Boasting an architectural heritage that stretched back millennia and saw groovy new stadia built for the 1990 World Cup in Bari and Turin - and stadia especially renovated in Cagliari, Florence, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Rome and Verona - Italy let its violent and disappointing World Cup finals play out between disappointing, random sets of box-nets.
And not even a fat man singing Puccini could hide Italy's missed opportunity to make its mark in the history of on-field architecture.
