Stadio Pietrangeli, as it has been so many times in the past, was the place for a tennis fan to be on Wednesday. From morning until night, as cameras panned over the Foro Italico, the sport’s most famous Fascist-era marble arena looked like a beehive at the center of the grounds. Everyone was buzzing around it, trying to find a way in.

There’s something special about a packed Pietrangeli. When it’s crowded, the amphitheater-style seating along the sidelines forces everyone to lean forward. At the top, underneath the towering, blank-eyed statues that surround the court, the sunken arena is open to anyone who wants to walk up and have a look; during an exciting match, the standing room there might run five rows deep. Compared to the vast, security-obsessed stadiums that we build in the U.S. today, the bleachers here are claustrophobically close to the players. When an Italian is playing, the fans are enthusiastic and animated enough that they become a third presence in a match.

In the good-old, bad-old days of the 1970s, these fans also had a way of making their presence felt—painfully. The Romans were famous for throwing whatever came to hand in the direction of an Italian player's opponent; coins and soda cans were popular projectiles. Now, in this more civilized sporting century, the fans tend to keep their expressions of support mostly vocal.

The effect of seeing a match in Pietrangeli at its most energized reminds me of a scene near the beginning of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, in which Anita Ekberg, who plays a movie star, gives a press conference when she arrives for a visit to Rome. The film exposes the artificiality and frivolousness of the event, and of the celebrity industry in general. Yet despite this, the scene is also fun. Sometimes, thankfully, life can be nothing more than a game.

This is how tennis looks inside Pietrangeli. The stadium and its city link us—or at least those of us who see it through tourists' eyes—to the Colosseum and its gladiators. When we think of sports there, we think of them as dangerous tests of strength on the one hand, and bread-and-circus diversions on the other. In this setting, tennis takes on those same aspects. At the Italian Open, the matches feel staged yet necessary; overly dramatic, yet somehow kept in their proper perspective.

Pietrangeli was once the biggest stadium on the grounds, but after a major rebuilding effort over the last decade, it’s now third on the list. That makes it a natural home for Italy’s best players. Step inside the amphitheater and you might hear the faint, 40-year-old echoes of “Ahhhh-dri-aaaano!” still swirling there. That would be Adriano Pannatta, a Florentine who was likely the last tennis champion to regularly light up a Muratti cigarette after a victory. He was also the country’s most stylish—and thus greatest—tennis hero. Pannatta was the last male player to win in Rome, in 1976, and his successors have long lived in his shadow there.

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In the Arena

In the Arena

In fact, the two best Italian men of recent vintage have lived pretty deeply in those shadows. In 2012, Andreas Seppi rode a series of Pietrangeli waves to the quarters, but otherwise he has never been out of the second round in Rome. That’s more than can be said for his Davis Cup teammate, Fabio Fognini. A volatile showman with a casual strut and a memorable name, Fognini seems like the model of an Italian tennis hero. Yet he has, strangely, always wilted in Rome. Fognini came into this year’s event with a 3-7 record at the Foro; last year he went out in the first round to Lukas Rosol.

If anything, the situation has been even more dire on the women’s side. In the last 65 years, only one Italian, Rafaella Reggi in 1985, has won the title. Last year, though, Sara Errani gave the home folks a week’s worth of hope. The Bologna native reached the final before falling, quickly, to Serena Williams.

Errani and Fognini both played in Pietrangeli on Wednesday, but their roles were reversed from 2014. This time it was Errani who looked constrained by the moment and the atmosphere. She played tentative, uninspired tennis in her 6-4, 6-4 upset loss to Christina McHale. The quiet American, who, after watching her 5-1 lead in the second set shrink to 5-4, rose to the occasion, fought off the crowd, and came up with a winning forehand on match point to finally seal the win.

So it was left to Fognini, of all people, to save the day. Save it he did against Grigor Dimitrov, by winning an 11-9 first-set tiebreaker, and then by running away with a 6-0 third set. On a different afternoon, in a different setting, the Vesuvius of tennis might have erupted, but this time Fognini did what Pannatta did on his good days: He let his emotions bring out the best, rather than the worst, in him. Instead of wilting under pressure, he played better when he was on the verge of letting his fans down.

By the third set, the crowd had lifted Fognini to a place where he could show off all of his many, often underused, talents. Has a new Italian tennis hero been born at age 27? We’ll find out more on Thursday, when Fognini returns to Pietrangeli to face Tomas Berdych.

As for Wednesday's play there, while it didn’t involve an Italian player, there was one more moment that seemed very Rome. In the match before Errani’s, Ana Ivanovic lost in a third-set tiebreaker to Russia’s Daria Gavrilova. The stands were full, partly because Errani and Fognini were coming up, and partly because Ivanovic can draw a crowd on her own. They supported her all the way, but it only made Ana tighten up, while Gavrilova played with the nothing-to-lose zeal of the underdog.

Finally, after saving a match point with a brilliant crosscourt forehand that brought the fans to their feet, Ivanovic's last return dropped feebly into the net. She stalked off to cheers, and without looking back, gave the fans a quick flick of her hand good-bye. She looked like a movie star escaping from the Paparazzi. The game will have to go on without her in Rome.

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