Italy

The earliest mention of cricket in Italy is of a match played by Admiral Nelson's sailors in 1793 during a stop in Naples harbour. C. Milan, which was originally the Milan Cricket and Football Club and the first Italian football team Genoa Cricket and Football Club, which was originally the Genoa Cricket & Athletic Club.

But these clubs soon forgot about cricket and concentrated on football. Cricket started to be revived after the Second World War. Cricket flourished in Rome in the 1960s at a superb field which looked across to St.

Peter's dome from Villa Doria Pamphili. The Australian and British embassies, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the Commonwealth War Graves Association, the Venerable English College and Beda College fielded teams which competed for the Rome Ashes there until, in the 1970s, the Villa became a public park. When cricket resumed in Rome on other grounds at the end of the 1970s, four of the Villa Doria Pamphili-era players formed in 1980 the Doria Pamphili Cricket Club: the Italian-Sri Lankan Francis Alphonsus Jayarajah, the Italian-Indian Massimo da Costa, the Australian Desmond O'Grady and the Syrian Issam Kahale.

In the same period, some cricket was played in the northern part of Italy with the Milan Cricket Club being formed in the 1970s and Euratom CC in the 1980s.