Candles in the Vatican yesterday on the day the Pope passed away, and around the Italian capital you could also find the odd flyer saying: “Vote Mussolini.” Municipal elections have brought Benito’s granddaughter to the polls for the Lazio region, and although she hardly expects to draw most of Romans around to her far-right way of thinking, the posters are eye-catching. Alessandra Mussolini is blonde, a former model with big, striking features.

Her brand of politics, and the surname, might look good to some of the folk who gather at the Stadio Olimpico. Lazio supporters have a reputation that goes back at least as far as the days when Alessandra’s grandad used to take her father to matches at their old Rondinella stadium in the first half of the last century. The association with Il Duce is something Lazio have never quite shaken off, and if ever a fixture was going to draw out the extremist paraphernalia that the more fervent laziali like to carry, it was the one they had been preparing for against Livorno yesterday, until the deteriorating health of the Pope meant all matches were postponed. Religion ahead of politics then.

Lazio-Livorno will now take place later this month, and the politics will outshout the sport. On the field, nothing more than some mid-table reshuffling will be at stake, but the arguments between certain fans of Lazio and Livorno will be maintained with the rhetoric of right and left. Since their last meeting in November at Livorno, the contest in the capital has assumed all the fire of a derby and the wind of a philosophical debate.

Livorno are known as a communist club, whose fans don’t just take scarves, replica jerseys and loudhailers to matches, but go with Che Guevara in tow. His face, emblazoned on banners and T-shirts, is the chosen signature not just of a club but of a city as strongly associated with the left as any in Italy.

The Italian Communist party was founded in the port of Livorno in 1921. The football club is a little older and not so successful. When they won promotion from Serie B last summer, they broke a 55-year absence from the elite. But the best tale of all for Livorno fans was that they reached the promised land led by a hero they could call one of their own. Cristiano Lucarelli comes from a place called Shanghai near the Livorno docks, and he’s an avowed communist. When his mobile phone rings, it’s to the tune of The Red Flag. He likes to stir Italian football’s appetite for conspiracy. On a dubious refereeing decision against Livorno earlier in the season, he declared: “They want to put us back down in Serie B for political reasons, because our fans are left-wing.” He was soon obliged to recant.

Athletes are generally discouraged from making political gestures, but last week the Italian media were keen to get Lucarelli and one Lazio player in particular together to talk politics.

The Lazio man you’ll recognise instantly — he is Paolo Di Canio, the gifted striker once of Celtic, Sheffield Wednesday, West Ham United and Charlton Athletic and always, deep down, of SS Lazio. A Roman from the tough district of Quarticciolo, he hung out as a teenager with the Irriducibili Ultras of the Curva Nord at the Stadio Olimpico. He’s a man who admires Benito Mussolini — “a principled individual who compromised his ethics to save the country” — and is not afraid to say so.

SO WHEN Italia Uno, one of the several TV channels owned by Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, chose to preview the Lazio-Livorno game by bringing together these two players, the talk was not of relegation or marking but revolutionaries and dictators. What, for instance, did they each make of Che Guevara? Di Canio first: Che was “a revolutionary who people have seized upon for his image”.

“Pah!” answered Lucarelli. “He’s the symbol of proletarian revolution.”

From Di Canio came the observation that “Mussolini was the best leader in the history of a united Italy”.

Lucarelli on Il Duce? “No comment.”

To the question: “If I called you a communist, would you be offended?” Di Canio replied: “I’d take you to court.”

Lucarelli’s answer: “No, I wouldn’t be offended.”

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