Volata

Volata is a ball game that was created by the fascist party in Italy as a subsitute for football and rugby

Football was quite popular in Spain, Italy and Germany when fascists came to power in each of these countries during the 1920s and 1930s. However, at the time football was still very much identified as an English game, since the rules for the game had been formalized in England, and the first organized sporting teams and associations orginated there. Although fascists idealized sport for its contribution to physical fitness, both Hitler and Mussolini hated football for its association as an English game and preferred instead sports that they deemed indigenous to their countries. (In Italy, Rugby was disfavored for similar reasons.) By contrast, Franco loved football and particularly the Spanish national team and, in the domestic La Liga, the club team Real Madrid.

Despite his antipathy for football, Hitler recognized both its popularity and propaganda value and gave grudging support for its play and for sustaining a national team. In Italy, however, there was an attempt to suppress football and rugby by susbtituting for them another game called Volata. This game was created by the national secretary of the Fascist Party, Augusto Turati, supposedly based on a form of football played in classical times and therefore indigenous to Italy. Starting in the late 1920s over 100 Volata clubs were formed into a league .

Volata (flow) was played by eight-man sides to rules that were a hydrid of football and handball.

Athough enjoying some initial popularity thanks to the steadfast support of Fascist sporting and cultural organizations, volata never caught on in football-mad Italy and in 1933 the effort was official abandoned, and all references to it expunged from party records. In the end, the invention of the game proved more damaging to Rugby's popularity and place in Italian sporting culture. Indeed, the enduring popularity of football caused Mussolini to completely change his attitude toward football and Italy hosted the 1934 World Cup, which was won by the hosts.

References

Making the Rugby World: Race, Gender, Commerce edited by Timothy J L Chandler and John Nauright(ISBN 0714648531). See especially pages 92-94. Book page: [link]

National Pastime: How Americans Play Baseball and the Rest of the World Plays Soccer by Stefan Szymanski, Andrew S Zimbalist (ISDN 0815782586) Book Page: [link]

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