Facciamoli Azzurri!

Thursday's Gazzetta dello Sport was blue in colour (as opposed to the usual pink) and had a fascinating title: "facciamoli azzurri". 

"Facciamoli azzurri" or "let's make them blue" is a play on words which is based on the Italian saying "facciamoli neri" (let's make them black, meaning let's beat them) but replacing the colour black with blue, which is azzurri in Italian, since that's the colour of our football shirts and also the nickname of our national team ("gli azzurri").

Let's make them black could be interpreted as a racist statement, but it is not. It simply refers to making your opponent black with bruises.

Yet, this did not stop Tuttosport, an Italian sports newspaper, from using that same expression in a different contest, after Balotelli's two goal vs Germany in the 2012 European Championship.

We made them black, read the title, with a picture of our world class player Mario Balotelli. 

I remember seeing this on twitter and thinking "Oh my god, this is a fake surely".

In a country like the UK, a title like that would probably lead to people protesting in the streets, the newspaper receiving a massive fine and the top management of the newspaper having to resign. 

Not in Italy though. Here there were some talks, some people thought it was a bit extreme, some labelled it as racist, but overall the reaction was relatively mild.

Is that because Italians are racist then? 

I could write pages and pages on this topic, but in a nutshell I would say that surely there are some who are. But they are a relatively small proportion of the population (at least I want to hope).

Unfortunately those idiots exist everywhere.

We then have another category of people, who are the result of ignorance. People who grew up surrounded solely by other Italians and who had very limited exposure to people of other ethnicities. These kind of people sadly represent a very large part of the country. These are people who simply do not know any better. They grew up in a country where people with a different background are the ones illegally selling you necklaces and bracelets at the beach. The ones who bother you trying to sell you a €1 rose every time to dine out.

Sadly they just live in their small world.

I could be one of them today, if it wasn't for some evolutions in my life which brought me to different places, made me meet very diverse people who opened my eyes and made me a better person.

Part of the reasons why we have the above situation is our lack of colonial history, which didn't make our population diverse enough. However things are slowly changing and more and more foreigners are starting to integrate in our society. Thanks to them, hopefully one day not too distant from now things will change and we will not see such titles in our newspapers and our country will be a lot better!