On Tuesday, Adam, Nick, and myself took a walk out to Fiorentina’s Stadium. For those of you that don’t know, Fiorentina is the Serie A football team in Florence. It was great going out to see the stadium for a couple reasons, mainly because I am a huge soccer fan but also because we were able to see a different part of Florence.
We started walking out away from the center of town and we went underground to get past a train station. While underground, we saw some incredible graffiti. I noticed that there is a lot more graffiti in Florence than in American cities. I have come to the conclusion that it is because a very relaxed and small police presence and the easygoing culture of Italians in general. Since there is little chance of getting punished either by the police or the tenants of the graffiti-laden houses, the artists do as they wish. With that being said, the underground walls looked as though they were professionally done.
Moving on, we entered a beautiful section of Florence. The streets were lined with trees, shops, and a few small bars and clubs. This section of Florence reminded me of a downtown area in a suburban American town. There was also a beautiful church (of which there are many in Florence) that we walked past. From here, we kept walking onwards to the stadium.
The stadium was located in sports complex, along with a rugby stadium surrounded by a track, a baseball stadium (or it at least looked like a baseball stadium, a gym, a pool, and a few more athletic facilities. We walked around the stadium, hoping to find an entrance so that we could go inside (kind of like my dad does at EVERY college football or basketball venue). There was one opening which only led to the Fiorentina offices. After asking a worker where to go to get a glimpse of the stadium, they directed us to a gate that may or may not have existed. Following our disappointing walk around the circumference of the facility, we still did not give up on our mission. There was a team shop across the street that we walked into to see if the cashier could help us. She gave us the brilliant idea of ringing the doorbell of the stadium. This would never work in the United States, but somehow it works in Italy. We buzzed to the person working in the office behind the gate and he opened it for us. Finally, our journey out to the stadium was paying dividends.
The stadium seats approximately 47,000 people, and has ACF Fiorentina in bold blue lettering across the bleachers one of the sidelines. It was definitely a stadium I would enjoy watching a match in. However, for a team that is in a large city and is consistently a top level team in the biggest sport in Italy, I thought it was odd that the facility was as small as it was. Almost every NFL team has a stadium over 65,000, and Fiorentina’s is not pushing 50,000. When I found out the truly elite teams (Juventus, AC Milan, Inter Milan, AS Roma) boast stadiums well over 70,000, I realized that there was a huge dichotomy in Serie A. The European powerhouses can afford to build these facilities and also bring in world-class talent because they have significantly more money then the rest of the teams. Despite the stadium’s small stature, I enjoyed our walk there. Hopefully the next time I’m there, the stadium will be packed with rabid Fiorentina supporters.
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