The Italy national football team (Italian: Nazionale di calcio dell'Italia), represents Italy in association football and is controlled by the Italian Football Federation (FIGC), the governing body for football in Italy. Italy is the second most successful national team in the history of the World Cup behind Brazil, having won four titles (1934, 1938, 1982, 2006). They have also won one European championship (1968), one Olympic football tournament (1936) and two Central European International Cups.
The traditional colour of the national team (as well as all Italian national teams and athletes officially representing Italy) is azure blue (azzurro, in Italian), due to the "Azzurro Savoia" (Savoy Blue), the colour traditionally linked to the royal dynasty which unified Italy in 1861, and maintained in the official standard of the Italian President.
The team does not have a designated "home stadium" like certain national teams. The primary training ground is at the FIGC headquarters in Coverciano, Florence and the team plays their home matches at various stadiums throughout Italy.
Read more about Italy National Football Team: Historical Kits, Coaches, Recent Results and Forthcoming Fixtures, Head-to-Head Records Against Other Countries
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“You can’t be a Real Country unless you have A BEER and an airline—it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a BEER.”
—Frank Zappa (1940–1993)
“In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed—they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!”
—Orson Welles (1915–84)
“We love the indomitable bellicose patriotism that sets you apart; we love the national pride that guides your muscularly courageous race; we love the potent individualism that doesn’t prevent you from opening your arms to individualists of every land, whether libertarians or anarchists.”
—Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944)
“In football they measure forty-yard sprints. Nobody runs forty yards in basketball. Maybe you run the ninety-four feet of the court; then you stop, not on a dime, but on Miss Liberty’s torch. In football you run over somebody’s face.”
—Donald Hall (b. 1928)
“I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bed-fellow in that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its bed and would fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency and bad dreams; or I was waked by the cracking of the ground by the frost, as if some one had driven a team against my door, and in the morning would find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch wide.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)