A Season With Verona: Travels Around Italy in Sea

From Udine to Catania, from San Siro to the Olimpico, traveling with the fans and the players from the tip to the toe of Italy, Tim Parks offers a highly personal account of his relationship with a country, its people, and its national sport. Verona, recently elevated to the top-rank teams -- Series A -- is struggling to stay there. The fans, as always, are accused of vulgarity, racism, and violence. The police are ambiguous, the journeys exhausting, the referees unforgivable, and the anecdotes hilarious. In a world stripped of idealism and increasingly bereft of religion, Parks suggests that soccer offers a new, and fiercely ironic, way of engaging with the sacred.
-- Combines the tension of cliff-hanging narrative with the pleasures of travel writing.
-- Does for soccer what John Feinstein did for golf.
-- A profound, insightful, and often hilarious analysis of one country's way of keeping itself entertained.