MILAN - "Who are Inter going to buy?" is the question Nerazzurri fans up and down the country ponder during the summer months. In January, too, nowadays. It's the same question fans of every other club ask themselves as the transfer window swings open and the dreaming can begin.
Transfers have always existed of course but in Italy the tradition of club officials all gathering in the same Milan-based hotel to thrash out deals, and with it the whole calciomercato circus, came about thanks to two individuals with ties to Inter and Palermo.
The first of these was one of the great geniuses of Italian football: Giuseppe 'Gipo' Viani.
Long before before guiding AC Milan to two league titles and a European Cup final in the late '50s, Viani plied his trade as a midfielder for Inter.
He joined Ambrosiana, as Inter were called at the time, from Treviso and won the Scudetto in his first season at the club, in 1929/30.
At the time the Nerazzurri were blessed with an array of brilliant individuals. Viani played alongside Fulvio Bernardini and Giuseppe Meazza, while Arpad Weisz directed from the dugout. In the years that followed he would be joined by Uruguayan World Cup winners Hector Scarone and Ernesto Mascheroni. It was a generation of superstars.
Gipo Viani was an intelligent a coach as he had been a player, although sadly his dream of managing Inter never came true. The permutations of life don't always take you down your preferred path.
He did, however, devise a novel and formidable defensive system that became a model for the whole of Italian football. He's also credited with inventing the libero (sweeper) role – although football historians still debate the matter to this day. What is certain is that the tactical set-up he formulated while at Salernitana and Lucchese – dubbed 'Vianema' – was something quite unlike anything seen before.
He then took the reins at Palermo, summoned by Raimondo Lanza di Trabia. Of noble origin and a notorious bon viveur (he spent many a Sicilian summer in the company of Hollywood star Errol Flynn and his many conquests included, so the rumour goes, a fling with Rita Hayworth), Lanza was also a controversial figure whose death remains shrouded in mystery (suicide or murder?).
In the early '50s he set out on a mission to turn Palermo into one of Italy's great clubs. He brought in Gipo Viani and the coach steered them into the upper reaches of the table. The entire city was in love with the team. In those parts, Masci-Boniforti-Buzzegoli rolls off the tongue much like Sarti-Burnich-Facchetti does in the black-and-blue half of Milan. Indeed, Buzzegoli, who played under Viani at Salernitana, is considered to have been the first sweeper in the Italian game.
Raimondo Lanza di Trabia stayed at Hotel Gallia when he was in Milan. Chronicles of his extravagant ways abound here too but most significantly it was here where he held long conversations with Viani – who had long been known as a wheeler dealer – about which players to buy. And it was here, in this fabulous hotel just a stone's throw from the Stazione Centrale, that Lanza would meet with club presidents, officials and intermediaries.
Gradually Hotel Gallia became the official headquarters for transfer business, and so it would remain for many years. Fans gathered outside hoping to hear the announcement of the latest big-name signing first. It fueled their dreams regardless of whether or not the rumoured move actually came off. Much like the transfer window does today. And it all started with Raimondo Lanza di Trabia and Gipo Viani in room 131 of Hotel Gallia.
Carlo Pizzigoni
