The happy Pope

When I attended  the Mater Dei convent school, tied up in a noble palazzo, dressed in  pale yellow, that sat at the bottom of the San Senbastianello slope, at a stone throw from Piazza di Spagna, it was a honour and a medal to have a Pope in the family. It may sound a laugh, nowadays - I gather - but in those lost times, some thirty years ago  it was an ever so serious business... Not everyone, of course, had a Sixtus ex ex or a Pius so and so. Francesco C. had two Popes in his pedigree and the same number belonged - I could not figure out how it could have happened ... - to a curly, dark haired, not so pretty girl called Fanny. But all these Popes, in their red robes and all, were only dusty pictures in a hall and had lost, in the galloping of years, their flare and smash and the fisher's ring...

Not so with my little friend Q. He was as small and blond as a little prince and nothing less than the nephew of the Pope in person, blood and bones, the one who actually was sitting on the seat of Saint Peter, he was the man who represented God in this topsy turvey world.

One day, this little elf of  a boy, went with his family to see his uncle, the Pope. The women of the family, mother and aunts and sisters and close friends, dressed in black, wore dark scarves and sullen faces, he, the little one (no matter how trained  he had been for long afternoons...) was as brisk and merry as a parrot in Brasil: a child going to the park...

At last they came to a silent room, ceiling and walls in prayer. The Pope left his noble seat to welcome his family and what do you think little Q. did? You guessed: he sat on the Pope's chair, under the awed eyes of the vatican crew. The Pope turned around, spotted him and said: "Little Q., I suppose that chair belongs to me...". And everybody laughed under dark scarves and solemn moustaches...   

Dimitto auricolas

Ten years ago, when I was still a journalist and not a ronin, when I had a paper to write articles for, a salary and my own dear little table, a computer of my own and a mail address that married my name to that of the paper, and collegues with whom to discuss this and that, the euro popped in and killed straight away our own dear lira and, after a while, with the crysis of Euroland and all, chopped me out of my job. Oh how happy italians were, when the euro cried its first baby cry, to welcome this new brand of notes all coloured in orange and green and purple. Flowers blooming in the sky. The colours of doom, to me. Oh how many times did I ask this and that if they were happy to buy milk at double the price of before, but, lo, in euros... Nobody listened. The party had begun, italians were no more italians, but europeans. Michelangelo and Raffaello and all our Roman past seemed to be forgotten as we melted in the gray,  european pot, that has and had no soul or heart, but lots of numbers and famelic bureaucrats...
I felt angry and betrayed and dispossessed of my country, that had given so much to the whole world. Beauty and art and grace dwell in this little boot that sleeps in the middle of sweet waters.... The euro, to me, a dictator, a foreigner, a new conqueror. Oh how I missed my dear old lira bank notes, with the dear faces of the artists I had always cherished: Michelangelo and Verdi and Caravaggio and even Mrs Montessori with her white hair of clouds and snow!

I said all this and much more to a friend the other day in a cafè that is nose to nose with the Colosseum. And when my Salomon speech was over I opened my bennibag to pay the low bill and found out that someone, who knows who, had given me, instead of the round two euro coin, an old Cinquecento lire - a twin coin, but worthless, to the euro - for change. And my friend, with round eyes and a little smile on her lips: "Well, now, you should be happy, you have got your lire back!". As the saying in latin goes: Dimitto auricolas...

From Rome with love

My mother, Regina, was born in Friuli, in the north east of Italy, a Region that had mountains as a crown and the sea as a grey scarf tied around its sandy neck. She lived in an old pink villa - that had a big green garden and a big green gate open to fields and vineyards - together with her mother, my grandma -  Stella, a star, as I am Ester, same name in babylonese.. - and with an old lady that cooked and cleaned and that was called like the first woman on earth: Eve. My mother hated house and all as much as she adored her father, who was an officer and a gentleman and had died in a prison up in some little village in Germany. He had died, as an italian prisoner from Albania, when she was only sixteen and since then little Regina, who was tall and dark and shy, had decided that she would leave for good the pink house, her mother and old Eve...

Her dreams came true on a summer's day when she spotted my father on the sandy beach that bore the poetic name of Lignano Goldsand (sabbiadoro). She was there with an aunt of hers who had a basket of kids; also my father was guest in an aunt's house, but she had no kids at all. She saw him and he saw her and they fell in love. September danced in the line with its bags of  rain and  clouds. My father back to Rome, my mother to the pink house. The months flew on Pegasus back. My father sent my mother a thin postcard. She did not even reply. I do not know if her silence spoke to him or if love had done it all, I only know that, one day, he knocked on the door of the pink house and that was that...
Many years after, my mother showed me his postcard. On one side the white meringue that tickles the skyes on top of Borromini's Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza, on the other only this sentence: "Be happy". The  love song of a lawyer...