I called us the Zoomers. I was in my mid-twenties, a novice to Rome life. Behind the wheel of the Alfa Romeo Giulia was Mario, a wiry Tuscan who loved his region as a woman might adore an heirloom pearl. It was the 1970s, and through the summers of those raw and turbulent times, Mario would take me along as his sidekick on trips to the small city of Montepulciano, in whose nearby rolling countryside he owned a home. He’d send his family to the seaside to make Tuscany his own.
At the time, Mario was the press spokesman for Italy’s lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, a lofty position because it gave him direct access to that legislative body’s president, Sandro Pertini, soon to be elected president. Pertini was a Socialist, Mario a devout Christian Democrat, but the two men formed a deep if at times gruff affinity.
It was hard to know what Mario liked more, his work or his region. In Tuscany, he created a “poor man’s theater,” in which locals, unschooled in drama, would nonetheless perform plays that Mario wrote, most of them about the ins and outs of life in Tuscany, about patriarchal society, about the Devil disguised in farmer’s clothing. These plays became nationwide hits, above all because of the amateur acting cast. A gigantic man shaped like a burlap sack, a vine grower and winemaker by trade, often played the lead, provoking the envy of other actors, jealous of his limelight. This in turn created a network of smaller human dramas that Mario would broker like a referee.
Yet as all this went on, in the high summer that is Italy’s August, Mario would take a break and zoom back to Rome, me beside him.
I later came to understand the word poltrona, which can mean sofa, as “armchair,” a sort of linguistic proxy for “domain.”
These trips were on the face of it unnecessary. Rome was empty. The Chamber was in recess. Not a cat walked Rome’s asphalt; most were instead asleep in Roman ruins.
So why this zooming?
“I must always check my poltrona,” said Mario, leaving me for a time bewildered.
I later came to understand the word poltrona, which can mean sofa, as “armchair,” a sort of linguistic proxy for domain. All the zooming was in fact an exercise in medieval tactics. At any time, at least in Mario’s view, a challenger or pretender could materialize as a phantasm might and make Mario’s job his own. Never mind the empty city and the bolts of heat, a job was a prize and never safe, especially in August, when all Rome was seemingly always dormant.
Mario would go to the Chamber and walk through the empty halls to his empty office, his only companions the uniformed ushers and a pint-sized American. As soon as he’d made his presence felt — this usually lasted a day, maybe two — he’d jump back into the Alfa Romeo and make 100-mile-an-hour haste back to Tuscany. The sacred armchair was safe for at least another week.
Later, long after my trips with Mario ended, I came to understand Rome as a city of tricks, deceit, false promises, frozen smiles. “You see Rome as gorgeous, albeit chaotic, which it is,” an underworld-busting journalist told me in the 1990s. “But trust me that behind most every beautiful façade there’s something illicit in progress, however banal.” Paranoia is inbred because to be is to cheat, others or the laws of the system, or both, mildly or harshly, as needed. Only knowing this (and experiencing it firsthand) did I absorb the dead-serious nature of Mario’s seemingly silly armchair visitations. Steal-all Satan might seem small, a casual visitor, innocuous, or a pretty woman, and so it was that these disguises required careful monitoring. Life should be, to some extent, an act of skepticism, and work imbued with Roman wariness.
“You never know,” Mario would tell me in his agitated Tuscan Italian, a speech of high-pitched inflection.
“See that cat,” and he’d point to one in front of his home, one of the few cats not asleep in the ruins. “It might be a pretender in disguise.”
A laugh.
Then pedal-to-the-metal. Zoom, the amorphous cat-pretender is left behind.
