This obscure Italian sport inspired modern American football

Daniel Stone

Florence: Even though you’ve probably never heard of calcio storico, the chances are nearly 100 percent that you’ve played some version of it. The Italian sport created during the Italian Renaissance is the original goal game, where two teams fight on a field to defend their side and invade their opponent’s goal. Soccer, hockey, lacrosse, rugby, and American football are all iterations on the same theme.

With calcio storico, however, the fighting is real. And not a byproduct of the game, as with hockey or football, but the main sport itself. “It’s why people come,” says Carla Vannucci, an Italian photographer who grew up watching matches, and then, about three years ago, decided to photograph them.

Under the rules, two teams of 27 players each start the game on different sides of a rectangular field. A ball is placed in the middle. For 50 minutes, the men with bulging muscles do whatever it takes to get the ball into the opposing team’s net. Participation was once limited to native-born residents of Florence, but officials now allow each team two outside ringers. The points matter, but the crowd’s attention tends to fixate on the hand-to-hand combat. At one of the matches in June, one of the neighborhood teams recruited a professional mixed martial artist (MMA) athlete from the U.K. The man fought until he was covered in blood, wobbling woozy on the field as though about to faint, and then found a new opponent for more battle.