When I first became familiar with my neighbouring Dublin suburb of Inchicore, about 10 years ago, I was struck by the unusually high number of barbers' shops in the area. There were several butchers' shops too. But a vegetarian could probably have lived happily enough in Inchicore, I thought, whereas a man with long hair would have felt constantly under threat, writes Frank McNally
By contrast, among the things conspicuously lacking in the village was an authentic Italian trattoria of the kind you might find in, say, Turin. Ten years on, happily, that imbalance has been redressed. Inchicore now hosts a little piece of Piedmont called the Enoteca Torino. And the area has at least one fewer barber's shop than it once did. That the trattoria was created by the notoriously long-haired builder and Italophile Mick Wallace may be just a coincidence.
Eating in the Enoteca is like having a short holiday in Italy. It's not just the language that's different; the customs take getting used to as well. On my first visit, I briefly mistook the plate of dried pasta shapes offered by the waitress as an hors d'oeuvre. Mercifully - and unlike other customers I've heard about since - I stopped short of trying to eat it, hesitating just long enough to learn that I was being asked to choose a pasta type for dinner, which I did with my air of Euro-sophistication (such as it is) narrowly intact.
As for Italian, by far the restaurant's dominant language, it's hard to avoid picking up some from the staff. Ever since I was charmingly corrected on the issue, for example, I can no longer bring myself to ask for a "panini" here or anywhere else in Dublin. In fact, at the risk of sounding pretentious, I never eat "panini" in a single sitting anymore, unless I'm really hungry. A single "panino" is enough for me now. Either that or a filled bread roll.
The Enoteca is clearly thriving. Last time I was in there, it had doubled in size (the prices seemed to have expanded a bit too). But it still had a photograph of the Wexford Youths soccer team - another of Wallace's passions - on the wall. And it still had a picture of an Italian club side from a different era, alongside the framed front page of an old newspaper, dated May 1949, reporting the same side's tragic fate.
Both were reminders that what happened to the Busby Babes this week 50 years ago was not the only air disaster to destroy a great European football team.
Bad as Munich was, the Superga tragedy - named after the basilica on the outskirts of Turin where the plane crashed - was probably worse. It wiped out the entire Torino AC team, except for a player who had inadvertently not made the doomed trip for a game against Benfica in Lisbon. Not only that, but such was the dominance of "Il Grande Torino" in 1940s Italy that when the plane crashed in bad weather on its return journey, it took almost the entire national side with it too.
The club had won the last Serie A championship before suspension of the league in 1943, and was about to make it four post-war titles in a row when disaster intervened. In fact, it did complete the sequence, playing the remaining games of the 1948-49 season with a reserve team, against opponents who - as a mark of respect - also fielded their second elevens.
In its pomp, the club had routinely contributed most of the Italian national side, including one occasion in 1947 when Torino players filled every position except goalkeeper. So when the team died, the effect was profound, locally and nationally.
In contrast to Manchester United - European champions only 10 years after Munich - Torino took almost three decades to win another Italian title, in 1976, and has not added any since. The decline was stark. Far from being Italy's dominant club, as it once was, Torino today does not even dominate its own city, where Juventus now rules.
The national team suffered almost as badly. Having won two of the first three World Cups, in 1934 and 1938, Italy had to wait almost half-a-century to add a third, in 1982. The shadow of Superga hung over its best attempt in the intervening period, when Sandro Mazzola - whose father had died in the crash 21 years earlier - was playmaker on the team that lost the 1970 final to Brazil.
The Torino tragedy may arguably have had an even more durable influence, in the form of "catenaccio" (literally "lock" or "deadbolt") - the ultra defensive style of football perfected during the 1960s and 1970s and still synonymous with Italy today, in which teams seek a 1-0 lead and then shut their opponents out.
Il Grande Torino had been a relatively attacking side, an early blueprint for Holland's "total football" of decades later. But although the relative merits of offensive versus defensive tactics are an ongoing intellectual argument in Italy, the loss of so many top players in 1949 probably contributed to catenaccio's supremacy in the 1960s and 1970s and its lingering influence now.
One of its great masters, incidentally, is a certain Giovanni Trapattoni, with whom we may be about to become much more familiar. Trapattoni was 10 at the time of the disaster, on his way to becoming a defensive midfielder with AC Milan and just as defensive a manager with a long succession of teams. If the Superga tragedy helped to shape him, its last shock-waves may be about to reach Ireland, 59 years on.
fmcnally@irish-times.ie