Stadio Pietrangeli, as it has been so many times in the past, was the place for a tennis fan to be on Wednesday. From morning until night, as cameras panned over the Foro Italico, the sport’s most famous Fascist-era marble arena looked like a beehive at the center of the grounds. Everyone was buzzing around it, trying to find a way in.
There’s something special about a packed Pietrangeli. When it’s crowded, the amphitheater-style seating along the sidelines forces everyone to lean forward. At the top, underneath the towering, blank-eyed statues that surround the court, the sunken arena is open to anyone who wants to walk up and have a look; during an exciting match, the standing room there might run five rows deep. Compared to the vast, security-obsessed stadiums that we build in the U.S. today, the bleachers here are claustrophobically close to the players. When an Italian is playing, the fans are enthusiastic and animated enough that they become a third presence in a match.
In the good-old, bad-old days of the 1970s, these fans also had a way of making their presence felt—painfully. The Romans were famous for throwing whatever came to hand in the direction of an Italian player's opponent; coins and soda cans were popular projectiles. Now, in this more civilized sporting century, the fans tend to keep their expressions of support mostly vocal.
The effect of seeing a match in Pietrangeli at its most energized reminds me of a scene near the beginning of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, in which Anita Ekberg, who plays a movie star, gives a press conference when she arrives for a visit to Rome. The film exposes the artificiality and frivolousness of the event, and of the celebrity industry in general. Yet despite this, the scene is also fun. Sometimes, thankfully, life can be nothing more than a game.
This is how tennis looks inside Pietrangeli. The stadium and its city link us—or at least those of us who see it through tourists' eyes—to the Colosseum and its gladiators. When we think of sports there, we think of them as dangerous tests of strength on the one hand, and bread-and-circus diversions on the other. In this setting, tennis takes on those same aspects. At the Italian Open, the matches feel staged yet necessary; overly dramatic, yet somehow kept in their proper perspective.
Pietrangeli was once the biggest stadium on the grounds, but after a major rebuilding effort over the last decade, it’s now third on the list. That makes it a natural home for Italy’s best players. Step inside the amphitheater and you might hear the faint, 40-year-old echoes of “Ahhhh-dri-aaaano!” still swirling there. That would be Adriano Pannatta, a Florentine who was likely the last tennis champion to regularly light up a Muratti cigarette after a victory. He was also the country’s most stylish—and thus greatest—tennis hero. Pannatta was the last male player to win in Rome, in 1976, and his successors have long lived in his shadow there.
