Hellas Verona FC was founded in 1903 by high-school students and named after the Greek word for “Greece” at the suggestion of a classics teacher. At a time in which football was played seriously only in the larger cities of northwestern Italy, most of Verona was indifferent to the growing sport. However, when in 1906 two city teams chose the city’s Roman amphitheatre as a venue to showcase the game, crowd enthusiasm and media interest began to rise. The team’s colours are yellow and blue. As a result, the clubs most widely used nickname is gialloblu literally “yellow-blue” in Italian. The colours represent the city itself and Verona’s emblem (a yellow cross on a blue shield) appears on most team apparel. Two more team nicknames are Mastini (the mastiffs) and Scaligeri, both references to Mastino I della Scala of the Della Scala princes that ruled the city during the 13th and 14th centuries. The Scala family coat of arms is depicted on the team’s jersey and on its trademark logo as a stylised image of two large, powerful mastiffs facing opposite directions, introduced in 1995. In essence, the term “scaligeri” is synonymous with Veronese, and therefore can describe anything or anyone from Verona (e.g., Chievo Verona, a different team that also links itself to the Scala family – specifically to Cangrande I della Scala).
