Chievo Verona jersey's history

Chievo Verona's jerseys have always had a certain Christmassy flavour, perhaps because of the omnipresent Paluani sponsor on the jerseys, which immediately pointed to the Pandoro of the company run by the Campedelli family. And it was president Luca Campedelli, who at twenty-three was the youngest Italian of all time, who not only led the team from a small neighbourhood of Verona to the Serie A championship, but was also one of the first to intervene in the design of his own team's jerseys. In some cases, he even personally designed Chievo's jerseys during his presidency, as he himself confirmed in an interview for Repubblica, answering the question of whether this story was a fabrication or the truth: "Since I became president. And I don't share the crazy colours I see now: the courtesy jersey, on the street, can have a certain freedom, never exaggerate. My Chievo is yellow and blue. Someone in Verona wants to take away my colours, the cangrande, the ladder: get over it."

The Cangrande Campedelli is referring to is the Cangrande I della Scala, or the silhouette of the club's symbolic knight, which has featured on Chievo's jerseys since the mid-1990s, particularly as a stylised figure on the left-hand side of the jersey, that accompanied the team from Serie B to the gates of the Champions League and then slowly turned into a symbol of nostalgia for the good old days, when the team sank to the bottom of the table, a bittersweet interlude on the way to the return to Serie B and the company's bankruptcy in 2019. The ladder, in turn, is a reference to "the "ladder of Verona", or a white rung ladder on a red background, a symbol of the Della Scala family, a dynasty that ruled the city of Verona, and which is used as the club's second logo on the away jerseys. But as much as Campedelli hinted in his words that he is a champion of tradition, his stylistic initiatives have not always followed this course. On the contrary, there has been no lack of daring.

The home jerseys of Chievo Verona

The home jerseys have always, or almost always, consisted of three basic elements: the silhouette of Cangrande, yellow as the base colour and blue sleeves. In some cases, this combination has resulted in jerseys that fans and enthusiasts remember fondly, such as in the 2001/02 season, when the club played in Serie A for the first time. The rest is left to the imagination. In the 2006/07 season, for example, a replica of the jersey Ukraine wore at the 2006 World Cup was proposed, with blue stalactites abruptly interrupting the centre of the jersey. In the 2017/18 season, a three-button side fastening system was introduced to outline a round neck collar, which Campedelli borrowed from fencing, one of his passions alongside questionably tasteful mediaeval fonts. in 1998, Campedelli decided to revolutionise the club's logo by introducing Fraktur fonts for the first time. The final turning point came in 2013 with the introduction of a font specially developed by the club, which turned out to be indecipherable and has been a symbol of the stylistic decline in Italian football for years.

Chievo's second and third jerseys

The models made for the away jersey and the third jersey deserve their own discussion. One of the jerseys Campedelli designed the most was the away jersey for the 2012/13 season, a white jersey with fine black vertical stripes similar to the New York Yankees jerseys, and Campedelli himself has admitted that he was inspired by an old baseball film when designing the jersey. The third jersey, also from that season, had a yellow and a green rectangle symmetrically separating the two halves of the jerseys - a clear reference to Newton Heath, the original name of Manchester United, a team Campedelli is a fan of.

The stylistic experiments did not stop there: Blue kits were reintroduced as a tribute to the club's first colour, using different shapes and shades each time. There was another homage to baseball with a silver jersey inspired by the San Francisco Giants, and even an homage to Formula 1 with a black and green jersey as a tribute to British Racing Motors. Of course, there was no shortage of special jerseys for Christmas with glittering golden details, but the last mention is dedicated to the equally revisable and unforgettable home jersey worn by Chievo at the Scala del Calcio, San Siro, on the occasion of the release of the film "Anaconda".