A Season with Verona (2002), Tim Parks’s account of a year on tour with the Italian football club Hellas Verona’s notorious travelling fans (motto ‘we have a dream in our heads, to burn the south’), contains a memorable scene in which Parks spots a teenage boy screaming abuse at some rival supporters before returning to the mobile to assure his mother that, no, they don’t have much homework that weekend. Here, doubtless, was the raw material for 17-year-old Hellas fan Mauro Duckworth, whose absence from his father’s investiture with the honorary freedom of the city is explained by his confinement in a Brescia police cell after a pitched battle with the local constabulary.
Mauro’s impending court case is, we rapidly infer, not the least of his 55-year-old multiple-murderer parent’s worries, for Verona, so long amenable to the furtherance of his schemes, looks to be closing ranks against him.
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