At the end of October 1957, Pier Paolo Pasolini published a chronicle of the derby between Roma and Lazio in «l’Unità», the organ of the Italian Communist Party. It was the first time that an Italian intellectual published an article on sport in a general daily newspaper in which the culture of the fans was valued and presented in a positive way. With this text, Pasolini contributes to several cultural and social phenomena then underway in Italy at the beginning of the «economic miracle»: the irresistible rise of mass football culture in the peninsula, the blurring of the separation between elite culture and popular culture on the one hand and popular culture and mass culture on the other, the attention of the elites of the communist left to the new cultural forms in gestation.
Keywords: Football, Italy, Pasolini, Culture