The Concrete Ghosts of Italy ‘90

In recent months I’ve been to the Luigi Ferraris stadium a few times to watch Genoa play. It sits in Marassi, wedged between the Bisagno riverbed, a main road, a prison and a listed fourteenth-century villa, with four red-brick towers planted at its corners like chess rooks. Those towers are not decoration. They went up between 1987 and 1989, when Vittorio Gregotti rebuilt the ground for the World Cup, and they are the most honest thing in the city about what that summer was. Genoa got a stadium that people still admire. Most of Italy got something else.