FC Torino

FC Torino
Thursday, July 23, 2009
7:10 PM

While Turin is known for Juventus, the most successful club in Serie A with 29 championships, FC Torino, the other club, also oozes tradition. Think of the Lakers and the Clippers if the Clippers had won a bunch of championships in the 70s or something. In 1949 FC Torino was the top team in Serie A and 10 of their 11 players were starters on the national team. After playing an exhibition match in Lisbon their plane crashed into a large hill that overlooks the city and has a large basilica on top of it. Oddly enough their top player had not been on the plane as he had received a red card and a subsequent 1 game suspension the game prior. Even stranger is that he died when he was hit by a car driven by the man who would eventually become the president of the club. To this day FC Torino is considered by some to be 'cursed' as a result of these unfortunate events.

After checking that out we headed to a park to play some basketball. It was a composite court with an outdoor/indoor soccer field next to it and when we got there a group of Italian kids were arguing with Peruvian men about who was to get usage of the court. There are few things more entertaining to watch than 12 year olds smoking cigarettes yelling at grown men. Luckily it seemed that reason won out and the Peruvians got the court and played a rousing game of soccer. Since 2 of the guys that were supposed to come had flaked, I taught Carlo and Daniel how to play 21, which can be a rough game to explain even to native English speakers. I went through it really slow and we played a few rounds and I think they enjoyed it. After that we played H-O-R-S-E which neither of them had ever played which was pretty surprising.

From there we headed back, got dinner, washed up, then got picked up by Carlo's friend and went downtown to Daniel's house. We had a couple drinks then hit up the bars and what not. Italian nightlife is vibrant but still kinda strange. The ratios across the board were pretty terrible but it seems that’s on account of Italian guys being really pushy. As things winded down we got a few slices of pizza for 2 euro which were actually in the American style which was pleasant.