World Cup

The World Cup is more than halfway done now, but it's still a big deal. Of course, the big disappointment here was Italy going out in the first round, after tying "lowly" Paraguay and New Zealand and then losing to Slovakia. People were certainly not expecting a repeat performance of 2006, and were heaping criticism on the coach even before the tournament started for picking the wrong players, but the final game was nevertheless a blow (although they had to admit that the Italian team really only started playing 15 minutes before the end). Since then, the number of Italian flags hanging on balconies has decreased somewhat, but the interest in the tournament has remained, at least from what I can tell at work.
Italy being Italy, it's of course more difficult to watch the games here than it should be. Since the state-funded RAI networks only bought the rights to some of the games (about one a day), the others being shown on subscription-only Sky, most games during the day are also not available for online streaming. So for some weekend games, we've gone to an Irish pub downtown (where we saw the glorious German victory over England this past weekend), otherwise we're reliant on some poor quality pirated streams of ESPN, BBC, or Chinese TV.

Calcio storico

One of the perks of living in Florence, instead of just visiting for a few days, is that you can take advantage of the various events that happen throughout the year. Today, we went to a “calcio storico” game in Santa Croce square, a game dating back to the 16^th century. Even though calcio is the word for soccer in Italian, this sport was more like a cross between football and rugby, with some wrestling thrown in. The tournament pits the four quarters of the city against each other, the winner getting a live cow (or the equivalent in steaks, I’ve read different things). We were seated in the green section, though the San Giovanni quarter of the city didn’t end up being able to field a team, and so their team was replaced by a purple team of free agents. I guess their motivation was therefore not high enough, and “our” team ended up clearly losing to the red team from Santa Maria Novella. Before and after the game, there was a procession of people in historical costume, which was quite photogenic when combined with the backdrop of Santa Croce church.