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...
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