Switch to Olimpico stadium realises Italian rugby’s dream

FOR the Italian Rugby Federation, playing this season’s home games at Rome’s Olympic Stadium is the realisation of a long-held dream – one they have cherished since the days when they were outsiders looking in enviously on what was then the Five Nations Championship.

Indeed, when FIR President Giancarlo Dondi took a group of Scottish rugby writers on a tour of the stadium back in 1998, it was clear that he and his colleagues planned a move to the ground as a sign that Italian rugby had arrived.

The Stadio Flaminio, where the pitch when we visited was recovering from a recent showjumping event, had a certain faded charm. But the Olimpico was the ground at the heart of the Eternal City, so playing there would place rugby, however fleetingly, at the centre of Italian sporting life.

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The hope was to move to the bigger ground as soon as the size of crowd demanded it. The Flaminio could hold around 30,000, but only 8,000 were under cover, and the FIR were acutely aware that it could not compare to the national stadiums of the other countries whom they joined to constitute the Six Nations in 2000.

But results in the ensuing years were not good enough to generate mass enthusiasm for rugby, which still finds it hard to expand beyond traditional pockets of strength such as Treviso, where Italy previously played. So the hoped-for move was delayed, and the ground which hosted the 1960 Olympic Games, and where Dundee United were disgracefully treated by Roma in their 1984 European Cup semi-final, remained unfamiliar with the joys of rugby.

Truth be told, the Olimpico, though bigger and grander than the compact and bijou Flaminio, was a bit rundown itself. It had undergone major reconstruction, including the addition of a roof, in time for the 1990 World Cup, but by 2000 it needed more than a lick of paint.

It got it in 2008, in time for the following year’s Champions League final. And at the same time, bowing to a bit of political pressure, the FIR decided to stay at the Flaminio rather than move Italy’s home games to Florence.

That decision was based on an agreement that the Flaminio should be renovated, with a new capacity of 42,000, in time to host the Azzurri’s games in this year’s championship against England and Scotland. Needless to say, that renovation did not go ahead according to its original schedule, leaving the Olympic Stadium as the obvious alternative.

It was a snowbound ground which hosted the England match, and the dream venue did not produce a dream start for the Italians, who lost 19-15. But the crowd, at 72,000, was at last a vindication of the dream nurtured by Dondi since the closing years of the last century.

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