Stadio Artemio Franchi

Palazzo Vecchio banned football from the Cascine park in 1917, and the Florentine clubs scattered to find grounds of their own. The Stadio Velodromo Libertas, between via Maragliano and via Bellini at the edge of the city, opened on 22 April 1922 and became the principal sporting structure in Florence, taking a Giro d'Italia stage finish in 1923 and again in 1924. Associazione Calcio Fiorentina, formed in August 1926 from the merger of Club Sportivo Firenze and Palestra Ginnastica Fiorentina Libertas, played its home matches there, but its 10,000 places proved inadequate in their turn. From 1926 the club's first president, Luigi Ridolfi Vay da Verrazzano, secretary-general of the Fascio of Florence and a member of one of the oldest noble families of the city, judged that Florence needed a large new ground able to compete with the football structures of the day.

New stadiums were going up across Italy between the 1920s and the 1930s, among them the Littoriale in Bologna and the Stadio Benito Mussolini in Turin; the fascist authorities spent heavily on high-capacity venues and treated architecture as an instrument of propaganda. In 1929 the Giovanni Berta fascist district group asked the city for a regulation sports field at Le Cure, the podesta Giuseppe Della Gherardesca took up the request, and the resolution to acquire land between via Faentina and via della Palancola was made official on 3 December 1929, construction being approved on 7 February 1930; talks with the Chaplaincy of San Giuseppe and Sant'Ignazio of Scandicci, which owned the area, then stalled.

In July 1930, helped by the pressure Ridolfi brought to bear on political and military institutions, the Comune obtained from the Ministry of War part of the Campo di Marte, military domain land holding the parade ground and the disused Firenze-Campo di Marte aerodrome, built in 1910 and closed earlier that year over safety problems. The site offered what was needed to build a stadium in Florence answering the requirements of the international sporting federations: wide ground to build on and the city and national transport network, with a railway station already standing there. Military engineers marked the concession out with stakes, and it is said that Ridolfi, probably with some of Fiorentina's directors, went to the site by night and moved them several metres to enlarge the future stadium. With roughly 50,000 square metres of buildable ground available, the drawings of 1929 were considerably altered, among other things to take a running track laid out to the most recent rules of the sport.

Pier Luigi Nervi had been designing the stadium since 1929, with Gioacchino Luigi Mellucci collaborating on some elements; Ridolfi had met the engineer years earlier, when he commissioned from him the stand of the ASSI Giglio Rosso athletics ground on Viale dei Colli. Nervi presented the project formally on 16 March 1930, and Della Gherardesca's resolution of 17 July awarded the building of the roofed stands directly to the Roman firm Nervi & Nebbiosi. Construction was officially resolved on 17 October 1930, payment falling due against the progress of the works in sums of not less than 50,000 lire, and the name had already been settled: Giovanni Berta, for the militant of the Florentine fascist action squads killed in 1921 by communist militants during the clashes at the Pignone. The contract, signed on 1 December 1930, allowed 180 days and carried a penalty of 500 lire for each day of delay. Alessandro Giuntoli, chief architect of the Comune's building office, designed the main entrance, and the municipal technical office under Enrico Pelleschi, with Fiorenzo De Reggi, arranged the pitch and the rooms beneath the stands.

Because the funding was hard to secure, the stadium was built in two distinct phases, October 1930 to November 1931 and July to December 1932, the aim being to have a usable ground as early as possible even with structures still unbuilt. The land purchase was completed on 15 July 1930 and the yard opened ten days later; excavation for the pillar foundations began on 4 October, and work on the stands and on the internal helicoidal stairs to the tribune of honour began on 4 December. Completion of the roofed stand was reported on 31 May 1931. Nervi was formally awarded the 120-metre uncovered stands on 20 June, then obliged to write to the Comune threatening to suspend the works if his dues were not settled; payment came only in January 1932. The end of works on the stands was confirmed on 19 September 1931 and the record of completion signed on 21 November.

On 13 June 1932, at the close of the football season, during which building had stopped so the matches could be played, the municipal technical office asked Della Gherardesca to open the second lot: the terraces of the curves, three external helicoidal stairs and the Marathon tower. Two things told in favour of the second phase: the podesta's visit to the works, which left him taken with the architectural majesty of what had been built, and the tramontana that blew across the site for several months of the year. Only the building of the curves could close the gaps between the two parallel stands, allowing the regular conduct of play and removing the discomfort to the public. The work went to Nervi & Bartoli, the firm the engineer founded with his cousin Giovanni Bartoli after Nervi & Nebbiosi was dissolved, and ran from 18 July to 15 December 1932. Vittorio Tognetti drew up the final test certificate for the west roofed stand on 11 July 1933 and completed the testing of the rest of the stadium only in 1934. The design allowed a maximum of 45,000 spectators, 6,000 of them seated under the roof, and the work cost more than 6,500,000 lire, a low figure per spectator against the sums other European stadiums had required. After the first lot the Comune went back on its undertakings and refused the money to finish the job; Ridolfi, convinced of the project's importance to the city, covered about a third of the value of the work himself, financing it by selling the castle of Verrazzano and the villa of Vitigliano in the Florentine Chianti to Egidio Favi, then owner of La Nazione.

The stadium was the first project with which Nervi drew serious notice in the architectural and engineering world. Raffaello Brizzi, director of the Higher School of Architecture of Florence, told the opening of the academic year 1931-32 that the new fabric of the stadium had notable merits of volumes rhythmically arranged, and Sigfried Giedion, presenting the building at the Milan Triennale of 1933, called it a work unsurpassed of its kind. Hugo Meisl, coach of the Wunderteam, called it the best stadium in the world both aesthetically and for the functionality of its sporting equipment. The Stadio Alberto Jose Armando in Buenos Aires, La Bombonera, took up the same D-shaped plan and the same innovative concrete techniques.

The ground was inaugurated on 13 September 1931 with the second lot still unbuilt, Fiorentina beating Admira Wien 1-0 before about 12,000 spectators through a goal by Pedro Petrone; the chronicles of the day record that the match ball was dropped over the stadium from an aeroplane flown by the Florentine aerobatic pilot Vasco Magrini. The first match actually played in the new ground had been Fiorentina's 6-0 win over Montevarchi on 10 September. Fiorentina had won the second-division championship of 1930-31 and were in Serie A for the first time; across the 1931-32 season the stadium took more than 300,000 spectators, an average of some 18,000 a match, despite ticket prices very high against the cost of living. On 7 May 1933 the Italian national side played in Florence for the first time, beating Czechoslovakia 2-0 before about 25,000 spectators, and that year Luigi Beccali, the Olympic 1500 metres champion of Los Angeles, broke the Italian 800 metres record on the track during the interval of a Fiorentina-Roma league match. In 1934 Florence was one of the eight cities to host the world championship, a tournament awarded to Italy in 1932 on a candidacy the fascist regime had advanced for propaganda reasons and used as an occasion to strengthen infrastructure and build new venues; the Tuscan ground took a round-of-sixteen tie and both quarter-final meetings of Italy and Spain. On 15 June 1940 it held the single-match final of the national cup, Fiorentina beating Genova 1893 1-0 through Mario Celoria for the first trophy in the club's history.

During the Second World War the stadium was the scene, on 22 March 1944, of the massacre of the martyrs of Campo di Marte. A special extraordinary tribunal convened to judge men who had failed to report for call-up condemned five young men to death; they had been rounded up at Vicchio by the militia of the Italian Social Republic on 12 March, and the sentence was passed both to warn recruits who meant to desert and to punish the Mugello town itself, which partisans had occupied days earlier, killing several fascist sympathisers. Seven were brought to Florence, of whom two were pardoned and assigned to operational units; the other five, all twenty-one years old, were taken into the Berta and shot by Social Republic soldiers near the Marathon tower. A memorial to the five was inaugurated near the ground on 29 May 1949, and every 22 March a ceremony is held in memory of the five dead, with laurel wreaths laid at the monument and a mass celebrated. Between the end of 1944 and 1945 the Allies requisitioned the stadium and installed a logistics base there, while also putting on athletics meetings, football and rugby matches and an exhibition by the boxing champion Joe Louis; on 1 January 1945 it held the American football game remembered as the Spaghetti Bowl, between the 5th Army and the 12th Air Force.

With the end of the conflict and the fall of fascism the ground was renamed the Stadio Comunale. By the end of the 1940s Ridolfi, no longer commanding the means he once had, commissioned from Nervi a plan to take capacity to 80,000 by setting a second tier of open terracing above the existing stands; the idea came to nothing for want of money. Alterations were discussed again in 1950 and in the years after, at one point to hold as many as 120,000 people, and the marquis's death stopped the project. On 18 May 1952 the stadium recorded its largest crowd, drawn by a friendly between Italy and England that finished 1-1 with goals from Ivor Broadis and Amedeo Amadei; 84,000 tickets were sold, excluding "invitations, the press and the police", for a total of around 95,000 people. Official capacity at that date, thanks to the many metal stands added, stood at almost 70,000.

Most of the ground had no numbered places, and with Fiorentina taking their first league title in 1955-56, secured with a 3-0 home win over Milan, overcrowding at the Comunale was fairly common. That overcrowding led, on 15 December 1957, during a Serie A match against Juventus, to the collapse of a balustrade in the Maratona stand under the weight of spectators; at the seventieth minute the crowd came down onto the parterre and about a hundred people were hurt, some with serious fractures, though there were no deaths. Three years before that, on the afternoon of 27 October 1954, during a match between Fiorentina and Pistoiese watched by around 10,000 people, objects were seen crossing the sky over the stadium and a white filamentous material fell onto the ground below. Accounts of what was seen differ, by one cigar-shaped craft that stopped abruptly overhead while the crowd fell silent, by another two objects running fast in a straight line from north to south before vanishing behind the Curva Fiesole. The substance was analysed at the Institute of Chemical Analysis of the University of Florence, which found boron, silicon, calcium and magnesium in it. The suggestion made was that the silk of mass-migrating spiders had agglomerated high in the atmosphere, a reading the science writer Philip Ball has doubted on the chemistry, boron and silicon being uncommon in living bodies. CICAP put the objects down to a military exercise using chaff, and attributed the white filaments, which proved to be borosilicate glass, to the ballooning by which some species of spider migrate.

The Comunale took part of the football tournament of the Rome Olympics in 1960, and on 27 May 1961 Fiorentina beat Rangers 2-1 there in the return leg of the Cup Winners' Cup, adding to a 2-0 win in Glasgow for the club's first European trophy; on 11 June the same side beat Lazio 2-0 in Florence for a second national cup. The Giro d'Italia finished at the ground on 6 June 1965. It held a semi-final of the 1968 European Championship, played in Italy, Yugoslavia beating England 1-0 through a goal by Dragan Dzajic before 21,834 paying spectators, and the following year Fiorentina won their second league title. Florence bid in 1969 for the Olympic Games of 1976, which went instead to Montreal, proposing to enlarge the Comunale to 80,000 places; between 1970 and 1971 two iron canopies were fitted either side of the reinforced-concrete roof, each carried on two pillars unlike the cantilevered central structure. On 10 June 1981, at a meeting on the Florentine track, Sebastian Coe set one of his nine world records, running the 800 metres in 1:41.73 before 15,000 spectators, while Carl Lewis ran a world-record time for the 100 metres that a fault in the electronic timing left invalid for records. On 25 November 1984 the ground set its record attendance for a club match, 58,271 spectators for Fiorentina against Internazionale. John Paul II came to Florence on 18 and 19 October 1986 and celebrated the eucharist in the stadium, beatifying during it Teresa Manetti of Campi, founder of the congregation of the Carmelite Sisters of Saint Teresa.

Used for rugby, baseball, boxing, athletics and cycling as well as football, the ground underwent heavy structural work ahead of the world championship of 1990, awarded to Italy in 1984. The restructuring project went in that year to the architect Italo Gamberini, with Salvatore Di Pasquale on the structures, and was put into effect from 1988 with two aims: rationalising general services and safety access, and raising capacity. The existing stands could not be built up, the stadium having been classified a national monument in 1983 and placed under the protection of the fine-arts authorities, so the pitch was lowered instead and the athletics track removed, new tribunes taking the ground to 49,000 seats. The works ended in 1990 at a cost of about 76 billion lire, and have since been judged a "cynical massacre perpetrated by Italo Gamberini in contempt of culture, in the complete indifference of Florentine and Italian intellectuals". During the tournament the ground held three Group A ties and one knockout match, the quarter-final in which Argentina beat Yugoslavia on penalties.

The stadium was named for Artemio Franchi on 26 November 1991. Born in Florence in 1922, Franchi had been Fiorentina's secretary in the 1951-52 season before taking the posts that made him president of the Italian football federation from 1966 to 1976, vice-president of FIFA from 1974 and president of UEFA from 1973 until his death on 12 August 1983; a marble plaque was placed at the entrance to the officials' tribune in his memory in 2008. Fiorentina reached three national cup finals at the ground between 1996 and 2001 and took the sixth cup in the club's history after a 1-1 draw with Parma in the return leg on 13 June 2001. After the collapse of A.C. Fiorentina in the summer of 2002 the new club, Florentia Viola and from 2003 ACF Fiorentina, moved its registered office inside the ground. Madonna closed her Who's That Girl world tour there on 6 September 1987 in a show filmed and released as Ciao, Italia!, David Bowie having played the stadium that June. Italy beat Slovenia 1-0 there on 6 September 2011 in a qualifier for the 2012 European Championship; the first rugby union match in the ground's history came on 20 November 2010, Italy losing 14-32 to Australia, and on 19 November 2016 Italy beat South Africa 20-18 there, defeating the Springboks for the first time in their history.

Under the anti-violence decree of 7 February 2007 the ground was judged unfit against the new safety rules and was fitted with double turnstiles, ticket readers and cameras; from 2009, under an agreement between the prefect, the questore, the city administration, the club and the supporters, the internal barriers began to come down, and further work from 2012 remodelled the tribunes, took out the barriers separating the terracing from the pitch and added a restaurant and skyboxes. The mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi, and ACF Fiorentina signed a convention on 25 January 2010 for the use of the Artemio Franchi, providing for its modernisation and looking ahead to a possible new football ground in the city. On 10 November 2015, closing the pastoral visit of Pope Francis to Florence and Prato for the fifth national convention of the Italian Church, the pontiff celebrated the eucharist in the stadium alongside 240 Italian bishops before 50,000 of the faithful. Its architectural quality is still recognised, but against the demands of modern football the ground is reckoned obsolete, and a new stadium for Fiorentina has been under discussion since the 1980s without any final decision being reached. The ground belongs to the city of Florence and remains ACF Fiorentina's home, and demolition is barred by the architectural constraints imposed by the culture ministry's superintendency; in 2021, 95 million euros of Next Generation EU money was allocated for a deep restructuring, and the international design competition opened that year was won by Arup in 2022, its scheme covering the modernisation of the Maratona sector, the roofing of the whole stadium and two new curves built in front of the existing ones. The European Commission refused on 22 April 2023 to allow national recovery and resilience plan funds to be used for the work, and the restructuring began officially on 20 February 2024 with the demolition of the scoreboard in the Curva Ferrovia.