Shortly after 13h renewed applause tells us that the service is over, and shortly thereafter the coffin emerges from the church. The massed ranks of ultras – black bomber jackets, baseball caps and sunglasses all round – break out into a chant of “Gabriele uno di noi” (one of us). Then a group start singing a tune I don’t recognise – la la la, they’re clearly doing the instrumental introduction – and it takes me a moment to realise that it is Vola Lazio Vola, their club song. (I’ve only ever heard it before from inside the Curva Sud, drowned out by the giallorossi around me).

The Lazio fans across the piazza begin to sing, loudly, and the woman in front of me with the ruined handkerchief starts to sing in a wavering voice, and it suddenly comes on to rain very hard. And everyone is holding their scarves over their heads and I find my eyes begin to water and the woman in front of me breaks down sobbing, and the chorus “Lazio sul prato verde vola, Lazio tu non sarai mai sola, Vola un’aquila nel cielo, piu in alto sempre volerà” seems to have been written with a funeral in mind. And I am glad I had the forethought to bring some tissues with me.

After the singing, there are a few more choruses of “Gabriele sempre con noi” and then one or two voices try to start up an anti-police chant. But it lasts only seconds before being hushed and quietly booed, if such a thing is possible, and then someone launches into the national anthem. The Irriducibili and the Banda Noantri next to me all make the Roman salute throughout, predictably, but that’s that. No political sloganeering at least.

And then gradually people start to file away, through what is now a downpour. The Lazio players pass in front of me to climb onto their coaches, and then sit in the heavy traffic waiting to move away. They wipe away the condensation on the windows, and stare out at us. Mudingayi (I think) practically presses his face up against the glass. We stare back. A small boy waves and claps. The crowds disperse almost as silently as they came, for the most part. But the group of Lazio ultras, a couple of hundred strong, set off towards the Olimpico. Up to a thousand ultras, apparently, gathered below the Curva Nord there to chant Lazio songs, before dispersing peacefully.

The mentalità ultra is many things, some good, some bad. But one of them is this. It is those ultras who travelled down from Milan, from Turin, from Udine; or up from Naples, Taranto, Palermo; who spent hours of their own time and who knows how much of their own money, to come on a Wednesday afternoon in November, to stand in the pouring rain in silence for nearly two hours, to pay their respects to a man they never knew. And after standing in the rain, and applauding the family and mourners, and chanting the name of a man they’d not even heard of this time last week, they departed peaceably. Now, you might find that barking mad. But it’s hard to see that you could find it objectionable or violent.

Read the rest here.

Today’s Lazio-Inter game has been postponed, and ultras are protesting throughout the country — rumours are circulating the internet wildly already, with claims that Sandri was shot multiple times. The Atalanta v Milan game was stopped due to fans breaking down a glass barrier, and Lazio fans have unfurled banners reading “Assassini, assassini” against the police. Many ultras are furious the rest of the day’s games were only delayed for fifteen minutes rather than cancelled altogether.

This may well all get a lot worse before it gets better. Two bloggers are on the case, Martha from the Italy Offside and in Italy, Spangly Princess.

Update: Be sure to read the comments below, with updates coming in from readers ursus and Ben.

Update 2: As I feared, things did get a lot worse: rioting broke out in Rome. Go read Spangles on the latest from Italy.

And again, “politics not football”:

Trouble started around 18h in the residential quarter on the other side of the river at the local headquarters of the squadra mobile (rapid response investigative police, who often deal with football related criminal activity). The crowd, variously estimated at from 200 to 1000 people, moved off when their initial siege was held off, rampaging around the area and finally crossing over to the stadium where they attacked the headquarters of CONI, the governing body for all sports in Italy. An incendiary device was thrown into the building, windows were smashed, vehicles and wheelie bins were overturned and set on fire, and according to some reports several hundred people broke into the building. Dozens of policemen and carabinieri have been treated for injuries of varying gravity.

It was, in essence, the pre- and post-match violence of a super fraught fixture, only without the match.

Driving past half an hour ago, the streets are littered with rubble, wrenched up road signs and abandoned 2m metal poles used as weapons. Overturned bins lie in the road. Fully armed riot police are still conspicuous by their presence. The whole area is lit up like an even less salubrious Blackpool – the stadium floodlights are on full, and as we drove northwards from the centre we ould say the whole area glowing a fierce white. The place was eerily empty of non-police. But it looked like a war zone.

Update 3: Gramsci’s Kingdom discusses the remarkably widespread and rapid response to the events, pointing to the failure of Italian state as the root cause of the rioting. As he puts it, “Today’s events, fundamentally, are not about football. They are about a society in deep, deep trouble. No one trusts authority. No one believes that any guilty party will be punished. And, without the reassurance that justice will be done, they take matters into their own hands.”