entry May 2008
Stadiums in Naples: San Paolo & others
San Paolo stadium in Fuorigrotta
The
original big-league football (“soccer”) stadium in
Naples goes back to the enthusiasm of the prominent
Neapolitan industrialist and sports entrepreneur, Giorgio Ascarelli
(1894-1930)*. He was responsible in 1926 for
founding the first city-wide football club in Naples and
then getting the national association to expand the
Italian league such as to include Naples. (Also see "Early Football in Naples.")
He had the stadium (photo, left) built on his own
property and with his own money. By today’s standards,
it was small, with a capacity of about 20,000
spectators. The stadium was
first called the “Partenope,” then the “Vesuvio” and
then simply the “Ascarelli
stadium” in tribute to the man who made it all
possible and who died suddenly just a few days after
attending the opening game in February, 1930. (It was a
satisfactory opener; Naples came back from 0-2 against
powerhouse Juventus to tie at 2-2!) The stadium was
located in back of the main train station and was
obliterated by bombings
in WWII. The area is still called the “Ascarelli
Quarter.”
*Giorgio Ascarelli, of the prominent Jewish Ascarelli family of Naples, known for philanthropy. Related entry here.
In 1934
financial difficulties following Ascarelli’s death
caused the team to relocate to another stadium (photo,
left), one financed and built by the Italian state in
the late 1920s up in the Vomero section of Naples. It
was originally called the "October 28th Stadium" (a
Fascist reference to the date of Mussolini’s March on
Rome in 1922, which brought the Fascists to power in
Italy). Later the name was changed to the current
one—the Arturo Collana
stadium (after a
journalist who was president of the Naples football
club). It held over 30,00 spectators and was the Naples
home stadium until 1959. The “Collana” is still an
active multi-purpose sports facility and has undergone
numerous renovations over the years. The stadium has a
certain interest for historians of WWII in that it
became a German internment camp in 1943 for captured
members of the Italian resistance due to be shipped to
Germany; as such, the area around the stadium became the
center of the active resistance movement against the Wehrmacht culminating in the so-called “Four
Days of Naples.” The square adjacent to
the stadium is today called Piazza Quattro
Giornate (Four Days).
In
1959, the Naples soccer team (currently doing well in “serie A,” the top league in Italy) moved
to the new San Paolo
stadium in Fuorigrotta, a western suburb near
the Mostra d’Oltremare. The
stadium then underwent extensive renovations in 1989 in
preparation for the 1990 World Cup. Those renovations
and the supplemental construction in the area were to
have included a new underground train to get people to
the games. Only a cynic would note that that train line didn’t
open until 2007; after all, they did get the stadium
finished on time! San Paolo seats sixty-thousand crazed
fans and is the third largest in Italy.
Currently,
there is a popular movement to have San Paolo stadium
renamed for Diego
Armando Maradona, Argentine superstar who
played for Naples from 1984-1991, leading the team
during its most successful period, one that included two
Italian A-league national championships (1986/87 and
1989/1990). Maradona is easily the most popular athlete
in any sport ever to compete in Naples. Ironically, he
played for Naples during the regular 1990 season when he
was also on his own national team of Argentina for the
World Cup games held at various sites throughout Italy.
Argentina played Italy in one of the semi-final matches;
it was played at San Paolo in Naples. Maradona was so
well-liked by his Neapolitan fans that he even got away
with encouraging them to root for Argentina. The fans
took it good-naturedly and even gave him a round of
applause when he scored the winning penalty kick against
Italy. There is, however, a problem; Italian law
prohibits public buildings from being named for any
person who has not been dead for 10 years.
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