The workshop that makes eliminated Italy home of the World Cup

When the World Cup is held aloft in July, it won't be an Italian lifting the trophy. The eliminated Azzurri will not brighten the tournament, but Italians will still make the Cup shine.

The four-time winners' humiliating exit in November's play-off defeat to Sweden cast a pall over one of the world's proudest football nations.

Italy are not going to the World Cup, but the World Cup will come to Italy. Every four years, in an anonymous building in an industrial town near Milan, amid the clouds of metal dust and sound of presses and hammers, an Italian company gets its hands on the World Cup trophy itself -- and gives it a makeover.

GDE Bertoni, a small business with 12 employees based in the Milanese suburb of Paderno Dugnano, designed and created the current Cup in 1971 after Brazil kept the Jules Rimet trophy after they won the World Cup for the third time and every four years it returned home for a spruce up.

"It's always a special feeling when the original trophy comes back to us, even if we see the replica every day," says Valentina Losa, director of the company her great-grandfather founded in 1938.

The trophy was made by the company's then-artistic director, sculptor Silvio Gazzaniga, helped by Valentina's father Giorgio, who suggested the globe at the top of the trophy.

"The original is the original. It's like the difference between seeing the original Mona Lisa or a copy. It's not the same feeling at all."
"Amazing feeling" -
"I always shed a tear at that moment because that trophy passed through my hands. It's an amazing feeling," he says. "Not many people can say that they've held the World Cup."
- Coveted -
"The World Cup is something different," he adds. "We make a lot of cups here, for Africa, the Gulf, Europe, Central America ... but this one has an extraordinary effect on you, different from all the others."