Nausicaa Dell'Orto: "Football is not only a sport, it's something that saved me"

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The bright lights of the makeshift studio catch the glimmer of tears that appear in Nausicaa Dell'Orto's eyes, but her gaze remains steadfast.

The 31-year-old Italian is reliving the moment she first discovered American football, which brings up a complex mix of emotions.

Born and raised in Milan, Italy, she paints a picture of a shy, athletic child who was mostly eager to please her parents. Like most girls her age, she tried her hand at a series of conventional sports - basketball, volleyball, artistic gymnastics - but after boredom began to set in, she turned to cheerleading.

"Be on the sideline and watch the boys and scream when they tell you to scream and shut up when they say shut up," Dell'Orto says with a wry smile, flashing her sharp sense of humour.

The shift proved ultimately life-changing when, one day, she was called up to cheer at a local tackle football game. Watching on, she was instantly captivated by the sport.

Block, down, blitz: much of the sport's jargon made little sense, and yet it gripped her all the same.

"The sport ignited fire inside me," she says earnestly. "I wanted to run, I wanted to catch. I wanted to fly in the end zone, just like that."

In that moment, her mind became set: "I decided to create the first women's team in Italy."

Straight away, Dell'Orto began rallying her fellow cheerleaders and women in the stands at the game for her cause. They then approached the owner of the men's team and excitedly laid out their goal. They were met with ridicule.

"He just laughed at our faces," she recalls. "'You can't even play soccer, what do you expect to do on a football field? You're going to get hurt, you're the weaker sex for a reason.' He shot all the stereotypes at us, and we were like, 'Wow, this is what we have to go through'?"

Disappointed but unmoved, Dell'Orto persisted. She hired a coach who began teaching the sport's fundamentals to their group.

Along the way, her new team discovered another that had recently been created, and soon talk of a team in neighbouring Bologna began to reach her. There was a network of underground women's tackle football - and they decided to come to the surface and play.

"Once we played the game, so many people came to watch because it was football, it was girls," the Italian says. The owner who had once dismissed them changed his mind in light of their reception. Women started to receive investment from the Italian American Football Federation, and a women's national team was born.