Park of the Acqueducts: Campo Gerini and football transported back in time.

Words: Dave Harry

Images: Dave Harry

Parco degli Acquedotti (Park of the Aqueducts) is exactly that. Rome may have taken longer than a day to build but clearly, thinking of the name for this park on the outskirts of Rome, took less time.

It’s a very impressive park though.

As the name suggests, it has a variety of aqueduct ruins surrounded by parkland but as much as the architecture points to the Romans, it’s so calm it’s hard to comprehend you’re little under 30 minutes from the centre of the Eternal City.

Of course, being close to Rome means the park has many tourists wondering through it, including myself but I’m the only tourist here for football. There’s a match on at Campo Gerini which is located within it and I’ve been waiting a long time to tick it off.

It’s a ground that has featured in a fair few lists of football grounds in amazing settings but the team that often gets linked with playing there – Atletico Derriti – have moved out. Atletico’s story is amazing, a club for refugees and dissidents that founded its home here but they quickly outgrew it.

That’s brilliant but for this hopper of unique grounds, it was a pain; I wanted to do a game here and I was struggling to find who uses it now. Thankfully Mike Bayly’s ‘Football Landscapes’ Facebook group came up trumps and a poster called Norbert Bandurski pointed me to its current home side, Procalcio Italia.

©Dave Harry/ Terrace Edition. Campo Gerini.

Yes, Procalcio Italia. Now, what would be a good name for an Italian football team? Given that lack of imagination, it seems fitting they play within Parco degli Acquedotti and the club crest pays homage to its surrounds.

They host Academy Mundial in a Lazio region league game (Level 9 on the Italian pyramid). Academy wear a Sampdoria kit which reflects their connections to the club that propelled the legendary Gianluca Vialli to Serie A stardom. The hosts wear a more Roman orientated yellow and dominate in a 4-1 win.

The crowd of around 50 all know each other and banter the players and there's a linesman sporting a denim jacket and listening to tunes on his phone. It’s all classic Sunday morning stuff but I find it difficult to follow a game at a place this photogenic and surrounded by so much history, that closely.

It’s a beautiful setting and the clay pitch fits in perfectly with the surrounds. Aside from the aqueducts, there are train tracks behind one goal and along one side of the pitch, and very occasionally a plane flies close by. You also have a classic Italian farmhouse and an abandoned building in sight as well – it’s exactly the kind of ground that I love visiting the most and its as representative of Italy as any I’ve been to.

Campo Gerini ti amo! No, it didn’t take long to think up that line!