OVERTURE: PASQUINO CONDUCTS MORNING TRAFFIC
***A chapter excerpt from Pasquinades
Whenever I pray to become flesh and blood and to sprout arms and legs, I always ask the gods to make me a pizzardone: a Roman traffic cop. Each dawn, I would rise and put on a sexy black uniform, a white British bobby-style helmet, and spotless white gloves. Then I would strut downtown, mount a steel pedestal, and direct morning traffic in the middle of Piazza Venezia.
If all roads lead to Rome, they all intersect at this central hub. The crossroads of Rome’s three busiest streets are sandwiched between the huge monument to Italy’s first king and the former palazzo of its last dictator, Benito Mussolini. Piazza Venezia feeds traffic towards City Hall, the Italian Parliament, the Presidential Palace, and other vital landmarks. City planners call it the Aorta of the Capital. But to keep things flowing and to prevent fatalities, a good pizzardone must be a symphony conductor, not a cardiac surgeon.
Up on the podium, a traffic cop maintains control through elaborate gestures. Although I’ve never driven a car, for obvious reasons, I know this semaphore by heart. Two outstretched horizontal arms mean “Go!” One raised vertical arm means “Yield!” Two hands straight out with palms facing motorists mean “Stop, goddamnit!” No other maestro could be more expressive—or more exacting about tempi and dynamics.
Morning rush hour is the overture to the Roman day, more complex and cacophonous than a tone poem by Respighi. But nothing is scored in Piazza Venezia. At this chaotic jam, anything can go wrong: A Lancia might lose its rear wheel, a delivery truck might spill a load of cantaloupes, or a bus might crush several scooters while executing a reckless U-turn.
But if I were a pizzardone, I would face such dangers with pride and confidence. Not only would I belong to the vigili—the oldest branch of the municipal police force, founded by Caesar Augustus in the first century BC to supervise night traffic in imperial Rome—but I also would be protected by a friend in high places. No, not the City Traffic Commissioner. I mean Francesca Romana, the patron saint of Roman drivers.
Santa Francesca, born and raised right here in my neighborhood, was the Mother Teresa of fourteenth century Rome. Whenever she traveled at night to help the poor, a torch-bearing angel guided her through the unlit streets. Today, municipal engineers invoke her to upgrade the city’s traffic lights. Because Francesca also possessed the gift of bilocation, the ability to be in two places at once, Roman cabbies place her image on their dashboards.
Every March, however, on the Sunday closest to the Ninth (Francesca’s feast day), non-commercial drivers flock to her shrine: a Baroque church with a Romanesque bell tower on the eastern end of the Forum. Devout Catholics and proud members of the Automobile Club of Italy, these pilgrims come to have their vehicles blessed by the Pope’s prime minister: the Cardinal Secretary of State of His Holiness. I never miss this ceremony because the pizzardoni always send an honor guard. One year, however, they showed up in full force to defend their reputation and to teach us Romans a little self-respect.
This happened in March 2018. Rome was nursing a collective black eye. Someone had leaked a forthcoming report from Greenpeace, an environmental group, rating Rome the worst European capital for vehicular traffic, air pollution, and road safety. In fact, the report said, the only city in the world with more severe congestion and worse air quality was Bogotá, Colombia. Colombia! The papers wrote fierce editorials, the opposition parties utterly denounced the sitting government, and motorists blamed the Traffic Commissioner and the pizzardoni.
I feared the acrimony would spoil the Feast Day ceremony, but everything seemed fine when I arrived in the piazza that morning. Carpenters were finishing a platform for expected dignitaries. Although the street along the Forum was lined with cars, enough space had been cleared for the procession to the Basilica of Saint Frances of Rome.
First, elegant in scarlet, was the Cardinal Secretary of State, who had come from the Vatican in a “pre-blessed” Mercedes-Benz sedan. Next was the Mayor of Rome, Virginia Raggi, wearing a tricolor sash over a black power suit. The Traffic Commissioner followed in a peaked cap and dress uniform. Behind him, in lockstep, were the pizzardoni, who sang a military cadence to—and I’m not making this up!—the tune of The Mickey Mouse Club March.
Inside the church, where Santa Francesca’s remains are buried in a crypt, the Cardinal Secretary of State celebrated a motor-themed mass. The altar was lined with parochial students dressed as crossing guards, holding miniature Stop and Go signs. After communion, the children followed him outside for the blessing. With an aspergillum, the Cardinal Secretary sprinkled holy water on a police van, an ambulance, a fire engine, and a garbage truck parked outside.
“Let the saint intercede to protect our way on the roads!” His Eminence intoned. “And may motorists drive with judgment and prudence!” Reporters smirked. Raising an eyebrow, the cardinal made the sign of the cross, and the faithful responded with a blast of horns and sirens.
Mayor Raggi carefully adjusted her tricolor sash and approached the podium. Everyone expected her to address the Greenpeace scandal, and I could see that she was nervous. “Sforza, Virginia!” I said under my breath. “Come on, Virginia! You’ll be fine!” At the time, I had a powerful crush on her. Raven-haired and fine-boned, she was not only Rome’s first woman mayor but also its youngest. Today, however, she looked haggard.
“Well . . .” the Mayor attempted a little levity, “this isn’t going to be easy.” She was rewarded with some rueful chuckles and scattered applause. During her election campaign three years ago, she had pledged to solve Rome’s traffic problems, so the Greenpeace report was “a personal embarrassment.” She took full responsibility, of course, but the challenges had been—
“Maybe we need a new traffic commissioner!” somebody brayed.
A pizzardone blew his whistle in fury and pointed at the heckler. The Commissioner, a husky, basset-faced man, who had gallantly risen to stand beside and support Mayor Raggi, snatched the mic at the podium.
“Complaints from the public,” he shouted, but with a touch of humor, “should be submitted on our department’s website!”
The pizzardoni laughed and clapped. Somehow this horseplay relaxed the crowd and emboldened the Commissioner to speak. Everyone loves to blame the government, he said, but the real problem was obvious: Rome had too many cars, and Romans drove them too often.
I didn’t need to hear the statistics. I had witnessed the change myself over the century. Before the First World War, Rome had fewer than 200 cars. By 1925, when Pope Pius XI declared Santa Francesca the guardian of drivers, that number had increased twenty-fold. A quarter century later, when Pius XII began the custom of blessing cars on Francesca’s feast day, traffic clogged the city—and the flood from the outer suburbs hadn’t even begun!
Today, the Traffic Commissioner said, nine out of ten Romans own at least one vehicle. But the city’s core, within the old Aurelian Walls, was not designed for motorized transportation. Most of Rome, we all knew, was never planned at all but grew helter-skelter. The historic center, where I live, remains largely a maze of narrow, crooked streets. Its few wide, straight avenues only speed traffic to such bottlenecks as Piazza Venezia.
Strikes, demonstrations, parades, processions, and visiting dignitaries and their corteges increase the congestion, stalling traffic for hours. The exhaust from idling engines suffocates pedestrians and disintegrates monuments. Every year, I disappear a little more. But the fumes also provoke toxic behavior. Drivers speed, cut each other off, and execute daredevil turns. City buses are whales amid schools of rushing, dashing minnows. Kamikaze pedestrians jump off sidewalks and into traffic. Scooters appear from nowhere and weave between honking cars.
“Why, only yesterday,” the Mayor, taking over the mic, said in her honeyed voice, “two texters collided at—”
“Then do a better job!” another heckler bellowed.
Once again, a pizzardone blew his whistle and pointed. But this time, the Commissioner and his fellow officers addressed the crowd. How could they do a better job if Roman citizens didn’t do theirs? What good were traffic laws without common sense and simple decency? Santa Francesca can’t protect us if we refuse to help ourselves. We listeners hung our heads in shame and remembered how we had opposed every traffic-calming measure in the past ten years.
When City Hall proposed permanently closing to traffic the four-lane road from Piazza Venezia to the Coliseum, we objected. Why should we commute to work or run errands by threading the narrow, already congested streets behind the Forum? As a compromise, the traffic ban was limited to Sundays and national holidays, but we still complained.
When we clamored for more parking, the city constructed an underground public garage beneath the Janiculum Hill. But almost nobody used it. A fifteen-minute walk to the heart of downtown was too inconvenient for most drivers.
“Romani,” said the Traffic Commissioner, “dobbiamo tutti impegnarci per fare meglio. We must all stive to do better. And with the intercession of Santa Francesca, we will!”
“We will!” we shouted. And for that moment, we meant it. But resolutions, I thought, rarely last in a city with so many delightful distractions.
The Cardinal Secretary of State beamed and made the sign of the cross. We all cheered. But as a chauffeur whisked His Eminence away, engines revved in the Forum. The church square throbbed, and tires squealed. Mayor Raggi looked to heaven, beseeching Santa Francesca to prevent speeding. It would be a shame to ticket people on such a beautiful Sunday.
When the square was empty, the Commissioner blew his own whistle and the pizzardoni assembled in parade formation in their gold-braided dress uniforms. With three short blasts, they began a snappy cadence, the same call and response they had performed before the ceremony.
“For ninety years or more we’ve all been marching in this squad!”
“Pizzardon’, pizzardon’! We’re the traffic guard!”
“The pay is pretty awesome, but the work is very hard!”
“Pizzardon’, pizzardon’! We’re the traffic guard!”
Off they marched, up the Forum—past ruined temples, arches, and columns—jaunty and proud and swinging their arms. And I marched right behind them, if only in my heart.
Anthony Di Renzo, a fugitive from advertising, teaches writing at Ithaca College. His previous
books include Bitter Greens; Essays on Food, Politics, and Ethnicity from the Imperial Kitchen
(State University of New York Press, 2010), Trinàcria: A Tale of Bourbon Sicily (Guernica
Editions, 2013), and Dead Reckoning: Transatlantic Passages on Europe and America (State
University of New York Press, 2016), cowritten with Andrei Guruianu. These works satirize the
ongoing culture war between Italian humanism and American capitalism. Italy usually loses.
A scholar of twentieth-century American literature, Di Renzo also has published two critical
studies: American Gargoyles: Flannery O’Connor and the Medieval Grotesque (Southern
Illinois University Press, 1993) and If I Were Boss: The Early Business Stories of Sinclair Lewis
(Southern Illinois University Press, 1999). As Pasquino, Rome’s talking statue, he contributed
monthly humor columns to L’Italo Americano between 2013 and 2020. He lives in Ithaca, New York: an Old World man in a New Age town.
Dr. Anthony Di Renzo, a recipient of the Ithaca College Excellence in Teaching Award (2003), specializes in professional and technical writing (PTW).
OVUNQUE SIAMO 