Fiamme Oro

Twice a year Rome stops to watch the Derby della Capitale, and Fiamme Oro line up against Lazio Rugby 1927. The rivalry sits at the centre of the club's identity in a way its current ground never could.

The club did not start in Rome at all. State Police officers formed the section in Padua in 1955, and it was there, not in the capital, that Fiamme Oro built the record it still trades on: five Italian Championships between 1957 and 1968. Relegation in 1978 broke that run, and the police kept the shirt alive by re-forming the section in Milan in 1985 before settling it in Rome two years later, attached to the National Rugby Academy at the Ponte Galeria barracks.

That police lineage still shapes the club's colours, crimson, sky blue and gold, and its nickname, I Cremisi. It also explains the ground: the Centro Sportivo Polizia di Stato, whose rugby pitch is named for Renato Gamboni, holds only around 1,300 people.

Simone Favaro and Carlo Canna have carried the Fiamme Oro shirt into the national set-up in recent years, proof that a club training out of a police barracks can still produce Italy internationals rather than just soldiering through the domestic league. For now, that domestic league is where the club's attention stays fixed, with the derby against Lazio the fixture that still decides how the season is remembered.