IS THE LATIN LOVER DEAD?
Nicholas Farrell on the Italian response
to claims that their menfolk can no longer cut the mustard
Predappio ITALIANS take in their stride most taunts from other Europeans about the Italian national character and its sometimes trag- ic, more often comic, consequences. But when the big German newspaper, Bild Zeitung, turned its guns this month on the sexual prowess of Italian men, it was a taunt too far. 'Latin Lover Addio: German Women say his seduction technique is "banal" and he is "hardly virile" ', crowed the German tabloid. The Italian response to this latest piece of impertinence by Italy's wartime ally was one of outrage. Journalists and psychiatrists leapt into action. How dare the Germans! Debate was declared.
I live in the Romagna, the land of the Latin Lover whose HQ is at Rimini, also famous for the millions of umbrellas on its tedious, flat, endless beach. It is true that as a man I am not often on the receiving end of the romantic attentions of the Latin Lover. Furthermore, I rarely go to Rimini if I can help it, preferring to remain inland in the Apennine mountains. But I am in an ideal situation to study the brute at first hand and to deliver a more balanced ver- dict on whether he has lost his touch than either the Germans or the Italians at this delicate moment of the crisis, with half of the summer still left to run.
Among the most famous Latin Lovers of this century, and one who, appropriately, came from the Romagna, was the fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, who, unlike Hitler, was very keen on sex. The Mussoli- ni technique was always the same and today would no doubt be regarded as rape: he would simply grab a woman he fancied and have sex with her there and then, clothed and preferably against a wall. Beds wasted far too much time. One women recalled how he squeezed her breasts as if he were squeezing the rubber hooter of a motor car. Nevertheless, Mussolini had a dramatic effect on women. Churchill's wife, for one, described his incredible eyes in a letter to her husband.
But it was really only after Mussolini was strung upside-down from the girders of a Milan petrol station with his last mistress, Clara Petacci, in 1945 that the Latin Lover achieved popular fame. This was due to the advent of the cheap package holiday and the arrival on the Adriatic coast each summer of millions of foreign women from countries such as Germany. It was also among the umbrellas of Rimini that Fed- erico Fellini, himself a Romagnolo, set his films about the Latin Lover, I Vitelloni and Amarcord. The rest, as they say, is history.
Given this history, Italian pride required nothing less than a full-scale response to the German assault on the nation's virility. Already this year the German press had warned Germans that for every four umbrellas on the beaches of the Adriatic there was an unexploded Nato bomb from the air war against Serbia. That was bad enough. Now this. The Germans were involved in a sinister plot, said Italians, to undermine the tourist industry. For apart from the Latin Lover, what other attraction can a place like Rimini possibly have?
The regional newspaper, Il Resto del Car- lino, led the counter-attack against the Germans for what it called this 'dirty war'. It urged male readers: 'Come on now, boys, forza The moment of rebellion has arrived. Against the arrogance of the mark, against the invasion of the Bundesbank, against the rebirth of the Reich, let us re- establish the leadership of the Italian male.'
The next day, the newspaper wheeled out its biggest gun: the Rimini-based Maur- izio Zanfanti — `Zama' for short, as in zanzara, the Italian for mosquito — the most famous living Latin Lover of all, who is now in retirement, he says, though I do not for a moment believe him. I last wrote about `Zama', the so-called Rimini Romeo, in 1995 when he announced his latest retirement. He had already retired once before, in 1991. By his second retire- ment, his tally was 6,000 female conquests, he claimed, but he felt the time had come to throw in the towel and concentrate on work — his discotheque, Gasoline. His technique, he told me, was, 'Sometimes it takes no more than a look and within five minutes we are making love. But the most important thing is to know how to talk. OK, don't look really ugly.' 11 Resto del Carlin° pictured him, now aged 43, looking defiant with his hairy chest, gold bangles and chains, thick mane of long blond hair, and swarthy torso, arm in arm with two girls. 'In my day it was a duty to return home with the "prey",' he said. The girls around whom he had his arms, I noticed, were dark-skinned brunettes, and did not look German in the slightest.
Elsewhere on the Rimini front-line there was further disheartening news for the Italians. Walter, an old umbrella atten- dant, complained that for three days now two foreign girls had lain under his umbrellas, and his son had not spoken to them even once. It was all so different in the old days: 'We used to go to the airport at Rimini and wait for the charter planes from Sweden and England to land,' he said. 'Then we used to follow the coaches in our cars. The hotel identified, we used to go back day after day to "give them damage".' Psychologists, meanwhile, fur- ther dampened Italian spirits by saying that young Italian men had become mummy's boys, or were more interested in books than women; either that or femi- nism had emasculated Italian men, or something.
But if what I see night after night in the bar next to the derelict Mussolini castle in the• village of Predappio, where the dicta- tor was born and is buried, is anything to go by, the Latin Lover is far from dead. I watch as these examples of the Romagnol cockerel, as he is known here, move in on their target either with a silly joke or the offer of alcohol or food. They will not leave. Next thing you know they are pro- pelling the target around the dance floor expertly as if at the wheel of the expen- sive car they invariably have, regardless of how menial their job. They pay for all food and drinks for the target and all her friends as well. Little talk takes place. It is all a question of bodies and eyes. No mat- ter how ugly they are, they will not take no for an answer. The only way the target can get rid of them is by losing her tem- per, which most women presumably pre- fer not to do. From what I witness it is clear that a lot of women find this sort of thing attractive.
There is, however, one big change which has occurred of late. There are now two types of Latin Lover: the traditional male one and a newer female one, the result, perhaps of some strain of feminism. Here, I speak from direct experience. I have been the target of the attentions of this new phenomenon, the female Latin Lover — propelled around the dance floor and all. It is an unnerving experience, I can tell you. I know now how the female millions at Rimini feel. Latin Lovers, of whichever sex, will not take no for an answer.
The author's biography of Mussolini will be published by Weideitfeld and Nicolson.
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