Flaminio isn’t a rugby stadium, it’s a history book. Tired, recurring history. A collection of essays on anger management that gets thumbed, but never read.

The ‘Azzurri’ play as if intent on righting some private wrongs, then end up kneeling in a pew, reciting acts of contrition.

We got the best and, inevitably, worst of Italian rugby here. Flaminio was all heat and bubbling fury, but no conscience. Heads kept swirling out of focus, pitching Nick Mallett into a heated post-game exchange with local media, only his President inclined to fight the coach’s corner.

Permanent dark clouds roll around them and it isn’t difficult to see why.

Rome’s metro stations are papered with Six Nations ads, the stony glare of Alessandro Troncon welded to passing commuters. Kappa, the Italians’ kit sponsors, run a TV ad featuring the team's biggest men pumping iron, Troncon barking at them like a drill sergeant.

The little general retired after the 2007 World Cup, but he is still the ‘Azzurri’s’ emblem. He works as one of Mallett’s assistants now, a once great warrior miked up on the touchline. But Troncon, on the bad days, could be reduced to an angry rooster in a farmyard.

“Don’t touch Mallett”, protested President Giancarlo Dondi at the end. “I am angry with the players.”

Ireland took their punishment yesterday, knowing that — for a time — they’d feel like men trying to stop a grand piano tumbling down stairs. That is the essential challenge you face in Flaminio. Avoiding getting physically crushed.

Andrea Masi was in the bin inside a minute and that pretty much set the template. His departure pitched poor Mauro Bergamasco into a stint on the right-wing, no doubt leaving him homesick again for the pack, where business was normal. This was a confrontation free of all superfluity. You could see as much in the ugly welt under Stephen Ferris’s right eye as he loped afterwards into the ‘mixed zone’.

Ferris, on his own admission, enjoys playing against “those big physical guys”. But he added: “Lack of discipline on their behalf got them in the end. They started to tire too. I’m not sure, maybe it was a bit of lack of fitness or something. They seemed to go off the boil, mentally as well.”

Ireland scored five tries in the end, an illusory tally. For 40 minutes they had to fight for their lives, the game just a blur of gun-smoke. In the stand, Declan Kidney bore the stern expression of a man reading a bad bedside chart. There was palpable frost in his cheeks.

I sat directly behind a desk-thumping Mallett who seemed lost somewhere between euphoria and dread. Italy were playing with volcanic fire, but he knew, too, the beast within. They could overheat in seconds.

Chaos reigned and chaos is a natural accomplice for the ‘Azzurri’. When Ronan O’Gara was binned in the 36th minute and Paddy Wallace quickly followed with a head wound, Ireland had neither an out-half nor place-kicker in the paddock. Peter Stringer sauntered in; Tomas O’Leary moving to 10, a reluctant bailiff.

All over the place, the maths were grim. Luke McLean’s three penalties out-weighed Tommy Bowe’s try (converted by O’Gara) and Ireland now found themselves a man down.

Then Salvatore Perugini ploughed through an Irish line-out and Mallett dropped his face to his hands. The prop was binned and, within seconds, Stringer and Ferris sent Luke Fitzgerald in for a pivotal try. It came at the end of a half dozen Irish phases, patience pulling Ireland through.

“They seemed to switch off at that point and, at this level, it’s going to cost you” said Ferris. “I think Stringer heard me roaring from about 40 yards away, coming around the corner. He sold a small dummy and just left it up there. Lukey followed me in nicely, it was a good team try.

“And it meant we came in at half-time feeling very confident. So we went back out and tried to play a bit of rugby after that. They (the Italians) were going down with injuries all over the place, so it was hard to get a bit of momentum going.”

That momentum came in one great, juddering leap. O’Driscoll stayed on his feet brilliantly to feed Jamie Heaslip in the build-up to David Wallace’s 46th minute touchdown and, thereafter, Italy pretty much parked all self-belief. Bergamasco and O’Driscoll had to be held apart in one mild spat, but the game was no longer a sincere contest.

Fitzgerald got his second try off Gordon D’Arcy’s offload and then O’Driscoll picked an intercept to score another. Suddenly, it was slaughter.

“Nah, it was very tough” said Ferris, rightly disregarding the arithmetic. “A very physical battle out there. But, then, we always knew it would be with guys like Castrogiovanni out there, you know huge men.

“They’re always going to bring a physical aspect to the game. But I felt we coped with it.”

Coping is the beginning and end of life in Flaminio. The bad stuff evapourates with the score. In the end, Ireland’s plumed movement gave the lie to the kind of physicality they faced. But they knew precisely what they’d been through.