“The Turin team is no more. Gone, burnt, exploded … The squad died in action, like an assault unit that left its trenches during the war and never returned,” reported the evening edition of the Turin daily La Stampa on 4 May 1949. The words were written by its journalist Vittorio Pozzo. A year earlier, he had coached the Italian team at the Summer Olympics in London. He knew all the players of the then unbeatable Italian team, affectionately known as the Grande Torino. Now their bodies lay beneath the magnificent basilica that rose on the Superga hill near Turin.
Late in the afternoon of the same day, Sauro Toma, the defender of Turin the Great, saw a crowd of people outside the building where he lived. Some he knew, others he did not, but all of them were completely out of their depth.
Sauro was not in the best of moods. Injured and unable to play, he and his colleagues were unable to go to Lisbon, where they had left three days earlier, on 1 May 1949. Benfica captain Jose Ferreira was coming to the end of a rich sporting career and, as he was a good friend of Torino captain Valentino Mazzola, they decided to mark the occasion with a friendly match.
Four days before the game, the club’s management was clear: if the result of the game against Internazionale is such that Torino does not lose its advantage and is still firmly in the lead four games before the end of the national football championship, they can go. If they lose, they stay at home.
Fatal rain and clouds
The result was a draw and that was enough. The golden team was unbeaten in its last 18 games, but had not lost at home since 1943, or 93 games in a row. Its members went to Lisbon, beat Benfica and boarded a Fiat G-212CP of the Italian airline Aeritalia at 09.05 on 4 May 1949. At 13.15 they landed in Barcelona, refuelled and moved on.
In the afternoon they were in Italian airspace. It was dark over Turin. It was raining miserably, and thick clouds covered the surrounding hills and mountains. Visibility was so poor that it seemed as if night had fallen prematurely. Near the 674-metre-high Superga hill, the pilot could see only 40 metres in front of him.
Superga was a popular excursion spot for Turin residents. It offers a magnificent view of the Alps and the Basilica, built of striking yellow bricks, which was for many years the official crypt of the Savoy royal family. It was designed by the architect Filippo Juvara, but after 1946, when the Italians abolished the monarchy by referendum and the royal family had to emigrate, it was hardly used for worship any more.
But it was still indispensable for pilots. It became their point of reference to know when it was time to descend to Turin Airport, 12 kilometres away. That afternoon, there were not many people near it, but a farmer was walking around. A plane was flying right over his head, he reported, and a few other eyewitnesses reported hearing the same plane circling overhead but not seeing it in the thick fog.
At 17.12, a car stopped suddenly outside a restaurant in a small square next to the basilica. The driver had to make an urgent phone call. He called the state news agency and reported what he had seen. The reporter on duty did not believe him. He should have. The Fiat G-212 had indeed crashed into the stone wall behind the basilica.
Nearby trees were engulfed by fire. There were no survivors. Bodies, luggage and wreckage were scattered all around. Firefighters and police arrived at the scene. They could do nothing. Soon, despite the bad weather, the townspeople started to climb the hill. The rain was falling loudly and they were walking in silence in a spontaneous procession. There were thousands of them who had to see the terrible news for themselves to believe it.
The plane was carrying 18 members of their popular football club. Only three remained at home: Sauro Toma because of an injury, Laszlo Kubala because of family commitments and Luigi Giuliano because he was unable to arrange his passport. Two Torino coaches, three club officials, three journalists and one translator also lost their lives at Superga. Together with the four crew members, the number of victims was 31.
You were masters
But that day, the Italians didn’t just lose the best team in the country. Il Grande Torino was such a great club in the 1940s that not only did it win four national titles in a row, but virtually every player who represented Italy in the national team came from the club. There were always at least 9 of them, and in the match against Hungary in 1947, 11 Torino players played for the Italian national team. Their team-mate was not only a goalkeeper.
Now there was no one left. One of the first to arrive on the scene was journalist Vittorio Pozzo. Once a player himself, he now holds the distinction of being the only coach to have led the Italian national team at two World Cups, in 1934 and 1938.
He knew the actors well, which made him ideal for the gruesome task: identifying the bodies. The circumstances were a little less ideal: the fire had left some of the deceased so disfigured that they could not be identified. They could only be identified by the identity papers found in their pockets or by the rings on their hands.
There was complete confusion. Some media reported that the team captain, Valentino Mazzola, was not among the victims. That he had missed his plane in Lisbon because of the fever. Others were able to say that he had got off in Barcelona when they stopped to refuel. Both of these pieces of information were incorrect. He was on board and he died together with his team-mates. They were all under 30 and all at the height of their careers.
The deceased were buried two days after the accident. It was a cold and rainy day, but more than half a million people gathered in the streets. Tears mingled with raindrops as they watched the mournful procession of coffins placed on open vehicles and covered with flags.
Ottorino Barassi, Director of the Italian Football Federation, addressed each of the coffins as if the person lying in it were still alive. Then, with tears in his eyes, he announced the 1948/49 national champions:
“Before your mangled remains leave us forever, before we all say our final goodbyes, I would like to do an honourable duty. I announce to you, dear brothers, that Turin has won its fifth national championship. Once again you have won it. I will continue to see the boys who watched you through the fence of the pitch and learned from you the subtle art of football – for you were masters – and I will see in them that they learned from you loyalty, will and a deep love of sport. You will be all that.”
In reality, Torino are still four games away from winning the national title. At the request of Milan, Inter and others, the Italian Football Federation awarded them the title as a mark of respect. They played the next four matches anyway. Torino sent their young players onto the pitch and their opponents did the same out of solidarity.
Torino’s first match was against Genoa. The fans were still in complete shock. The match began in deafening silence, but soon the shouts of “Toro, Toro, Toro” rang out across the Philadelphia stadium where their heroes once ran. Torino defeated Genoa 4-0 to maintain the club’s unbeaten run on home soil.
But these youngsters never experienced the magic of coach Egri Erbstein like their late, older colleagues. The flag that covered his coffin was different from the others. It was Hungary. Erbstein survived the Holocaust, but four years after the end of the war, even the immense love of life that empowered him then did not help him to survive.
“In Egri Erbstein they had a divine teacher. This Hungarian was one of those people who smiles at you and wins you over at first sight. He was a man with exceptional communication skills”, former actor Héctor Ettore Puricelli said of him.
He was appreciated, not only for his exceptional humanity, but also for his professionalism. He was the first “scientist” of the Italian play. He transformed the players’ attitude to it, their physical training and their diet. He was the first to pay attention to a player’s individual nutritional needs according to his height and energy consumption. He introduced fruit and vegetables on the menu. He was also the first to introduce training twice a day, although until then it was believed that this was not necessary.
What happened?
But now his coffin was part of the funeral procession. As it disappeared from the eyes of the mourners, more than 30,000 people took to Superga in a spontaneous procession to say goodbye to their heroes there.
The country is in a state of grief. “People tried to pretend that nothing had happened. They tried to move on, but it was not easy. There was not a single person in Italy who was not affected by this terrible event,” wrote journalist Renato Tavella.
Yet this was also the time when they had to find the cause of the accident. The pilot, Pierluigi Meroni, was anything but a novice. He was awarded two silver medals and three gold medals for his bravery in the air during the war. He knew the route he was flying well, and the environment of Turin even better. The aircraft he was flying was new, but it is true that it had no radar.
However, the three separate teams – military, civilian and legal – that investigated the accident came to the same conclusion: the crash was the result of human error caused by extremely bad weather conditions, not technical shortcomings of the aircraft.
Meroni, like the other pilots, probably wanted to use the basilica as a landmark, but due to the visibility of only 40 metres, he probably saw it too late.
Some witnesses claimed that the plane circled in the air as if the pilot was trying to find the right path. He seemed to have been confused, although he was clearly not worried, because he radioed the airport tower staff to make him coffee just four minutes before he crashed into the stone walls surrounding the basilica.
If he had flown just 10 metres higher, he would have flown over the wall. And so the speculation began to spread. Was it really the pilot’s fault, or was the altimeter malfunctioning and Meroni thought he was flying higher than he was? Unable to accept the loss, people kept wondering. Why was the plane not diverted to the much better Milan airport? Why was he allowed to land in Turin, even though the weather was disastrous? And why did the pilot not ask to land in Milan?
They found the answer: because the players wanted to avoid customs. There is no evidence of this, but rumours spread that players from Portugal were carrying diamonds they did not want to declare to customs. One story has it that a Bela Egresi player, who was not yet under contract to Torino and therefore not allowed to travel, even though he was training with the club, gave money to his colleague Juilius Schubert to buy diamonds for him.
In post-war Italy, shortages were widespread, so footballers often bought things abroad and smuggled them back home, either to sell them at a higher price or to give them to relatives who couldn’t afford them. Most often, though, they trafficked in cigarettes and alcohol because both were hard to come by.
For example, the police once stopped a bus carrying Torino players returning from a return match. In between, they were buying some smuggled cigarettes. Guglielmo Gabetto filled his boots with them. The police found the illicit cigarettes, confiscated them and took away Gabetto’s identity papers.
She allowed him to return home with his teammates, but refused to return his documents. The police had a request: they wanted Gabetto to play one match with their team, but it happened to be at the same time as one of Torino’s national championship matches. The club’s management had difficulty convincing the police that it was more important than theirs.
Players from Hungary and other former Eastern Bloc clubs, for example, have had even more problems. In their own countries, they were not allowed to earn much more than other citizens for reasons of equality, so they had to make ends meet by hustling, with the help of their counterparts from the West.
How much is a footballer’s life worth?
But none of that mattered now, especially not to the Torino management. It sued the airline, claiming that it was entitled to higher compensation because football players are worth more than “ordinary” victims because, as players, they have a certain material value. The action moved from court to court until a higher court ruled that compensation was only justified for people and property and did not include the additional “sporting value” of the players.
But for the Italians, these players were worth much more than money. L’Unita newspaper said: “All Italy was littered with charred corpses.” The accident united them regardless of their background, their political beliefs or their loyalty to any other club, because for them, Grande Torino was more than just a football team.
World War II may have ended, but the stigma of Mussolini still clung to the Italians and their football. It was no secret that the Duce was deeply involved in Italian football.
Bologna won five national titles between 1929 and 1941. It also helped that the Italian Football Federation was led from Bologna by the fascist Leandro Arpinati. He pressed the city authorities to help the club financially and personally supervised the construction of Bologna’s Dell Ara football stadium.
Nevertheless, Hungarian Jew Arpad Weisz was unstoppable in his victories. In 1938, when the fascists, following the example of Nazi Germany, introduced anti-Jewish laws and banned Jews from holding public office, which they believed included the medical, legal and teaching professions, Weisz was sacked. Even Leandro Arpinati was unable to protect him. Arpad Weisz died during the war.
In 1934, Italy hosted the World Cup. Mussolini wanted to win, but the law forbade foreign footballers of Italian descent to play for the national team. Mussolini tweaked it a little for the occasion: suddenly, foreign stars of Italian origin, especially Argentinian, could play for Italy. The Italians won the championship.
Coach Vittorio Pozzo was also instrumental in the victory. Under his guidance, the Italians won in 1938 and the tournament at the infamous Berlin Olympics two years earlier. Even though he was with the national team from 1929 to 1948, he never got rid of the fascist flavour, and neither did the Italian national team.
At the 1938 World Cup final in Paris, spectators saw a mild fascist salute from Italian captain Giuseppe Meazza before he hoisted the Jules Rimet trophy, named after the FIFA president between 1921 and 1954. The trophy was awarded from 1930, when the first World Cup was organised, until 1970. Four years later, it was replaced by a new one.
Later, the players claimed that they supported the government of the day because they had to, but that they were only interested in football. Nevertheless, they had problems abroad: in the 1930s they were allegedly everywhere associated with the fascist regime, whether they played as a club or a national team. During the 1938 World Cup final, anti-fascist protests reportedly broke out in Marseille and the police had to intervene.
After the Second World War, they had to face their inglorious past and the devastation left by the war. In those years when it was unwise to admit that you were Italian, Grande Torino’s victories were not just football achievements, but the only thing that made them proud.
Given the importance of Torino for the Italian self-image and the fact that a whole team, which was almost the national team, was killed in a plane crash, the Supergo, as it is popularly called, is considered by some to be the most tragic accident in an otherwise relatively accident-rich sporting history.
The Superga disaster was positive, at least insofar as it finally stopped Italian football being associated with fascism, but at the same time it was extremely negative, because Italian football was almost non-existent after it. The national team did not play at least decently until the 1970 World Cup. In 1950, 1954 and 1962, for example, it was knocked out in the first round. It did not even qualify for the 1958 World Cup.
The accident also left deep psychological wounds. In 1950, because of what was called the “Superga psychosis”, the national team, led at the time by Ferruccio Novo, President of Turin, travelled by boat to the fourth World Championship and the first since 1938.
Ferruccio Novo bought the club in 1939. He was an entrepreneur and former player, but also a sports official with a vision. He brought in football experts, introduced a business approach to management that had never been seen before, discovered promising young talent, looked at good players at other clubs and, together with his team, made Torino unbeatable.
He was also the club’s president on that unfortunate day in May 1949, when it lost more or less all its players, coaches and officials. He did not want to risk losing the national team yet, but he put the players on a boat. It took them 14 days to reach Brazil.
Most of them were plagued by seasickness all the way. They were unable to train on deck. They arrived at the finish line completely exhausted and unprepared for the rigours of the race ahead of them. They had already lost the first one, against Sweden. In the second, they beat Paraguay, but that meant nothing. They begged for a flight home. They were home 35 hours after they had left Brazil.
Boom! Superga!
Italian football took a decade and a half to recover. The first sign of revival was Milan’s success in beating Benfica of Portugal in the 1963 European Championship final in London, although it was not until the 1970s that the Italians really recovered.
In that decade and two years later, Torino derbies were always charged with emotion. When the announcer read out the names of their club’s players, the fans pretended to be aeroplanes: they spread their arms, swayed left and right and muttered softly as if they were falling: When the announcer finished announcing the players and the coach’s name was spoken, they let out a collective gasp: “Boom! Superga!”
The accident was never forgotten, and with it the meaning of Superga Hill, where the dream of Turin the Great ended, was changed forever. On that fateful day, the Basilica became a shrine and a place of remembrance for the Grande Torino.
A year after the tragedy, a memorial plaque was unveiled on the hill. Among the crowd that gathered at the site were Sandro and Ferraccio, sons of Valentino Mazzola, the legendary captain of the ill-fated team.
He started his professional career behind the conveyor belt of the Alfa Romeo factory to help support his family. He could only get behind the ball on the factory field, but fortune smiled on him when the military took him to Venice and the cruise liner Confienza. There he was spotted by football insiders and invited to the Venezia, where he more or less sat on the bench, but was not forgotten. He slowly worked his way up the ranks until, in Turin, he became an inspirational leader and one of the first modern reserve players.
The fans loved him and so did his club. In 1999, on the 50th anniversary of the accident, a memorial service was organised. Former players and city dignitaries came. Afterwards, the former Torino players played a friendly match in their club’s original jerseys. As always, the whole city took part in the commemoration.
Emotions never faded, as they never do in true devotion. Francesco Cimminelli, Torino’s owner from 2000 to 2005, thus unleashed widespread anger when he branded the fans who climb the Superga every 4th of May as a mark of remembrance as jerks. He was never forgiven and never forgotten. For Torino fans, the Superga was and remains a sacred place.
Torino Football Club has never reached its former glory. In fact, it has never even come close. In 2003, it had the worst season in its long history. After it, its fans made a spontaneous pilgrimage to Superga. 50 000 people took part in the so-called Torino Pride March.
If we went to a museum, we could reminisce about better times. For example, there is an original trumpet that a railway worker and a passionate Torino fan blew when Torino needed a goal. His call heralded the start of the “blood-red quarter of an hour”, or the 15 minutes in which Torino smashed their opponents. Legend has it that Valentino Mazzola then “rolled up his sleeves”, shouted “let’s go” and Torino won.
