I remember Rome in 1965, five years after the two bit ham actor from California Remington Olmsted who had washed up in Cinecittà with sword and sandal roles in Ben-Hur and Barabbas opened a restaurant in Trastevere appealing to American tourists who wanted their waiters to sing and crack dirty jokes in Roman dialect. I ate there with my mother and brother and aunt and cousin. I remember we ate outside on straw woven chairs and had big helium balloons tied to their ladder backs. They looked good in the black and white pictures the restaurant photographer took.
A few years ago I told a Roman about my memory of the place and he laughed and said it was a tourist trap even back then. Owner “Sor Remy” as he was called when not getting credited billing as a Roman soldier on the big screen single-handedly invented the concept of the singing Italian waiter, in Rome! A bit like Mamma Leone’s in the Theater District and Adolph’s Asti in Greenwich Village, now both closed.
Mamma Leone’s brings to mind Pasolini’s film Mamma Roma, made about the same time as our dinner at Da Meo Patacca, about a former prostitute with a difficult son. We had rented a Checker cab in Paris and driven all the way to Rome, “two ladies and three children” as the night clerk at the Berkeley Hotel kept repeating to himself at 4 am in the funniest accent I had until then ever heard (“But the reservation says three ladies and two children, and you are two ladies and three children”) when we got to London on a late BOAC flight from New York.
My mother and aunt did not want to navigate Roman streets on their own in a Checker, so they picked up a hitch hiker on the city’s outskirts and asked him to drive us to our hotel. In broken Italian the two ladies and three children were taken to meet the hitch hiker’s wife in their apartment in a Fascist era building with a later conversation between hen-pecked husband and hell-to-pay wife no doubt like something out of the Mamma Roma script.
And something even stranger…My mother and aunt bumped into a lady they seemed to know from Texas travelling with her son who was a bit younger then me, maybe 6 years old, and when we all sat in the Tre Scalini in Piazza Navona he threw a fit because they didn’t have a hamburger- “hambuuguh” he pronounced it and we all laughed at him. The boy’s name was Earthman and he ran around the fountain of the Quattro Fiumi which contrary to what our mothers told us did not represent the Missouri River where we lived, just the Nile, the Ganges, the Danube, and the Rio de la Plata. I later saw them all.
Pasolini would have been amused by the Earthman boy’s Ugly American act. He could have cast him in one of his Trilogy of Life tales- say in the Decameron, as Masetto of Lamporecchio the pretend deaf mute who is forced to have sex with every nun in the convent because they know he will not tell anyone and finally when exhausted cries out, Enough!, is proclaimed God’s miracle- or even better in Salò, the 120 Days of Sodom. But then he would have had to stuff his face with that hambuuguh as carpaccio, raw and by the kilo, and laugh like an idiot, while the rest of us ate the Tre Scalini’s famous tartufo- “una storica golosità”- as if we were all civilized American gluttons.
