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With the 2010 World Cup fast approaching many football fans around the world will be avidly debating and agonising over the fate of their nations in the tournament. However it is often at the domestic club level that the game finds its most passionate support.

David Goldblatt, embarks on an assortment of adventures into the meaning and madness of the game. He travels to four very different football games in Italy, Egypt, Ghana and the UK, to experience the build-up and pitch action from the perspective of the fans.

BY DAVID GOLDBLATT
It's 24 January 2010, a bitingly cold Sunday and the city is enshrouded in freezing fog, trees are encrusted in frost like sparkling diamond telegraph poles.

The elite of Milanese society are swirling up the steps of La Scala for the afternoon performance of Rigoletto but that evening they will most likely be at a more significant performance that will grip the entire city as Inter - the Nerazurri - play their city counterparts Milan - the Rossoneri.

For the first time in years both clubs have a chance of winning the Scudetto - the Italian championship. The scandal of Calciopoli in 2006 still courses through this fixture and Serie A. Inter became champions that year, after decades of cursing and waiting - whilst Juventus were disgraced and relegated, and Milan were docked points for their part in the worst ever crisis to hit Italian football.

For decades Inter fans have considered themselves the unlucky ones, in the shadow of Milan鈥檚 domestic and European glory. Milan fans talk patronisingly of them as the idiot cousins, to be tolerated and allowed to share stadium space with. But not anymore.

Since 2006 Inter have gone on to win successive championships whilst Milan have begun to wane. An old team presided over by a figure who divides Italian society and whose own powers might be on the wane - Silvio Berlusconi. His political power built on the spectacle and glory of Milan in the 1990s. This night is perhaps their last chance to haul Inter back into a title fight.

Many derbies are characterised by hatred, fear and loathing. But here you can see friends, even families supporting both sides, and walking alongside each other to the match. Milan have, traditionally been the club of the city鈥檚 working class, Inter the club of artists, intellectuals and the elite.

Much has changed since Berlusconi used Milan to create a spectacle of football, full of bling and hyperbole to project his political ambitions on a national stage. That鈥檚 merely the backdrop for a fixture and a game that permeates every sector of Italian society.

In the company of Calcio historian John Foot, I speak to a leading architect and to a hooligan about what football and the Derby della Madonnina - named after the city鈥檚 great statue of the Virgin Mary at the top of the Duomo Cathedral - means to all.

Listen as I find out how faith, power, dreams and paranoia clash in the dark night of the San Siro.

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