The coffin of Gabriele Sandri leaves the church after the funeral ceremony in Rome. Sandri, a 26-year-old Lazio fan, was shot dead as police were intervening in a scuffle between rival supporters, an incident that sparked violence across Italy. (Photo credit should read Mario Laporta/AFP/Getty Images)

Not for the first time, Italian soccer finds itself at the crossroads, following Gabriele Sandri's shockingly senseless death.

Sandri, a club DJ and a Lazio supporter from Rome, was killed last Sunday after a police officer shot him while attempting to break up a scuffle between groups of fighting fans at a highway rest stop in Tuscany.

A police statement called the shooting a "tragic error," explaining that Sandri was accidentally killed when the police officer fired two warning shots to prevent the fight between the two sets of fans from escalating further. One of the stray bullets hit Sandri, who was sitting in a parked car, in the neck, police said.

Sandri, who was on his way to Milan to watch his team play Inter Milan, died almost instantly. He was 26.

His death led to violent episodes up and down the Italian peninsula that same day. In Milan, approximately 400 fans threw stones at police headquarters, while outside the San Siro stadium Lazio and Inter supporters united and chanted anti-police slogans.

Riots broke out in the stands at the start of the Atalanta-AC Milan game in Bergamo and some fans in the curva (end zone section of the stadium) attempted to smash through a Plexiglas wall so that they could swarm the field and stop the game from continuing. The game was called off after seven minutes.

Fans in Rome wreaked violence and havoc outside the Stadio Olimpico, storming a police station near the stadium. They also threw stones at police cars and smashed windows of the Italian Olympic Committee headquarters, also near the stadium, forcing the cancellation of that evening's Roma-Cagliari game.

Violence inside and outside soccer stadiums has ravaged the Italian game for years, and Sandri's death reignited a national debate as to how to defuse the escalating tensions, with some arguing the current Serie A season should be suspended to allow for a cooling off period.

Such suggestions, though, miss the point entirely, because the violence that afflicts Italian soccer is merely symptomatic of a much larger disease that plagues Italy.

We, in North America, have this romantic perception of Italy as a country where everyone is living la dolce vita (the sweet life). We think of Italy as a nation where young professionals, tailored in the latest Armani fashions, steal away from work early to meet up with friends and gossip while sipping espresso at sidewalk cafes. We picture families frolicking on the beach, basking in the warmth and glow of the sun while eating gelato. We have this image where everyone is living life to the fullest without a care in the world.

The reality is quite different.

The day-to-day efficiency, transparency, clarity and accountability that we take for granted in North America simply does not exist in Italy, where bureaucratic delay, semantic nuance and outright corruption bedevils everyday life.

Far from a meritocracy, Italy is a society weighted down by what Italians call forte raccomandazione, a way of life that sees the average person only obtain and hold onto their job, buy a house, and advance in their career not on merit, but due to an insufferable mixture of equal parts nepotism and favouritism.

It is this systematic string-pulling, where you can only get ahead if you know someone in high places, that defines Italian society. In Italy, it's not what you know but whom you know that counts.

Everyday life is a struggle for the average Italian who doesn't have friends in high places, while benefactors of forte raccomandazione and those who have learned how to cheat the system are the ones that succeed.

This deteriorating state of life in Italy has led to a nation of disenchanted citizens who harbour anger and resentment against authority figures (most notably, politicians and the police) and are always looking for an outlet for their frustrations.

It is within this context that a significant portion of the Italian population seeks solace in breaking the rules and taking shortcuts - be it tax evasion, swindling strangers, or bearing false witness against neighbours - as a form of rebellion.

It should hardly come as a surprise, then, that soccer, the unifying cultural thread of life in Italy, is often the venue where people rail against the country's social problems.

This is why racist chants and banners are commonplace at Italian soccer games, why fans violently clash with police inside the stadiums, and why players are the targets of projectiles thrown by supporters from the stands.

It would be terribly irresponsible to paint all of Italy's people with this brushstroke, because most Italians (the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker) are honest and hard-working folks.

But there is no denying that a growing number of Italians do not feel bound by a personal sense of responsibility or moral obligation in how they choose to conduct themselves, preferring instead to find excuse after excuse that justifies their miscreant behaviour.

Italy can't even begin to fix the problems that bedevil Italian soccer until the more important issue of diagnosing and curing what ails Italian life is first addressed.