«Siamo una squadra fortissimi»: La mediatizzazione della nazionale di calcio nella canzone italiana tra inni, pratiche musicali e identità

Abstract

This paper analyses the role of songs in the mediatization of the Italian national football team, adopting a historical-mediological approach that moves from the framework of the mediatization of sport, integrating together constructionist and historicist perspectives. Through a periodization by decade, from the 1970s to the most recent years, we will examine the lyrics, practices and forms of enjoyment of songs related to the Azzurri, showing how they have acted simultaneously as agents of history, narrative tools and sources for historical research. The investigation highlights two main trajectories: the top-down one, in which institutions and the media system propose official songs with paratextual and identity-building functions, and the bottom-up one, in which fans and users adapt and relocate existing songs, transforming them into collective anthems. The second trajectory is dominant at the enunciative level, which is expressed in an increasingly performative dimension that ensures every use of these musical objects becomes an opportunity for identity, social, collective and cultural renegotiation. In this intertwining, the song emerges as a transmedia device capable of accompanying and co-constructing the transformations of the media system, reflecting and feeding into practices of social adherence and reappropriation. The result is a representation in which the history of the national team’s songs not only reflects, but also helps to shape the Italian football imaginary, establishing itself as a cultural heritage that continues to renew, in the present, the sense of collective identity.