San Siro's beauty struggling to hide a damaged Italian racing industry

It’s the other San Siro that you see first. More formally known as the Stadio Giuseppe Meazza, it dominates the hearts and minds of most residents of Milan as well as the city’s western skyline.

This brutalist cathedral, redesigned for the 1990 World Cup and possibly to be preserved as a monument of contemporary architecture when it is eventually replaced, is the home of two of Italy’s footballing giants in Milan (never AC Milan around here) and Inter. You’re either red or you’re blue and, should anyone be in any doubt about it, there’s a mural on the street corner with a masked devil from Milan strangling a serpent in Inter blue. 

The atmosphere would have been quite different seven days on, when the two sides meet for the derby. Quite what the fans would make of someone telling them they were actually going to a horse sale is anyone’s guess.