The Times:
It was a day of bright winter sunshine in Italy yesterday, ideal, in normal circumstances, for football, the national passion.
Instead the stadiums were silent, with all professional and amateur matches postponed for two weeks by FIGC, the Italian Football Federation, after the death of Filippo Raciti, a 38-year-old policeman, in rioting by hooded Far Right hooligans known as "Ultras" at a match in Catania on Friday.
There was a nationwide mood of loss and even despair, in contrast to the euphoria of last summer's triumph for Italy in the World Cup. "What was once a national dream has become a national nightmare," La Repubblica, noting that Italian football has been marred not only by violence but by match-rigging scandals.
" Basta!" (Enough) ran the headline in Tuttosport, the sports newspaper, which announced "the death of Italian football". Even L'Osserva-tore Romano, the Vatican paper, declared that " Italian football died last night".
Instead of showing match reports, television sports programmes showed impassioned studio discussions on whether Italy should adopt "British-style" measures against hooligans, and ran and reran footage of rampaging fans at Catania setting fire to cars and attacking police. So far, 29 people have been arrested, including several minors.
Ignazio Fonzo, the Catania magistrate investigating the violence, criticised one football programme for interviewing Ultras "as if there were two sides to the question".
The Guardian:
Draconian measures, aimed at halting the spread of fan violence in Italian football, were expected from a crisis meeting today between government ministers and league chiefs after the death of a police officer in Catania on Friday night.
No professional matches were played yesterday and Italian media reports suggested that the championship was unlikely to resume until February 18. Even then, many of the matches were expected to be played in empty grounds.
Amid suspicions that the dead officer, Filippo Raciti, had been the victim of a premeditated killing, government figures were pressing for spectators to be excluded indefinitely from stadiums that failed to comply with existing security regulations. No more than four Serie A grounds are thought to meet the requirements of an act passed two years by the previous administration of Silvio Berlusconi.
The Italian football federation's special commissioner, Luca Pancalli, who was brought in to tackle the aftermath of a match-fixing scandal earlier this year, said: "The suspension of the championship will remain in place until drastic steps have been taken."