An anti-racism campaign by Serie A that used art showing monkeys, drew a bemused response from one of its own clubs on Monday night.
"AS Roma was very surprised to see what appears to be an anti-racist campaign from Serie A featuring painted monkeys on social media today," said Roma on their English-language twitter feed. "We understand the league wants to tackle racism but we don't believe this is the right way to do it."
Serie A Managing Director Luigi De Servio had earlier presented an anti-racism plan which included the signing of a charter by a player representing each of the 20 Serie A clubs.
The league also displayed a triptych by Italian artist Simone Fugazzotto at its Milan headquarters which showed three monkeys in close-up but with slightly different colours over the basic brown.
The artist’s intentions: paint a western monkey, a black monkey & an Asian monkey to show that humans are all the same.
— Matteo Bonetti (@Bonetti) December 16, 2019
Okay, great.
Serie A commissioning the project shows how utterly tone deaf they are. Good that there’s this initiative, but once again poor execution. pic.twitter.com/aL0cTeJu4w
According to the League, the work "aims to defend the values of integration, multiculturalism and fraternity".
Later, as criticism began, the league issued a statement saying "true art is provocation."
Fugazzotto almost always paints monkeys, in a variety of artistic styles, usually wearing human clothes and representing different cultures and historical periods.
"I only paint monkeys as a metaphor for human beings," he said in interviews with the media ahead of the campaign. "We turn the concept back on the racists, as we are all monkeys originally. So, I painted a Western monkey, an Asian monkey and a black monkey."
Italian stadiums are the scene of recurrent racist incidents, including monkey cries aimed at black players.
FARE, a racism monitoring organisation, called the choice of art a "bad joke".
"Once again, Italian football leaves the world speechless. In a country in which the authorities fail to deal with racism week after week, SerieA have launched a campaign that looks like a sick joke," it tweeted
Roma also led the outcry earlier in the month when Italian sports daily Corriere dello Sport ran the front-page headline "Black Friday" to accompany an article about the first Serie A meeting between former Manchester United teammates Romelu Lukaku and Chris Smalling.
The newspaper protested that its headline was being deliberately mis-interpreted and its intention was to "showcase" the players, adding "we will continue to fight racism and ignorance."