Superga, the afternoon the Grande Torino was lost

In the late 1940s, Torino were the best team in Italy. The press and the fans called them the Grande Torino. They won five league titles in a row, a run that equalled Juventus's record. Their captain and star man was Valentino Mazzola. At home they played at the Filadelfia, their historic ground, where they were very hard to beat.

Their weight in Italian football was enormous. On May 11, 1947, Italy beat Hungary 3-2 in Turin with ten Torino players in the starting eleven. Only the goalkeeper came from another club, Juventus. Rarely has a single team given so much to a national side.

In the spring of 1949, Torino were once again closing in on the title. With four matchdays to go, they held a comfortable lead over their closest pursuers, Inter. In those days, the squad travelled to Lisbon to play a friendly against Benfica. The match was a tribute to Francisco Ferreira, the Portuguese club's captain. It was played on May 3 and ended in a 4-3 win for Benfica.

Not everyone made the trip. Club president Ferruccio Novo stayed in Italy because he was ill. Defender Sauro Tomà did not travel either, because of a knee injury. Those absences, decided for ordinary reasons, saved their lives.

On the morning of May 4, the team left Lisbon on a three-engined Fiat G.212 operated by Avio Linee Italiane, registration I-ELCE. The captain was Pierluigi Meroni, a pilot with experience in Italian military aviation. The plane stopped in Barcelona to refuel. There, the Torino players crossed paths with those of Milan, who were travelling to Madrid. The aircraft then continued on its way to Turin.

That afternoon the weather in Turin was very bad. There was rain, strong wind and very low cloud. Near the hill of Superga, visibility was almost zero. Shortly after five in the afternoon, the plane crashed into the embankment that supports the rear of the Basilica of Superga, at the top of the hill that overlooks the city. The investigations pointed to the lack of visibility, drift caused by the wind and a possible altimeter fault, which may have read around 2,000 metres when the plane was flying much lower.

All 31 people on board were killed. There were no survivors. Among the victims were 18 players, technical director Ernő Egri Erbstein, English coach Leslie Lievesley, other club officials and staff, the four crew members and three journalists travelling with the team: Renato Casalbore, Renato Tosatti and Luigi Cavallero. At a stroke the club lost almost its entire first team. Vittorio Pozzo, the former Italy coach, was the one who identified the bodies.

The news shook the whole of Italy. On the day of the funerals, around half a million people took to the streets of Turin to say goodbye to the team. There were still four matchdays left in the championship. The Italian federation proclaimed Torino champions for the 1948-49 season, at the request of the other clubs. Torino finished those matches with their youth players, and their opponents also fielded youth teams as a mark of respect. And so the Grande Torino's last title came when the team was already gone.

Since then, every May 4 the victims are remembered at the Basilica of Superga, where the players' names are read out. The story of that team is not measured by its trophies alone. It is also measured by the mark it left on Turin and on Italian football, which still remembers it today as one of the greatest in its history.