red Giordano Bruno in Campo de' Fiorio (the piazza where Bruno was burnt at the stake in 1600) was wearing a larger than life red Roma shirt and the Romanisti were trouping about the city on foot and in Vespa gangs singing, chanting, whistling and flag-waving. A concert for AS Roma at Circo Massimo has the authorities expecting a possibly million strong crowd for music, footballers and a strip by Italian icon and Roma fan Sabrina Ferilli. It's unclear when celebrations will cease, but the last Italian world cup victory pales by comparison, and last year's celebrations by Lazio seem like a tea-party.
The day Roma secured the Scudetta for only the third time (1942, 1983 and 2001) was complete madness. With Roma needing only to win and leading Parma 3:1 and but five minutes to go in the second half, thousands of Romanisti burst onto the Stadio Olimpico arena and while mobbing the players also stripped them of their shorts, shirts and in some cases shoes and socks. The Roma goalkeeper lost everything but his Y-fronts and though replacements were found for all other souvenired strips, he played the final few minutes wearing a standard AS Roma shirt inside-out because no replacement for his goalkeeper's shirt could be found. It was odd that Antonioli was so singled out in the souveniring because the Romans use the same word 'portiere' to denote the doorman of an apartment block and a goalkeeper, but Antonioli is referred as 'er citofono' which in the Roman dialect means the buzzer or the intercom... what you are left making do with when the portiere is asleep. It took 14 minutes to clear the field and find new strips for the players, but after an uneventful final few minutes of play, all hell broke loose and over a million people took to the streets in a red and orange festa of extraordinary dimensions.
Becoming a Romanisti was a not unimportant part of my stay in the Italian capital. It has been difficult to talk politics with my various left leaning Italian writer friends and acquaintances because (despite the many good Berlusconi jokes) the bulk of them have been quite depressed about the looming ineivitability and (since the May 11 election) the fact of a government led by Silvio Berlusconi; the media tycoon who is the richest man in Italy. As I write, he is about to table a bill concerning his conflicts of interest, a document which may prove the longest piece of legislative whitewash in Western history. Not only does Berlusconi own three of the six principal television stations in Italy, but the other three being Rai 1, Rai 2 and Rai 3 are owned by the government which he now heads, his holdings of newspapers, magazines and publishing houses are also extensive. Imagine Kerry Packer acquired Fairfax and Channels 10 and 7 and was then elected as a Conservative Australian Prime Minister, and you can see why Italy's left is looking a bit dispirited. You are more likely to have a pleasant evening with 21st century Roman intellectuals if you steer the conversation towards Gabriel Battistuta ('Batti-gol'), Vincenzo Montella (of the aeroplane goal-celebrations) and AS Roma captain Francesco Totti - surely the most attacking forward threesome in Europe. At least they can't be accused of entering public-life only to avoid prosecution over taxation and asset-stripping irregularities!
NapoliPoesia at Castel Nuova on the the foreshore of the bay of Naples was another highlight of my time. The audience might have tended to gaze above my left shoulder at the screen scrolling Italian translations of the poems I was reading in English, but one young Italian listener in the castle staggered me by saying I was his 'poeta preferiti' because I was 'come Nick Cave'. My first visit to Rome's Musei Capitolini and the Roman Wolf involved encountering NSW Premier Bob Carr and entourage, by my third visit I'd become an exhibit (which is to say that I was honoured to read there with Italian poets Raffaele Fresu, Plinio Perilli, Tomaso Kemeny and Luigi Fontanella for 'Dialogo Della Civilta Attraverso La Poesia' in the Sala Pietro da Cortona - Milan's Tomaso Kemeny quipping accurately that the frames around the da Cortona paintings were worth more than all the poets). I was also involved mith my actor partner Jo-Anne in a theatrical presentation of Australian poetry at the Teatro de Satire near Campo de' Fiorio in collaboration with a Clesis Arte Roma production of an unfinished Eduardo di Filippo play freshly provided with an ending and translated from Neapolitan into Italian. For atmosphere, we had Sergio on the didgeridoo playing in and around the Italian and mother-tongue versions of the poems. Each night the first poem would be read initially in Italian by an Italian actress of the old school rumoured to be 84. Bianca Tocafundi would emphatically announce the title 'La Donna a Uaomo' ("Woman to Man" by Judith Wright") and then Sergio would kick in on the didgeridoo. The several other Italian and Australian actors seated on stage waiting for their turn to read came to hate me for giggling at this point. However, on one night, most of us cracked-up, because as the venerable Bianca approached the lecturn, the Romanisti let out one hell of a roar in Campo de' Fiorio as if Judith Wright in Italian was a bloodsport. Although there are many Italys I haven't seen, from Otranto to Venice I've enjoyed those that I have and I think the Literature Fund's Overseas Studio program is a terrifically enlightened and enlightening opportunity, and one for which this young Australian author will always remain deeply grateful. Like others before me I've done some serious writing in the Whiting Library, but now whenever I read Philip Salom's poem "Seeing So Often the Statue of the Poet Belli", I'll be able to think of that Trastevere statue of the satirical Roman dialect poet , Gioacchino Belli, as he stood last Sunday with three Romanisti exuberantly waving red and orange banners, two guys perched on his frock-coat shoulders, and a face-painted girl on his top-hatted head.
