ROME, ITALY – Ahhh Roma. The Eternal City.

City of Caesars and seat of civilization. Home of Fellini's La Dolce Vita, sun-splashed piazzas, Trevi Fountain and gridlock traffic. A city of great decadence, but also one of the holiest places on the planet thanks to the presence of hundreds of churches and the Vatican.

But while Rome serves as official world headquarters of Catholicism, it is another faith that Romans and the majority of Italians observe with greater religious fervour.

Calcio, the Italian word for soccer, is king here in "il paese bello" – the beautiful country.

A Sunday morning stroll through Rome's Piazza Bologna and the surrounding neighbourhood underscores the point.

School children play a fevered pick-up game of soccer in the middle of the piazza for hours on end. Elderly men at an outside café sip their morning espresso and talk, not about politics, but about Italy's shocking 1-0 loss to Slovenia the night before. Both the Gazzetta dello Sport and the Corriere dello Sport – Italy's biggest daily sports newspapers – dedicate the first two thirds of their 36 pages to soccer coverage.

In Italy, soccer is the national passion, the national obsession. It is religion.

"It's part of the DNA. It's naturally encoded into Italians," says Paddy Agnew, Rome correspondent for the Irish Times. "It's not even enough to say it's a part of the tapestry; it's a part of the infrastructure of the Italian mind, of the Italian being, of the Italian state of mind and of the Italian way of life."

"It's not just that you have a huge obsession with calcio as a game and as a sporting spectacle," continues Agnew, "but you have a huge obsession with calcio as a metaphor for life. Every politician you talk to today uses football metaphors all the time."

Indeed, aside from his duties as owner of defending Italian league champions AC Milan, Silvio Berlusconi occupies himself with his rather important day job, that of running the country as Italy's Prime Minister.

In 1993, the billionaire media tycoon founded his own political party, Forza Italia – Go Italy – and was elected as the country's prime minister the following year. Berlusconi was ousted after an indictment for tax fraud by a Milan court led to the collapse of the government just seven months later, but he was back on the throne after winning the 2001 election thanks in large part to the Forza Italia mantra.

Soccer also offers a level of simplicity that daily life in Italy – weighted down with bureaucratic delay, semantic nuance and outright corruption – does not.

Italy is a society fraught with what Italians call raccomandazione, a way of life that sees citizens only obtain and hold onto jobs, buy and rent houses, and advance in their careers not on merit, but because of an insufferable mixture of equal parts nepotism and favouritism.

In Italy there are hundreds of thousands of government employees working – ostensibly – on behalf of the people. Tucked away in a labyrinth of anonymous office buildings, these civil servants are rarely held accountable, are able to hold onto their plumb positions and are protected under raccomandazione.

In Italy, it's not what you know but whom you know that counts.

It's this lack of transparency in everyday Italian life that helps drive the passion for soccer in Italy.

Says Agnew: "In a society where so much is not transparent, where there is so much corruption, where there is raccomandazione, where there is so much basic unfairness, [soccer] has an element of total clarity about it. You see everything out there on the field for 90 minutes."

"That level of accountability [in everyday life] which North Americans take for granted, simply doesn't exist here, but it does in calcio," says Agnew, who has lived and worked in Italy since 1985.

One shouldn't overestimate the importance of ancient history in explaining soccer's popularity in Italy, too.

Ruling emperors placated and distracted impoverished Romans with free food and gory spectacles at the Colosseum, leading one satirist to mock them for selling their real freedom in exchange for "bread and circuses."

"You come from an ancient culture where bread and circuses has always been important and where the idea of the spectacular has always been important," explains Agnew.

"What is the great modern spectacular? There is none, but as we all know, the world's most popular sport is football [soccer] and this ties in beautifully with something that comes easily to Italians, that whole sense of drama and spectacle, and football is the great modern drama."