Torino

Turin builds cars and it buries its dead in ceremony, and Torino carries a bit of both. What Torino did with that inheritance, between 1942 and 1949, still sets the terms for how the club is discussed. That Grande Torino side won five straight championships, with Valentino Mazzola wearing the armband. On 4 May 1949 the plane carrying the entire squad went down at Superga, on the hill overlooking the stadium. The club did not win the league again for twenty-seven years, until 1975–76, a gap that outlasted most of the people who remembered the crash firsthand.

The stadium sits close to where the aircraft came down, and it now carries the name Stadio Olimpico Grande Torino — 28,177 seats. The colour is maroon, granata, and it gives the club its nickname. There have been seven league titles in total and five Coppa Italia wins, plus a UEFA Cup final in 1992 lost to Ajax on away goals.

The organisation itself is not unbroken: bankruptcy in 2005 forced the old club out of the league, and what plays now is a refounded Torino Football Club that started back in Serie B. Urbano Cairo has owned it since that refounding. Against Juventus, the derby is called the Derby della Mole, and the divide gets framed along old class lines — Torino as the workers' team, Juventus as the industrialists'. The name from the post-war years that people still bring up first when asked who Torino produced after the crash is Luigi Meroni.