Roman research

The Italians are an easy-going lot as a rule. Except when it comes to domestic matters. I do not refer to politics, of course, but to matters pertaining to the household. When my parents owned a house outside Pisa, they employed a cook called Amelia and a maid whose name is now a long-distant memory to me.

What is not a distant memory, however, is how those two scrawny-looking women with skin like Egyptian papyrus fought each other. The maid would clonk Amelia over the chops with a broomstick and Amelia would retaliate with a spaghetti fork. These rows were usually about Amelia’s husband who drove a bakery van.

Amelia was convinced that there was more in the van, which left the house at midnight, than just bread. Someone was buttering it or rather buttering up her husband and she suspected the maid of being the butter knife. Incidentally, it turned out that Amelia was right.