A helicopter circled overhead. Sirens filled the afternoon air. Policemen made sure their machine guns were prominently displayed.

Clearly, I was walking into dangerous territory. But I already knew that.

After all, I was on my way to an Italian soccer game.

This was a week ago. I was in Rome, and had taken the plunge and bought a ticket to see a game in Italy's top soccer league, Serie A.

Almost everyone who writes about Italy says a soccer game is a must for an unvarnished look at Italian life. "You cannot claim to know Italians until you've seen them at work inside a soccer stadium," writes Beppe Severgnini in "La Bella Figura: A Field Guide to the Italian Mind."

Of course, there's no guarantee you'll like what you learn. Italian soccer has a history of corruption — Serie A is just a season removed from a match-fixing scandal — and is surrounded by a subculture of violence: The sport was shut down for two weeks last season after a policeman was killed in a riot at a game in Sicily.

That led to stringent new security measures, including sturdier entry gates and a requirement that each ticket carry the name of the buyer, which could be checked against ID as the ticket-holder entered the stadium. (This was why I'd had to present my passport to buy a ticket.)

This game — Roma hosting Juventus — was a particularly big one, with Roma the early Serie A leader and Juventus something like the New York Yankees of Italian soccer: the most successful team in history, with huge nationwide groups of both fans and detractors.

With passions sure to be running high, the police presence was particularly strong. And the clerk at my hotel advised me to arrive at least two hours early because the identity checks would make admission a long, slow process.

And so I arrived at Stadio Olimpico, home of the 1960 Summer Games, about 2 hours before the 3 p.m. kickoff. Naturally, I breezed right in, once I found the right gate. There was no line, and no ID check, which certainly calls the dedication to these measures into question.

Still, it was well worth arriving early. For one thing, I had a chance to check out the stadium, finding that out of respect for the historic nature of the 1960 games, the stadium had apparently been allowed to retain its dirt from that day forward. The area below the seats had the same adhesive quality as Superglue applied to the floor of a run-down movie theater.

More to the point, it allowed me to get a full sense of the atmosphere that was the whole reason for attending.

One small wedge of the stadium, from first row to last, was filled with black-and-white clad, banner-waving, chanting Juventus supporters. Although the stadium would eventually be packed to overflowing, and the Juventus section was fenced off from the rest, one section on either side of this group was left empty, to provide a buffer against assaults by Roma fans. (This proved to be a significant underestimation of the Italian throwing arm; Juve fans were pelted with trash well before the game started, sending them flying toward the Roma fans with mayhem in mind before being repelled by guards.)

Even at this early hour, the two "curvas" — the end sections inhabited by the "ultras," the most fanatical followers — were nearly filled with the banner-waving Roma hard-core, all of them seemingly in Roma's maroon and gold. They chanted insults at the Juventus fans, and whistled to drown out the Juve fans' response. (I didn't need to understand the words to know the tone, and phrasebooks don't usually include those kinds of words.)

The atmosphere was so heady — we don't have anything like it in the states, though if you crossed the crowds at a really heated college football rivalry and a major championship fight, you'd be at least halfway there — that the game itself hardly mattered. But as it turned out, it was a good one.

Juventus took an early lead before Francesco Totti — the local soccer god, whose name and No. 10 are on the vast majority of Roma jerseys worn by fans — scored twice in a six-minute span to give Roma the lead. Each goal was met by wide celebration — I was pounded on the back, expected to high-five everyone around me, and was hugged by the vision-impaired fan, white cane in hand and radio in ear, sitting immediately next to me — while the Juve fans, who had their own wild celebration earlier, sat in sullen silence.

That 2-1 lead held at halftime. There was one more wild celebration by the Romanistas — when Juve standout Alessandro Del Piero sailed a penalty kick far over the crossbar, but it turned out to be the Juventus fans that had the last chance to roar. With three minutes left, Vincenzo Iaquinta scored the equalizer, and the game ended at 2-2.

So the game was good. The atmosphere was electric, and the fans — relatively speaking — were on good behavior, with only a couple of smoke bombs, a handful of cherry bombs, and no brawling or arrests, to the best of my knowledge.

If Major League Soccer could find a way to import that atmosphere, everyone would care about the sport.

Of course, everyone has to care to have an atmosphere like that. So for a while, you're going to have to travel — to Italy, or England, or Spain — to really find out what the game can be like.

I'm glad I did it. I hope to do it again sometime.

"Next time," said the hotel clerk, "you should come for the Derby." That would be the intracity rivalry between Roma and Lazio.

Considering that a 2004 meeting between the two was called because of a bottle-throwing riot, I'm not sure I'm quite ready for that much atmosphere yet.

— Contact Star columnist David Lassen at dlassen@VenturaCountyStar.com.