By Mark Duff BBC News in Milan

A shadow is hanging over the Italian team's preparations

As football fans around the world are preparing for a month of hope, exaltation and for most inevitable heartbreak, for many football-loving Italians the agony has already begun.

Their faith in the game has been stretched to breaking point by the biggest scandal in the country's sporting history.

An unseasonable cynicism is threatening to make a mockery of Italians' four-yearly voyage to football heaven and hell.

And they could do with something to cheer about. The economy shows few signs of life - and the recent general election left the country as divided as ever.

Time, if ever there was one, for a spot of feel-good football fever. But it is not to be: revelations about the extent of corruption in the domestic game have seen to that.

Big scalps

Back in 1966, disgruntled fans threw rotten tomatoes at their under-performing prima donnas when they flew home early after being dumped out of the World Cup by the minnows of North Korea.

This year, they have started early. When Gianluigi Buffon - the world's most expensive goalkeeper - joined his team-mates for pre-tournament training the fans whistled their derision.

The reason: Buffon is being investigated for illegal gambling - an allegation he has denied. Buffon is not alone. From Turin in the north to Rome in the south, there is a heavy reek of corruption about the game they call calcio.

I'll watch the World Cup - but it won't be the same Aldo, football fan

As if to underline the seriousness of the problem, the same man who led the inquiry into political corruption in the 1990s has been appointed to head the investigation into what the papers have dubbed Calciogate.

Match-fixing, transfer-fixing, false accounting - it has everything. It touches the biggest clubs in the country: Juventus and AC Milan are being investigated, as well as Rome's Lazio and Fiorentina of Florence.

Already it has claimed the heads of the Juventus board, as well as the president and vice-president of the Italian football federation.

Love of football has turned sour for many Italians

One of the two Italian referees who had been picked to officiate at the World Cup has had to unpack his bags after being incriminated in the row over whether Juventus was able to effectively pick its match officials.

End of affair

You can bet your bottom dollar it will not stop there. There have even been suggestions that the position of the national team coach, Marcello Lippi, has been compromised by his links with some of the men at the centre of the row.

For now, Lippi has the confidence of the man appointed to sort out the mess. After the World Cup, though, it is anybody's guess.

One of the wisest heads in world football, Franz Beckenbauer, says it is all bound to take its toll on the team's performance when the tournament begins.

Three times winners of the World Cup, Italians are passionate about their football.

The scandal is the talk of the town - the chatter at cafes and bars is of little else. There is a touch of Machiavelli about it all: a belief by powerful men that the ends justifies the means.

But it has introduced a tired world-weariness into the way ordinary football-loving Italians talk.

For Aldo Lundari - a lifelong Juventus supporter, like his father before him - what has happened marks the end of the affair.

"They have taken us for a ride," he says, sipping a glass of chilled white wine, a Juventus flag still hanging limply from his home in Bergamo, outside Milan.

For Aldo - as for many other Italians - what happens in Germany is now of only academic interest.