After we left the pastry shop, there was one more aroma that reminded me that I was consumed with a ravenous hunger following the soccer game: the scent of meat sauce bubbling on the stove, wafting out of nearly every window: il ragù della domenica—the Sunday meat sauce. Though I’ve never really been clear on how it’s spelled—ragù, ragout , or ragou—whatever the spelling, it definitely stimulates the appetite all the same.
Now, we weren’t in Naples and we weren’t in Bologna, the two great centers of Italian meat sauce, but still, we know what we’re doing in Rome when it comes to ragù. Nowadays, perhaps, the tradition is being lost, but in Italy ragù has always been the classic Sunday specialty for various reasons. One of the main reasons is the time it takes to make it, and an Italian mother finds that extra time only on the seventh day of the week. The second consideration is the sheer cost of making meat sauce: ragù every day would bankrupt Bill Gates. And that’s to say nothing of digestibility: not many people would be able to go back to work in the afternoon after piling on a healthy helping of fettuccine al ragù for lunch.
The traditional Spaghetti family recipe is as follows: In a few tablespoons of oil, sauté ground beef, along with lard, pancetta (similar but not identical to American bacon), parsley, pepper, finely chopped garlic, and onions. When the meat is nicely browned, lower the flame and start pouring in wine little by little, letting it evaporate, and then adding more until the components in the saucepan are evenly mixed. At this point, add crushed tomatoes and continue sautéing, stirring constantly, until the sauce has turned a very dark red. This process requires a very long cooking time, and actually demands an even longer resting time, so that the ingredients can blend together to perfection. There are even people who make a ragù the previous day, so that it will be ready and “rested” for their Sunday lunch.
When it came time to scoop up the last driblets of sauce in the bowl, we were always well supplied with bread purchased directly from the baker’s oven in Trastevere. After the scarpetta (literally, “little shoe”), as we call this bowl-cleaning ritual, we were all ready to dive into the secondo, which was generally an involtino, or roulade, thin slices of meat rolled up with a stuffing of garlic, cheese, salt, and pepper, and then fastened together with a pair of toothpicks and browned in a saucepan with oil and garlic and the usual addition of white wine and tomatoes. There it was, an extra blast of nutrition, just in case the ragù proved insufficient.
Before reemerging to enjoy the remaining amusements Sunday had to offer, I, for one, had to undertake one last act that was fairly challenging for a child my age: crossing the street, as I lived on the Via Gregorio VII, a long thoroughfare that runs straight to St. Peter’s Square. After lunch on a Sunday, there was a constant flow of pedestrians, tour buses, and cars coming back from the Angelus prayer, which the pope recited every Sunday at noon.
I don’t know how many times I walked down Via Gregorio VII to go to St. Peter’s, but I do remember one time in particular, when Karol Wojtyła was elected pope as John Paul II. The whole city turned out for the event, even a multitude of non-Catholics, because in Rome the pope is ultimately considered a sort of benevolent old uncle—a member of the family, in other words. Many times, in the years that followed, I sat there on my scooter, held up by the city traffic cops, the vigili, even though the traffic light was green, in order to allow the pope’s motorcade through. It is always fun to see the expressions of amazement on the faces of the tourists standing at the stoplight when I explain, “The pope is about to go by!” Their helpless, astonished faces always make me feel slightly protective of them.
The election of John Paul II was deeply moving for me. My parents had explained that I could understand the outcome of the vote from the color of the puffs of smoke that issued from the little chimney above the Sistine Chapel: a puff of black smoke if none of the candidates had yet received the requisite two-thirds of the votes of the College of Cardinals, or a puff of white smoke if a new pontiff had been elected. The black smoke came when they burned the ballots from the unsuccessful election; the white smoke was generated by tossing damp straw into the oven.
Caught up in the infectious excitement of the people all around me in the immensity of St. Peter’s Square, I never took my eyes off the chimney, hoping I’d see a puff of white smoke. Instead, however, after a long, long wait, a dreary puff of black smoke, accompanied by a collective Oohhhh of disappointment from the crowd, informed us that they had been unsuccessful. I asked my parents whether the conclave might remain in session a little longer, if they might not think it over and elect a pope before going to sleep; that way, at school the next day I could boast that I’d been there. They explained to me that electing a pope wasn’t as simple and straightforward as tossing a couple of sausages on the grill. So we walked back home along the slight uphill slope of Via Gregorio VII. I was only able to see the eventual puff of white smoke on television; likewise the first speech of John Paul II.
Of course, for the papal Angelus on an ordinary Sunday, there was none of the oceanic crowd that stood in St. Peter’s Square expectantly awaiting the election of a new pope. Still, we had to be very cautious when we crossed the famous Via Gregorio VII. Once I got home, I could replenish all the energy I had lavished on the parish soccer field at the dining room table. That, however, was just a brief intermission in my soccer-related activities. At two thirty in the afternoon, it was time for the most eagerly awaited event of the week: the Serie A soccer matches from all over the country, collectively reported on the radio.
The fact that I had eaten Sunday lunch at home meant that I hadn’t gone to see the game at the Stadio Olimpico with my father. So the only option was to listen to the match on the radio. That meant one of two things. Either I could head back to the parish soccer field with my friends and listen to the play-by-play in their company (one or two transistor radios always seemed to be available for that), or I could stay at home and devote my full and undivided attention to the voice of the radio sports announcers. As the minutes of play ticked by, I always did my best to memorize the exact timbre of the voice of the sports journalist covering my team, S.S. Lazio. Every time one of the dozens of sports announcers covering soccer matches across Italy broke in to announce a goal, I could feel a stab of excitement as my heartbeat raced and I furiously tried to concentrate on whether or not that voice was coming from the field where Lazio was playing. The sports announcers often had remarkably similar voices, and it wasn’t uncommon for me to punch the air in thrilling exultation as the announcer shouted, “Goal!,” only to sink back to earth as I realized it was another team—not Lazio—that had scored.
Once the soccer games were over, in order to recover from the psychic and physical ordeal of up-to-the-minute radio coverage—and while the grown-ups sat around groaning or napping after stuffing themselves with ragù, involtini , and pastarelle—we kids hurried back to the soccer field to play away the rest of the afternoon, until the darkness of late evening if our parents would let us.
Afternoons playing soccer were hardly limited to Sundays. In fact, school or no school, whether it was 105 degrees in the shade or raining cats and dogs, every blessed day of the week we had to play right up to the last possible moment. In the winter, we developed echolocation skills worthy of so many little bats: we kept running up and down the field even when it was too dark to see. I remember playing one-on-one matches and being one of the last two kids left running around in the dark, when my parents would come down to the field to drag me home—I protesting vociferously, they furiously lecturing me about having called every hospital in Rome to look for me before thinking of the soccer field.
A terrible threat, however, loomed over our midweek soccer matches: the hour of catechism. Out of the sixty children busily chasing the soccer ball back and forth across the field, fifteen at a time were hustled off the field to attend the sixty-minute class in the parish church. The match was stopped a few minutes before the hour, and those who were going to be marched off
to study left the field, weeping, moaning, throwing tantrums. The rest of us simply hardened our hearts and resumed play.
Luckily the parish soccer field was surrounded by a ring of overgrown hills covered with bushes and shrubs. Roughly fifteen minutes before the hour, those hills began to fill up with the tousled heads of youngsters hiding in the shrubbery, doing their best not to be hauled off to catechism. Still playing on the soccer field were those of us who, by some fluke of destiny, weren’t required to attend the class taught by the parish priest.
Once the roundup was over, a few minutes after five p.m., the horde of hobbits emerged from the underbrush and the game resumed. We never wanted to stop playing.
When the game finally, inevitably came to an end, we returned home in a state of indescribable filth. The least exciting part of the routine began for all the midget soccer players in my neighborhood: wash time. I don’t know how many kilograms of dirt a child can actually bring into a house after the kind of soccer matches we played, but I do know the dirt was everywhere: coating our arms, smeared on sweaty soccer jerseys, caked in the creases and wrinkles of our shorts. And even though I would have happily climbed into bed in that state—just to save time for everyone; after all, ten minutes into our game the next day, I’d immediately resume my state of filth—my mother would decline my labor-saving offer and send me off to the bathroom for a thorough bath.
I tried to negotiate with her to let me take a bath every other day instead of every blessed evening, but there was nothing doing. The thing that pained me most was that, because of my mother’s stubbornness, I was excluded from a very special competition: the rainbow foot contest. That’s right, because at the end of the seventies every kid in Rome wore the same kind of shoes: the formidable MECAPs, newfangled creations made of rubber and canvas, in a color somewhere between dark blue and green. They had one fundamental flaw: when they came in contact with a sweaty foot, the dye never failed to run. This not only stained your socks in a way that made them unusable in future, but they also stained the foot in an incredible spectrum of bizarre hues. These spontaneous artistic creations that appeared unbidden, printed into our feet, were vaguely psychedelic, hypnotic, and wonderful. Most importantly, they were a field for competition. We could sit there for hours admiring these found works of pop art that explored the entire range of blues and greens, masterpieces that could rightly have been acquired as part of the collection of contemporary art at MoMA. But back then, like so many geniuses, we were misunderstood. Only the most daring, or the luckiest—those, in other words, who managed to stay out of their mothers’ clutches, either with superior negotiating skills or a particularly good excuse, and kept from washing their feet for two or three days in a row—could aspire to victory in the rainbow foot contest. For sure, after the Sunday soccer match, I didn’t have a chance: not only were my feet washed, they were even disinfected with ethyl alcohol until they returned to their natural color.
After the evening bath, it was bedtime for us midget soccer players—at least during the week. But on Sunday evenings there was one last magical moment: the show 90° minuto, or 90th Minute (a reference to the length of soccer games, ninety minutes). This was a sports broadcast that all Italy watched fanatically. The opening theme music was unmistakable, and any Italian would recognize it instantly, even if you woke them up in the middle of the night with it. The show reprised every goal scored that Sunday, and until we actually saw them on 90° minuto, we had only been able to imagine them when we’d held our transistor radios to our ears. The cue that our beloved Sunday soccer special was about to begin any minute now would come from the closing theme music of the preceding program, Attenti a quei due, a show better known around the world by its original English name, The Persuaders! From the beginning of 90° minuto until late Sunday night, when I was finally frog-marched off to sleep, I plunged into a rushing river of soccer television, summaries of epic games, replays, and commentary. As far as I was concerned, I could watch this stuff forever. And if that Sunday my beloved Lazio had won, then I dropped off into a golden slumber. If not, I would toss and turn before finally falling asleep, troubled by the idea that tomorrow, back at school, I’d have to resume the daily battle with my friends who were Roma fans. Like the eternal conflict between Good and Evil.
Of course, I was on the side of Good.
5
Secret o’ Life
I hardly need to say it: as far back as I can remember, like many other Italian boys, I had decided, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that when I grew up I was going to be a soccer player. The question of talent—maybe that was something I lacked—was a side issue. The crucial point was this: it was all I did all day, every day, with my friends at the parish church, from midafternoon until sunset, and then I continued playing on my own at home. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else when I grew up. When it got dark out and I finished playing at the parish church, I would return home and start dribbling again on the terrace—either convincing my father to play with me or else dribbling and kicking the ball against the wall by myself. I think it was an ongoing nightmare for my mother: from the filth that covered me from head to foot every time I returned home, to the relentless hammering of the soccer ball against the outside wall of the living room, it must have been hard on her. Only the love of an Italian mamma could have made it possible to put up with this regime of torture. I think that if there was a child like me in my apartment building today, I’d pour a pot of boiling pasta water on his head from my balcony!
What with playing every day from morning till night, I felt sure I was becoming better and better, and at night, under the blankets, I dreamed of my long career as a soccer player, a crescendo of triumphs. I would play for one team and one team only, my beloved S.S. Lazio, until I was drafted for the Italian national team. Then I’d go on to win the World Cup final match with a decisive last-minute goal in the most hotly contested minutes of play in the history of soccer, and my roar of joy would ring out like a cross between Rocky Balboa in the boxing ring and Marco Tardelli in the 1982 final match against Germany. I would raise the World Cup over my head as I looked out over an ocean of streaming Italian tricolor flags—as I stepped, once and for all, into the halls of legend.
How many times I luxuriated in these golden daydreams . . . But each time, a little serpent of nightmare wriggled into my fantasy, hissing the inviting sound of my surname. What if, instead of scoring the winning goal, I made the Italian national team lose the World Cup with a decisive and devastating own goal? What banner headline would be screaming across the front page of the Gazzetta dello Sport the following day? I had no doubts: Spaghetti-Ball!
Now, it’s true I had always played the inside forward position, so I was usually closer to the opposing net than our own. The likelihood was greater, therefore, of scoring a goal than an own goal, but unforeseen factors always lurked in the wrinkles of the game: a ricochet on a penalty shot, a chance deviation on a corner kick—you could never know. In short, Spaghetti-Ball was a constant danger. Of course, if this potential own goal were to be made by Carlo Bianchi or Mario Rossi, it would be an entirely different matter. No one would be able to think up any cutting puns on their names.
Yet it didn’t keep me from dreaming. Or from rooting furiously for the team I loved above all others, S.S. Lazio.
I was born with Lazio in my heart. Or at least I think I was, because I can’t remember the exact moment when I became a die-hard Lazio fan. So I’ve probably always been one. Certainly, the celebrations in 1974 when S.S. Lazio won the scudetto, Italy’s national soccer championship, for the first time in the team’s history invigorated my loyalty, but in all likelihood it was the steady stream of subliminal messages being broadcast by my father, a dyed-in-the-wool Lazio fan, while I was still in my mother’s womb that turned me into the all-out laziale that I am and have been for as long as I can remember.
S.S. Lazio, Rome’s first soccer team, was founded in 1900 in the heart of the city, at Piazza della Libertà, a
magnificent “balcony” overlooking the Tiber. Even now, every year Lazio fans spend the evening of January 8 in Piazza della Libertà, waiting for midnight to celebrate the birthday of their one and only team. The team’s colors—white and sky blue—were selected in honor of Greece, homeland of the Olympic Games. As for the club’s badge and symbol, the founders weren’t timid: an eagle with its wings spread, a proud emblem of the legions of ancient Rome.
How could a child resist the allure of such a story? And it all would have remained very poetic and sentimental, had an irreparable disaster not occurred twenty-seven years later. Four smaller city clubs merged to create a new team: A.S. Roma.
Roma fans proliferated like rabbits, and as I write this, there are probably seven times as many Roma fans in the city as there Lazio fans. That of course does nothing to undermine my love—and the love of my many friends who are also Lazio fans—for the white and sky blue jersey. Maybe there’s also a kind of strength in small numbers. But Roma fans are hard to miss, especially considering the team colors: just look at the difference between the elegance of Lazio’s white and sky blue and Roma’s garish yellow and red—any fashion designer or couturier would have to agree with me!
Un Amico Italiano Page 4