Virtus Bologna

In 2003 the books caught up with Virtus Bologna. It took until 2005 to get back to the top flight, and the return said as much about the club as any of the banners hanging in the arena.

The basketball section traces to 1927, grown out of a gymnastics society founded decades earlier in Bologna, and by the late 1990s it stood among the continent's benchmark sides, taking the EuroLeague in 1998 and again in 2001 under Ettore Messina, with Predrag Danilović running the offence. Manu Ginóbili also came through the club before his career carried him to the NBA, and the academy later produced Marco Belinelli. Domestically, Virtus has been champion of Italy seventeen times, a run stretching from the immediate postwar seasons of the late 1940s through to an unusually long span for any side to keep returning to the top.

Sponsors have rewritten the name on the shirt over the years — Sinudyne, Knorr, Kinder, Segafredo among them — but the crowd still calls the team Vu Nere, black shirts, a nod to the colours rather than whoever is paying for them that season. They play at the Virtus Arena, a temporary home in the Fiera district due to give way to a permanent hall built for the club.

None of it carries the heat of the Bologna derby. Fortitudo Bologna share the city, and a home game against them is treated differently from any other date on the calendar; the meetings with Olimpia Milano, the other heavyweight name in Italian basketball, run it close but come from a different kind of rivalry, built on titles rather than streets.