Italy's win against England in the Euro final symbolises 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 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.

Even before the game, the country was revved up. The Wimbledon final, in which Berrettini managed to take a set from Novak Djokovic, was a warm up to the main event. Waiters and waitresses, their faces painted with the Italian colors, served copious amounts of beer to fans waving Italian flags.

The outdoor cinema in the Trastevere section of Rome interrupted its regularly scheduled programming ("A Perfect Day" by Ferzan Ozpetek) for the game, and the turnout was considerably larger, with thousands cramming the square. Fans flooded into the big squares, nuns stood in front of televisions, and families stocked up on flags and air horns.

"She was born on the day Italy won the World Cup," said Carlo Alberto Pietrangeli, 52, about Ester Aquilani, 15, who wore a flag draped over her shoulders. So did her cousin, Lorenzo Ciurleo, 12, who had refused to wave a flag until the finals for fear of bringing bad luck.

"If we had lost," he said with a gulp.

But lose they did not, and if anyone expected to get any sleep in the coming days, they could basically forget about it.

If past celebrations, most recently the team's World Cup victory in 2006, matched Sunday night's revelry in decibel level, they did not have the emotional undercurrent and pent-up frustration.

"The national team is a symbol of a country that in difficult moments has always known how to get up again," Roberto Mancini, the team's coach, said before the tournament began and while Italy was still in lockdown.

But no one really expected that Italy and its mostly young and inexperienced team would be playing in the final at Wembley, where Mancini, during his playing days, lost the 1992 European Cup final with his Sampdoria team against Barcelona.

Nonetheless, the team's captain, veteran defender Giorgio Chiellini, had noted that the team had a "chemistry" that was "a kind of magic." And as the team kept winning, more and more Italians started to believe.

After excruciating penalty kicks and a diving block by Donnarumma made Italy champions of Europe, England's fans couldn't believe it.

The men's team had not won a major championship or even been to a major final in 55 years, but this team had promise and youth and diversity and a social conscience and seemed to reflect a complex, multicultural England that was sometimes lost in the tribal debates over Brexit. The team united a country that spent much of the past 4 1/2 years arguing with itself over its split with the European Union, and much of the past 15 months under coronavirus-driven lockdowns.