It's worldwide known how soccer is the pricipal and obsessive thought of italian male people. Saturday, Sunday and Monday there's almost nothing else on italian TV. However, there's a new game raising in Italy, very different from other sports and tipically british: this game is rugby. And I'm really up to it. For few months in a year the Stadio Flaminio in Rome became a sort of Great Britain's ambassade courtyard. Not included our "french cousins", with whom we Italians have a very special "love and hate" relationship, during the "Six Nation" the Eternal City get filled with -it depends on matches schedule - sociable people all dressed up in green (Irish) or with a yellow flower as a cap (Welsh), picturesque guys with "skirts" (Scots) - oh well, I know kilt is not a skirt, but I had one exactly alike in the late seventies... - and other kind of people who wouldn't need any identity mark because you could recognise them by their serious, serious, serious faces... I'm talking about English, of course.

My favourites, obviously, are Scots. Not only because of their tartan kilts - even if every Six Nations I learn something new about it - but also for their pipebags orchestra following the team everywhere, improvising concerts in the midlle of the city square. But I like very much Welsh too, the "Cymru" people, where even grandmothers wear this strange cap daffodil-shaped (daffodil is the common English name for narcissus).

But in return the only UK anthems I know are the English and Irish ones!

This is important, for at the end of the match there's the famous "third time", where supporters of both the teams they gather and talk and sing together. And, last but not least, they drink a lot of beer. (Sometimes I think they have beer as fuel because often they tell you how they had a sightseen of Rome in few hours!)

Well, I love my country and I feel one hundred per cent Italian, but I love sometimes breath the air of a totally different country and share a little bit of Britain amongst its citizens.