COMMENDATORE NACCHERINO[1]

This little man is everywhere. Thanks to his pint-size body, he squeezes into tight spots; slides under tables to emerge the other side; filters into any room; jumps out from a corridor without warnings and manages to get everybody’s attention. He is a propaganda master of Italian culture abroad. He is the champion of winning causes and conquered admiration. He always travels first class, for free, and sits at the captain’s table where he charms everyone with his conversation, literary or legal, depending on the circumstances. He is always busy arguing the thesis that Beatrice[2] was a virgin, that Amerigo Vespucci[3] was a man of impeccable honor and he has an at-the-ready list of initiatives: a Dante theater, a Petrarch library; a new monument to commemorate Garibaldi or another statue to Christopher Columbus who, as he claims, based on the documents in his possession, was certainly Italian. All he asks for himself, besides the monuments, is a little office with a tiny room to sleep in and some travel funds. He is not asking too much. His self-appointed missions are vacuous but studded with speeches. He is only happy when he is sent on a mission somewhere in the world, preferably America. He tries to become member of executive committees only in order to fulfill this ambition. He brags about his friends in high places in Italy, his many acquaintances abroad, his commemorative publications and the number of languages he claims he can speak (approximately). He is the bane of consuls who are sick and tired of being forced to give him a room and find him a public for his lectures who put everyone to sleep, even those most used to these kinds of official tortures. Italian Americans got to know him well and they are less concerned because they can make him happy with a meal, a cigar and a few promises that everybody knows will not be kept. From the time he graduated from university in Italy he hasn’t studied anything anymore. He believes in the authenticity of Dante’s house in Florence and Torquato Tasso’s prison in Ferrara; in Francesco Ferrucci’s[4] patriotism and in Fabrizio Maramaldo’s[5] betrayal; and that Flavio Gioia[6] invented the compass. Moreover, he is willing to be held personally accountable for the claims of Italianness of William Paca,[7] one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and Francesco Vigo, [8] the alleged (by him) discoverer of the headwaters of the Mississippi river. He gets all flustered when people express doubts or questions about his claims and calls them “melancholic souls.” He believes he has a constructive temperament and in fact some of his expeditions as missionary of Italian culture leave behind in the square those excrescences commonly called monuments.

New York, January 27, 1956