Colours and Badge
| Palermo's historical first red-blue kit. |
The official badge as of 2004 is a pink/black escutcheon with an eagle poised for flight within it, and the official club denomination "U.S. Città di Palermo" in capital letters on the top. The eagle instead represents the city of Palermo, as it is also part of the city's official coat of arms.
Palermo originally played with red and blue as its official colours since its foundation in 1898, but decided to switch to the current choice of pink and black on 27 February 1907, contemporaneously with the change of denomination to Palermo Foot-Ball Club.
The colour choice was suggested by count Giuseppe Airoldi, a prominent founding member of the club. In a letter Airoldi wrote on 2 February 1905 to club councillor Joseph Whitaker, he defined pink and black as "colours of the sad and the sweet", a choice he asserted to be a good fit for a team characterized by "results as up and down as a Swiss clock", noting also the fact that red and blue were a widely diffuse choice of colours at the time.
The club had to wait for the new jerseys for three months, because no pink flannel was available in Palermo, forcing the appointed tailoring company to import it from England. The new shirts were first worn in a match against Sir Thomas Lipton's crew team; the match ended in a 2–1 win for Palermo. From 1936 to 1940 the team played in red and yellow jerseys due to an imposition by the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, red and yellow being the official colours of the municipality of Palermo. When the club was refounded in 1941 following a merger with Juventina Palermo, they started dressing in light blue shirt on the pitch, switching to the more popular pink and black one year later.
The choice of pink and black as official colours for a football club is still unique today, as Palermo appears to be one of the few top-flight football teams to use these official colours. Another club with these colors is the first division club Sport Boys in Peru.
Read more about this topic: U.S. Città Di Palermo
Famous quotes containing the words colours and, colours and/or badge:
“The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite: a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, or any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.—”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite: a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, or any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.—”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“Just across the Green from the post office is the county jail, seldom occupied except by some backwoodsman who has been intemperate; the courthouse is under the same roof. The dog warden usually basks in the sunlight near the harness store or the post office, his golden badge polished bright.”
—Administration for the State of Con, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)