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Like the Bolognese towers in the background, we inclined
toward each other for two and a half blissful days.

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By Tom Di Egidio

August 6, 1999 | In those glory days when I was in my late 20s, living in Rome with my then common-law wife, every day promised adventure. Or so it seems from the perspective of two decades. My work as an art and theater critic threw me in with a good many interesting people, and provided limitless opportunity for diversion. It was diversion in a milieu that included beautiful actors and eccentric artists, not to speak of Fellini and the rest of the Roman movie world, in those last fabled days before the advent of HIV in good old decadent Italy.

One day, not long after Rome had gone into brief if heartfelt mourning for the passing of Fellini's favorite composer, Nino Rota, I received a phone call from Sandro. (The names in this little tale have been changed to protect the delightfully guilty.) Sandro was part of a small avant-garde theater group whose members included a slumming count and Sandro's own live-in lover, the beautiful and talented Francesca. They were a few years my junior and minor rising stars in Italy's rich artistic firmament.

Sandro explained that the group had been commissioned to broadcast a radio play based on an episode in the life of Marilyn Monroe. They had thought to hire me, an American, as a consultant on the pronunciation of American names. In Italy things are frequently not what they seem and, though it went unsaid, I understood that this was partially a ruse to give some work to a friend and fellow party-goer. The "job" would require spending a few days in Bologna, and Sandro made several references to that city's culinary arts, famed even in Italy. Italians like to combine pleasure with work whenever possible and I had little trouble deciding to continue our revels in another setting.

Thus began an interlude that could have easily inspired one of the salty tales of Boccaccio's "Decameron," a work that, for good reason, has never lost its relevance in the country's literary and cinematic traditions.

. Next page | We'd have to share the same bed, she apologized



 

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