San Siro Stadium

This guide to San Siro Stadium in Milan opens on a chaotic night in April 2005, during a Champions League quarter-final between AC Milan and Inter, and uses it to explain why the stadium exists at all: a shared, fiercely contested home built for a city split down the middle. It traces the ground back to 1925 and club president Piero Pirelli, through its rapid construction, its wartime expansion to house both clubs, and its unofficial nickname borrowed from the city's opera house. Look up at the eleven concrete towers ringing the bowl as you listen, built decades after the stadium first opened.