understand how much above is above and how much below is below, perhaps it’s up to one’s discretion, a bit like the crossbar of the German. The ball, collected by the receivers, is then thrown towards a piece of wood in the center of the field, which in this case is a fruit box. Don’t ask me why, but it’s a particularly exciting moment in the game where everyone is running everywhere.
Some curious people, walking around Piazza d’Armi, stop to look. “It is usually played on a lawn” another boy explains to me.
And explain to him that there must have been a meadow here, or rather there once was. Piazza d’Armi, before the earthquake, was there L’Aquila beach who crowded the inside of the athletics track and the tree-lined surroundings, amidst chatter, running and endless football games. The poor athletics athletes pay the price. After the earthquake, to fix the situation, the athletics track was rebuilt, rightly reserving access only to those who have to do athletics. A rugby pitch has been created next door, rightly reserved only for those who play rugby.
An urban park was also supposed to be created, after the Municipality had reacquired the old military area from state property: fifteen years after the earthquake there is no trace of it. Maybe in ten years, for the third generation of Bangladeshi migrants, it will be the right time for the park too.
