Get the ball rolling on independence
Sport can be “a vehicle of cultural identity”, according to Salvatore Mangano, president of the newly formed Sicilian national team on the occasion of its first official competition. The team, alongside five other teams representing as many other “nations without a state”, is competing for the Mediterranean Futsal Cup 2021 in Sanremo (see a video of the presentation here). The event has been organised by Francesco Zema of Conifa, the organisation that brings together the representatives of communities and peoples who want to voice their cry for representation through sport, and football in particular. Sicily is Conifa’s newest member, having been welcomed into the fold last June, and is the perfect paradigm of the dynamics at play between politics, linguistic and cultural identity, and sport. “Conifa is a platform for people, so we can educate the world about their history, tradition and also of course show their ability on the pitch” says Per-Anders Blind, global president of the association of federations.
Fabio Petrucci, general secretary of the Sicilia Football Association, echoes this, and affirms that “the Sicilian people is a people who has an extremely strong identity and yet also an extremely low level of awareness of this”. He goes on to explain the main purpose of this project: “through football, we want to promote a process of rediscovery of our national identity and self-esteem that is currently lacking and that is the key to start again and profit from the countless opportunities that our land has to offer”. This journey started on the 15th of May 2020, the anniversary date of the Sicilian statutes of autonomy, when a group of like-minded people, led by Mangano, decided it was time to put ink on paper and constitute officially a sport association. Since then, the Sicilia Football Association has built its foundations with a mostly subterranean work that culminated in June this year with the Conifa Membership and today with the participation in the first official futsal competition. We will have to wait for 2022 to cheer the first 11-a-side football formation on the pitch, as everything has been slowed down by the pandemic.
During the Mediterranean Futsal Cup launch event in Sanremo, two out of three official kits have been presented. They bear names like Vespiru and Fidiricu, which are immensely meaningful for the Sicilian people and many elements of the whole graphical identity of the association are borrowed by the long history of the Kingdom of Sicily as well as the important moments when its independence has been put into question. The first one commemorates the Sicilian Vespers of 1282 when the Sicilian people rose against the Angevin rule that was established as a consequence of the defeat of the last representative of the Norman-Swabian dynasty, king Manfred, at the hands of Charles I of Anjou at the Battle of Benevento (1266). “Our is a message of unity, that same unity that the Sicilian people showed in its finest hours” says Petrucci, “just as in 1282, when the Sicilian cities -united- pushed away the invader who had ignored and voided the constitutions of the Kingdom”. The second kit remembers Frederic III of Sicily, the king who maybe more than any other Sicilian ruler had been a strenuous defender of the right of the island-kingdom to exist, despite huge international pressure against it and a powerful coalition of enemies, in what Petrucci does not hesitate to define “a splendid saga of the union between the monarch and his people”.
Both during the presentation and throughout the tournament, the Sicilian representative has been introduced with the notes of its chosen anthem, the well-known cabaletta Suoni la tromba from the opera I Puritani written by Sicilian composer Vincenzo Bellini. The opera, one of Queen Victoria’s favourites according to biographer Helen Rappaport, translated the political themes of the fight for liberty and patriotic passion from the suffered reality of the 1830s to an idealised scenario set during the English Civil War. The aria, which has been dubbed a “hymn to liberty” is certainly well suited to represent the energy and the passion of the Sicilian national team, and its musical nature (compared to the Marseillaise by musicologist Mary Ann Smart because of the similar compelling character) will no doubt enhance the hopes of the organisers of rekindling the flames of Sicilian independence.
