The eternal derby reveals why Italian football finds its way into your blood

[Torrent Disney]

ROME -- On the day before the Rome Derby, in which AS Roma beat Lazio 3-1 on a viciously hot afternoon, I met Luciano Rossi and his son at a restaurant near the Roma training facility. A lot of people from the club come here for lunch, including Francesco Totti, now retired but still the most beloved living Roman. Both Rossi men are Roma official team photographers, and their roots in this city stretch back at least seven generations. Luciano's family comes from Trastevere, the old neighborhood south of the Vatican, and he feels, in his heart, more connected to his city than his country.

Luciano often gets asked whether he's Italian when traveling overseas with the team and someone hears his accent.

"No," he will reply. "We are from Rome!"

That's what was on display Saturday, and why Italian football so easily finds its way into your blood. Italy is a very young country and a relatively new idea. Its cities, however, are very old, many of them former city-states with their own history and mythology -- their own food and wars won and lost and a unique way of defining what it means to be a citizen. When their football teams play, ancient things get ripped out of the past and put on public display.

In Rome, that's only heightened.

This sounds silly, but it's always startling to be driving around the city to meet someone for something as modern as a meeting or a cocktail and just pass the spot where Julius Caesar was stabbed, or make a right at the Coliseum.

No big deal.

It's just the f---ing Coliseum!

Rome conquered the world, rose and fell, and nearly everything that has happened in the city since flows from that identity.

Especially the football culture.