So there we were! It didn't look much. It reminded me of a hundred small Scottish grounds not least Inverness. But it was not Caley, more Clachnacuddin's Grant St. except that it was not to be found in Merkinch but on the much grander-sounding Via Giacomo Puccini. In fact the ground is called Stadio Communale J. Moscardini. Nothing unusual in that, you might think except that “J” is not a common letter in Italian. “G” is used instead of “J”, like “G” in Giacomo, Guiseppe, in Giocondo and in Giovanni.
But perhaps the plaque beside the ground's main entrance would be some help.There the “J” became Johnny, Johnny as in English, even as in Johnny English, with also an “H” and two “N”s. But then we were not in England, nor even Britain. We were in Italy. It was Tuscany. The hills in the foreground became mountain in the distance. Just ten kilometres away was Monte Cimone, the highest mountain in the Northern Appenines. Whilst in winter there was football down here, there was skiing up there and but for the hanging clouds we might even have seen snow.
In fact not only were we in Tuscany, we were in Barga, by repute the most Scottish town in Italy. Across the road to the left where we stepped off the bus had been the Shamrock bar with a Saltire in the window. Next to it had hung a sign announcing the Barga Celtic Supporters' Club. That was because the bar owner, Paulo, not Nutini, although in fact Paulo Nutini's forebears also hail from the town, had also been brought up in Paisley and travelled regularly back with others from the town to Parkhead for games. To the right had been the gate to a beautiful Old Town of winding alleys and crowding houses up a hill, crowned by a Duomo with stunning all round views. In one of the small squares below was a vinoteca, a wine bar, owned by another Moscardini, christened and still known, not as Johnny or Gianni, but John.
And there were still other Moscardinis, which incidentally is a word in Italian for octopus . Down the hill from the bus-stop across the bridge that spans a steep valley was the New Town. The small hotel there that we were due to stay in was owned by yet more. The Villino Moscardini is next door. Moscardini descendents had remained whilst others from the town and the hills that encircle it had found their way, eventually, to Scotland. To find them, so the story went, we had to drive for half an hour up into those hills to the exquisite mountain village of Sommocolonia with its stunning view down valley to Barga itself.
It was in Sommocolonia that the Johnny Moscardini story might be said to have begun. In one version of it in the late 1880's three brothers, Bonafede, Sabato and Ferrucio, left the village by mule, then the only means apart from pony, Shank's pony, of connection with the outside world. They made their way to the USA, to Baltimore, staying for three years, before with money they made there returning to their home village and buying land and houses. Then they set off again, this time across Europe, to France, England and to Scotland, to Glasgow. In 1891 two were living in Blythswood, from where they made and sold religious, plaster figurines, again saved money, set up an ice-cream business and bought a horse and cart. That was until 1895, when Ferrucio was accidentally killed, by a horse. It caused the two other brothers to return home once more, where between them they had nine children, of whom five would themselves emigrate, at least one to the UK.
It would be wonderfully romantic to believe that Johnny Moscardini was one of those children but by the time the brothers had begun to make their way in the World there were already other Moscardinis, presumably also local, in Scotland. This time the story is that again three brothers had already left Barga in 1872 for our frozen north. Once more it might be true but even they were not the first. In 1871 there were already already Scots-born Moscardinis, a mother, two sons with no father recorded, living in Pollockshaws. A decade later they were gone but a decade later still they were back and joined by a Bonafede, his wife, a Sabato, possibly two of the same Sommacolonia brothers of mule fame, and one other, seven in all. In fact that year, 1891, in Scotland there were twenty-nine Moscardinis in all, in Glasgow, in Campsie, working in Larbert and Falkirk. There they had set up confectioners, ice-cream parlours, fish and chip shops and prospered. Indeed, the Moscardini name still hangs over a chippie in Falkirk's town centre even though the family no longer runs or owns it.
And it was in Falkirk in 1897 that Giovanni Moscardini, our Johnny Moscardini, was born. In 1901 he is still there, with his father, not Bonafede or Sabato but Giocondo, his mother, Maria, brother Umberto and another young Moscardini, said to be a servant. And next door there are more Moscardinis, Pompio and a family of four, yet another Moscardini, and five more with Italian surnames, three born in Italy and two in Switzerland.
However, in 1911 a by then thirteen-year old Johnny Moscardini is not recorded in Scotland. He may already have been in Italy. We know that with the outbreak of the Great War as soon as he was able he enlisted in the army, but there and not in Britain. He fought in the Battle of Caporetto in 1917 on what is now the Italian-Slovenian border, was wounded and sent to Sicily to recuperate. And he did not return to Scotland after the War but to Barga.
However, he had taken with him, to Italy, to Sicily and back to Barga, an ability to play football that he must at least have begun to develop in Scotland. He was a centre-forward, even known for his “robust” Scottish style, but also for his precision and his dribbling, and, whilst playing for the local team in Barga was spotted by the club from the nearby city of Lucca, 30 miles away, transferring in 1919 to not present-day Lucchese but Lucca F.C.. The transfer was said to be on the following terms.
“……………..return train ticket from Mologno (That's Barga’s nearest station) to Lucca, if they won they gave him a bottle of olive oil, if they drew he got a bottle of wine, and if they lost he got nothing.”
But whatever the deal it is likely to have been negotiated by two men who spoke the same language, Scots. The Lucca F.C. club, had been founded in 1905 precisely as the Paisley-thread makers, Coats, had bought an existing textile business in the city and was starting to build a large, new mill, Cantoni-Coats, on its outskirts. It cannot be coincidence. Production started in 1908 and in 1910 James Henderson, later Sir James Henderson, arrived from Scotland via Germany as Managing Director and would run the business in Lucca itself and then from Scotland for forty-five years. It was he, as things settled after the Great War, who in 1921 created the company sports club, with its stadium, still known today as Campo Henderson, opened in 1923, the same year that would see the emergence through the absorption of the company's club of the city's new club, Lucchese, still Lucca's football team today, having last been in Serie A in 1952 and now playing in Serie 3, Italy's third division.
If fact James Henderson, knighted in 1934, would be a key figure not with regard to football but to a variety of sports in Lucca. His attitude to what would on his arrival become the largest employer in Lucca might today be considered at the very least paternalistic but at the heart of what he did was an enlightened view of social activity and sporting participation as important elements of well-being, mental and physical. It was a very typical Scottish philosophy, the product of Henderson's upbringing in Scotland, specifically in Paisley. He was born in the town in 1882, the son of weaver, who became a greengrocer in Smithhills Street in the centre. It is claimed that Henderson had begun to work for Coats in its Glasgow in 1897 aged fifteen but it seems unlikely. Having finished his Scottish education, in 1901 he is listed as a fruiterer's clerk, working for his father. Nevertheless in 1902 he had certainly joined the thread-makers and was sent to the company's Hamburg office, where shortly before his transfer to Italy in 1908 he married a local girl.
As for Johnny, Gioni the Fly as he would be known, he would have five years at Lucca and not without success. In his first season his new team won the Tuscan regional cup and the Kings Cup. In his second, 1920-21, it finished third in the Tuscan qualifying group for Italian Championship, effectively the Italian Cup. It lost to Pisa and Livorno at home and to Pisa and Florence away but it was by no means a disgrace. Both Pisa and Livorno would make it through to the next round and Livorno to the final, losing narrowly to the top, northern team, Pro Vercellli from Lombardy. Indeed Johnny must have played well and he had been noticed once more. It would be whilst at Lucca that in 1921 that he would first be called into the Italian national team, gain the majority of his Italian caps, eight in all, and score five international goals.
His first international game would be away against Switzerland, a 1:1 draw in November, in which he played alongside his Lucca team-mate, Ernesto Bonino, and scored. In 1922 he represented Italy three times – home draws against Austria in Milan in January, in which he netted twice, Czechoslovakia in Turin in February and a 4:2 win over Belgium again in Milan in May, with him scoring once more. Meanwhile there had been a split in the Italian game, a frequent occurrence in the early years. It was an argument that still rears its head, internationally and nationally worldwide. The major clubs wanted to reduce the number of teams in the First Division. The smaller clubs, of which Lucca was one, fearing being squeezed out, disagreed. The larger teams reacted by creating their own football association and competition outwith the Italian Football Association. Lucca remained with the establishment, as did Livorno. Pisa played in the alternative.
The split in the national game did not last long. It was resolved in 1922 as the Italian Championship was reorganised in regional leagues with national play-offs. Genoa would take the 1923 national title. Lucca would finish fourth from bottom of its league and be demoted. Meanwhile internationally Johnny had played one more game in 1922, in December in Bologna, another draw against Switzerland. He then missed two more before in early 1923 being recalled for the return away games in Austria and Czechoslovakia. The game in Vienna was a scoreless draw and in Prague Italy was defeated 5:1. However, again he had hit the back of the net and was once again attracting attention.
In the summer of 1923 Johnny was invited as a guest player to join a touring party to South America, organised by the national champions, Genoa, no longer with the Scot,
George Davidson, as president but still managed by Englishman, Arsenal's Willie Garbutt . It took in a stop in Rio de Janeiro and games in Montevideo and Buenos Aires. There is a photograph of the players, Moscardini amongst them on the peak of Corcovado, overlooking Sugarloaf Mountain and the then Brazilian capital.
In 1923-24 Lucca was not involved in the Italian Championship. The explanation is simple. It had ceased to exist on its own but was in the process of integrating with the new Coats sports club to create Lucchese, which still plays at the city's stadium at Porto Elisa, the location of one of the original sites of the company that became Coats. Johnny did, however, play internationally, in a 0-4 home defeat in Genoa to Austria in January. It was the last game before Vittorio Pozzo took over as national manager with the remit to prepare the team for the Paris Olympics that summer. Johnny Moscardini was dropped but perhaps only because he was Scots-born, may not have had Italian nationality and was therefore ineligible in the days before Oriundi, players born of Italian parents abroad, of which he was arguably the first, began to be included.
However, towards the end of a clearly disrupted season Johnny was on his way. He changed clubs once more, not to Genoa but the ten miles or so from Lucca to Pisa, and the Arena Garibaldi Stadium just a few hundred yards from the Leaning Tower. There Moscardini would score eighteen goals in his single season, in March 1925 be recalled to become the club’s first ever cap, netting twice more in a 7:0 win over France in Turin and at the age of twenty-eight might have been expected to have a couple more good years in the top flight, now as a genuine professional. Juventus had in 1923 become the first officially professional team in the country. Other teams soon followed to compete but the facts are that even in 1923 Italian football had been shamateur. There is no possibility that Johnny Moscardini would have been able to survive to play club football at the level he did, never mind play international football, on a bottle of olive oil for a win. He was clearly amateur only in name, with “boot money” at least supplementing any other income he had, if not supporting him and now his family fully. In 1924 he had married, to a girl from Tuscany.
However, in the summer of 1925 Johnny Moscardini was once more on the move, but not to a bigger club. That year his father retired and returned to Barga, at which point Johnny left Pisa and Italy altogether, returning to Scotland and taking his new wife, Tecla, with him. She was a Castelvecchi, which is another of the Barga families, Alfredo Castelvecchi to this day running the chip shop of that name again in Paisley. Certainly in 1925 a John Moscardini was living in Shawlands in Glasgow, just a mile and half from Hampden Park. In 1926, aged almost thirty, he was said to be managing his uncle’s café in Campbeltown, playing football still but for the town's Grammar School Former Pupils. The busy, bustling and tenacious centre-forward he had always been, he had learned to be in Falkirk and had displayed on the pitch internationally, was showing what he had in the local league in Argyll. A son, Anthony, had already in 1925 been born in Campbeltown, where the family would remain until 1928, then move on. But it would not be back to Barga, not even to Italy but to Ayrshire, to Prestwick, where Johnny would open his own business, The Lake Café in the town, and run it, clearly profitably, with his younger sister, Maria Anita, for over thirty years. His daughter, Jenny, would be born there in 1929 and in 1930 Johnny, Tecla and the family were living in a substantial house in nearby Monkton.
James Henderson, Sir James from 1938, would finish his time with Coats in 1957 at the age of seventy-five, and a board member. He would die in Hampstead in London a decade later. Johnny Moscardini would retire from his café in the 1960s. His sister would die in Prestwick in 1969. Tecla would follow her in 1984 and he a year later, aged 88, both also in the town. Indeed Johnny, Tecla and daughter, Jenny, are all buried in Monkton and Prestwick Old Cemetery with it questionable how many in the town even sixty years ago would have known they had been served their coffee by a full, Italian football international, who due to family ties, never perhaps reached his full potential.
However, in Tuscany he was and still is remembered. Barga with its Scottish connections knows who and what he was. In addition to the stadium of his first club still bearing his name in recent times the Moscardini Cup has also been inaugurated; to be played for specifically by teams from Italy, the land of his father and Scotland, the land of his birth and his football. And in 1970 at the age of he returned to Lucca, where the club presented him on the pitch a medal in remembrance of his exploits of fifty years earlier as a noted Italian centre-forward but also as the first in a long and continuing line of notable Scottish-Italians to have graced our cultural life and therefore football league and national teams.