The national team beat England in the final of the European Championship soccer tournament, and the country wildly celebrated a win that seemed to symbolize renewal after adversity.
The eruption of sheer joy — and car honking and horn blowing and firework exploding and hugging, so much hugging — across Italy on Sunday after its national men’s soccer team defeated England to win the Euro 2020 tournament marked an extraordinary turnaround, not just for a recently beleaguered team, but also for a recently beleaguered country. But if Italy’s scrappy, indefatigable and improbably undefeated national team lifted the country’s spirits after multiple lockdowns and incalculable suffering brought by a brutal pandemic, it was only the latest signal of a national resurgence. Also on Sunday, Matteo Berrettini became the first Italian to play for the men’s singles championship at Wimbledon. Soon before he took the court, Pope Francis showed his face for the first time since undergoing major colon surgery. In May, the Roman rock group Maneskin won the Eurovision song competition. And Khaby Lame, a 21-year-old from near Turin, has one of the world’s most followed accounts on TikTok. Italy’s fortunes are also looking up in real, and not just symbolic, ways. In February, a political crisis led the country to ditch its struggling prime minister and allow the accession of Mario Draghi, a former president of the European Central Bank whose exalted international status helped elevate Italy from bit player on the European stage to a driving force. More than half the country has received a vaccination dose; restaurants, bars, parks and beaches have reopened. Billions of euros are headed the country’s way as part of an enormous European coronavirus bailout. Overhauls once thought unimaginable, including the paring of a paralyzing bureaucracy, now seem plausible. Those substantive changes may have put Italy in a stronger position compared to European neighbors in which political uncertainty and tension abound, but nothing brings the country together, or touches a communal, rapturous nerve, like a big national soccer victory. The inarticulate screams of Sunday night, its cheers for Leonardo Bonucci’s tying goal in the second half and Gianluigi Donnarumma’s two saves in the penalty shootout, its yelps from Roman balconies, Bergamo piazzas and Sicilian seasides translated into expressions of relief and of life returned.
