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From The Guardian, 15/3/97:
'Luther Blissett' still finds Italy a trial
James Tandy In Rome
LUTHER Blissett, the former Watford striker, is on trial in Italy for
resisting arrest and Insulting a public official. Or to be more accurate, four Luther
Blissetts are in the dock.
The trial of four Italian youths found travelling without tickets on a night tram last
summer began in Rome on Thursday. When asked by police to identify themselves, all four
gave the name Luther Blissett, in memory of the British football player still remembered
In Italy for his disastrous 1982 season with AC Milan.
According to their lawyer, when the four were apprehended on the night of June 17 1995,
they were staging an itinerant party with improvised music and dancing on the tram. The
peaceful "sociocultural happening" was being broadcast live on a local leftwing
radio station, Radio Citta Futura.
In the words of the Blissetts themselves: "The forces of law and order arrived and,
incapable of understanding the event, decided immediately to repress it, even firing shots
into the air"
The four are members of a loosely-knit anarchic youth movement that has adopted the
identity of Luther Blissett as a cover for a series of hoaxes and practical Jokes.
"The group considers identity to be the prison of the self," said Checchino
Antonini, an editor at Radio Citta Futura. "Identity and fixity are the enemies of
communication and have to be combated by nomadism and collective identity. When the
conductor asked for their tickets, they replied that a collective identity does not travel
with a ticket."
He said the group had selected Luther Blissett, once known by British fans as "Luther
Missit" as a cultural icon because his career in Italy had been so unlucky. Blissett
was "famous for missing open goals and for the inexorable precision with which he
would find the goalpost," according to an unforgiving account in an Italian
newspaper.
The prosecutor, Gloria Attanasio, has failed to see the funny side, however, and the trial
has been postponed until December.