Calcio Storico

Today, other Italians may think of the Florentines as a rather effete, innocuous sort. But each June they manage to summon up some of their old medieval berserker spirit in Piazza Santa Croce with the rib-crunching violence of the football game called the Calcio Storico (Also known as Calcio Fiorentino or Calcio in Costume).

Its origins go back to the Middle Ages, if not further. Every Italian city had some sort of communal game of this nature. Florence's became something special on 17 February 1530, at a time when the friendless republic of Florence had been besieged by the army of Emperor Charles V for three months.

People were cold, hungry and miserable, but they were grimly determined to repel the Emperor’s troops, who could look down over Piazza Santa Croce from the surrounding hills. It was then decided to give them something worth looking at, to show them exactly what the Florentines thought of their siege: they played a rowdy, noisy game of football.