Books, Arts & Manners: An Incident at the Border

In the Italy of my childhood (as in the present-day United States), various disagreeable happenings could be avoided or settled by personal intervention. One such instance occurred when Nigel the remittance man, my cousin Nicola, and the political career of my uncle Mario (Nicola’s father) were put on the right track again after having come close to a collision that would have brought everlasting shame to them and to Monte Porzio Catone, the town where they lived.

Il lord inglese, as Nigel was called by the citizens of the small Roman hilltown, was not a lord at all, though he was an upper-class Britisher; he was 23 years old, and had been sent down from Oxford for extremely unsuitable behavior—passing bad checks and cheating and stealing—which he continued until his exasperated family finally sent him abroad, with a monthly remittance. But, instead of going to Kenya or Rhodesia like his fellow bad eggs, Nigel went to Rome to study archaeology, a subject that had fascinated him from early youth. He turned up in Monte Porzio as Uncle Mario’s secretary on the (faked, as it turned out) recommendation of a Roman bishop. My uncle set Nigel to work putting in order his collection of Roman coins and other antiquities— shards and marble bits, including a fragmented big toe—that had been dug up over the years in his olive groves and vineyards.

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Nika Hazelton

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In the Italy of my childhood (as in the present-day United States), various disagreeable happenings could be avoided or settled by personal intervention. One such instance occurred when Nigel the remittance man, my cousin Nicola, and the political career of my uncle Mario (Nicola’s father) were put on the right track again after having come close to a collision that would have brought everlasting shame to them and to Monte Porzio Catone, the town where they lived.

Il lord inglese, as Nigel was called by the citizens of the small Roman hilltown, was not a lord at all, though he was an upper-class Britisher; he was 23 years old, and had been sent down from Oxford for extremely unsuitable behavior—passing bad checks and cheating and stealing—which he continued until his exasperated family finally sent him abroad, with a monthly remittance. But, instead of going to Kenya or Rhodesia like his fellow bad eggs, Nigel went to Rome to study archaeology, a subject that had fascinated him from early youth. He turned up in Monte Porzio as Uncle Mario’s secretary on the (faked, as it turned out) recommendation of a Roman bishop. My uncle set Nigel to work putting in order his collection of Roman coins and other antiquities— shards and marble bits, including a fragmented big toe—that had been dug up over the years in his olive groves and vineyards.