Real Madrid v Juventus Lonely amid the multi-coloured banners pleading "Peace" draped from balconies on the approach road to San Siro flutters one plain but proud.On TV: TV3, UTV
Il calcio e tornato, it declares. Italian football may not be setting pulses racing across the continent, but it is undoubtedly enjoying a renaissance.
This evening at the Bernabeu, Italy's champions elect Juventus will attempt to flourish where Manchester United floundered and dethrone Real Madrid. Tomorrow Milan and Internazionale will contest their weightiest derby in recent memory in the second semi-final.
Only once before have three teams from the same nation reached the last four of this competition. Spain must have fancied a repeat of their dominance of 2000, but Valencia and Barcelona have stumbled, stifled by something very like catenaccio.
"Italy is a force again even if the three clubs have been a bit lucky," said Roma's former Real coach Fabio Capello. "But Spanish teams have always suffered at the hands of the Italians."
Luck played a significant part, though it does not explain how a nation whose football was apparently in terminal decline only 12 months ago has mustered enough grit and guile to eclipse all but Spain's finest. Italy had been represented at every European Cup final between 1992 and 1998, a sequence culminating in the giddy night Real humbled Juventus in the Amsterdam Arena.
Since then, Serie A has been relatively impotent; in the past two seasons, pathetically, calcio had failed to make its presence felt beyond the group stages.
Stung by Roma's surrender to Liverpool last March, La Gazzetta dello Sport scrutinised the deepening crisis under the headline: "Italian football stands accused." Accused of mediocrity.
"We lose because we are too old fashioned in our approach," insisted Arrigo Sacchi, who masterminded Milan's years of dominance at the end of the 1980s.
"We are too superficial, obsessed as we are by results, and have dropped below the best European methods."
A year on, with old-fashioned methods reaping reward and La Gazzetta rejoicing in Spanish clubs' willingness to fall into "Italian traps", Sacchi stands corrected, if unrepentant. "With the players we have in our league, we shouldn't just be winning," he said last week. "We should be winning convincingly."
This year's revival has been eked out by the three Italian clubs best able to weather the game's economic troubles and with a reliance upon a pragmatic, counter-attacking style. Juve squeezed the life out of Barcelona to progress at the Camp Nou, when 10 men erected a black and white barrier before conjuring a 114th-minute winner.
"They are the only Italian club that really play football," said the Real coach, Vicente del Bosque, tongue firmly in cheek. He can expect more tonight.
"Real will come at us with attacking football because that is their main weapon, but we have weapons of our own that have been effective so far," Juve's coach, Marcello Lippi, warned.
"Our characteristics are hard work, concentration and tactical awareness."
REAL MADRID (4-3-1-2; probable): Casillas; Salgado, Hierro, Helguera, Roberto Carlos; Figo, Makelele, Flavio Conceicao; Zidane; Guti, Ronaldo.
JUVENTUS (4-4-1-1): Buffon; Thuram, Ferrara, Montero, Zambrotta; Camoranesi, Tudor, Conte, Nedved; Del Piero; Trezeguet.
Referee: T Hauge (Norway).
