THREE COATS OF ARMS

Three Coats of Arms - Quintini Paleologo

These three sketched coats of arms were sent to me recently by a friend who is an Italian authority on heraldry. He found them in an old notebook of his and thought they might be of interest. Here they are with no comment so far.

Quintini according to the Guelfi Camaiani Istituto genealogico italiano.

Paleologo Oriundi

Quintini Paleologo (as used by Giorgio)

ROOTS - Family Trees (Paleologo)

FAMILY TREES

Giorgio Quntini Paleologo, like many of us interested in genealogy, drew family trees. It is the easiest and clearest way to indicate links in the past, and once one is used to the conventions and methodology they are an aid to any historian. Even novel readers sometimes need to reconstruct family trees in order to understand complicated plots.

Giorgio, who never leaned to use a computer, did a lot of cutting and pasting. Close friends knew better than to lend him books which might be returned lacking some family trees or illustrations, victims of the Quintini knife. Unfortunately for us he drew up no family trees either of his mother or of his father's paternal line. His interest was almost exclusively for the ancestors of his paternal grandmother, Ida Oriundi (Paleologo).

This photograph is of some of the trees which he created and which are extant. The large one in the middle was an unexpected gift to the present writer one evening at supper, because he had included a link to a joint ancestor. What one would like to have is a photograph of the very large family tree which was framed and hung in Giorgio's flat in Ovada. It is believed to have been deposited with the local city library around the time of his death. It is not known whether they still have it.

Giorgio added various trees to books (right)

WRITER - "APOCALYPSE WOW!"

Apocalypse Wow!

by

Giorgio Quintini

The title of the novel was clearly a take on the 1979 Francis Ford Coppola film, Apocalypse Now. Giorgio Quintini’s title has since been used for video games.

In the mid-1980s Giorgio Quintini was occupied in writing a second and last novel which, like the first, would be a satire on contemporary society. But if I malnati was the bildungsroman of the young Quintini, Apocalypse Wow! was the culmination of the life in Italy of Giorgio Quintini-Paleologo. The hero of the first novel, Andrea, is a lightly veiled portrait of the author, and all the other characters in that roman a clef are based on friends and acquaintances. However, a quarter of a century later, none of the characters in Apocalypse Wow! can be traced to just one source, except for some minor walk on parts put there for reasons of satire and in jokes with the few friends who might be the readers of the novel. Most of the main characters have various traits which represent different sides of the author’s own personality.

Giorgio Quintini in Taormina in Sicily in the mid 1980s, on holiday with some friends whose company probably influenced some of the early atmosphere of the novel and who certainly listened to Giorgio's later readings from his manuscript. The light which got into the film when the camera was being unloaded might be the lights in the sky which announce the Apocalypse.

Although the characters of the novel move between Paris, London, New York, the South of France and Venice, the principal locations are Sicily (Palermo) and Rome. Its main action takes place in the capital of Italy, whose low-living High-Life is amusingly laid bare. There is, however, a simple plot which serves to display a whole menagerie of extravagant characters who seem to have expanded some of the bit parts in Fellini’s film Roma.

The main protagonist is the heir to a Sicilian dukedom, surrounded by a host of both pious and venal relations from the old Sicilian aristocracy and new political classes. If the background is Tomasi di Lampedusa, the humour is Ronald Firbank, Philippe Julian, the William Plomer of Curious Relations, the Angus Wilson of Such Darling Dodos, Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh and behind all of them, Marcel Proust, whose works Giorgio Quintini loved, read and reread. 

The pure fun the author has in listing improbable noble titles has some of the silliness of Firbank’s Cardinal Pirelli. There are many jokes for his friends who will understand and identify some of the situations and people involved in the fairly simple story. Anyone who believes that Giorgio Quintini was guilty of over-exaggeration need only take a look at some Italian internet sites regarding the nobility and so-called aristocracy to see how many people in the country take matters of status and nomenclature extremely seriously indeed. Giorgio only uses satirical hyperbole to poke fun at this special weakness of a society he knew very well.

The book opens with the preparations for a very exclusive ball to which only the highest levels of the old aristocracy were invited, and naturally enough there is the problem of interlopers who have to be there – a local politician who had made his money in questionable circumstances but whose daughter was engaged to be married to the heir to the family dukedom. Because of this engagement and because the politician is going to be blackmailed by some of his mafia chums, the future heir is kidnapped and sent back having been castrated.

The opening of "Apocalypse Wow!"

The idea for this probably came from Giorgio’s long friendship with Giò Stajano, who finally had an operation and became a woman, although, very tall and muscular as she was, something of an improbable one. The hero of the book thus becomes the heroine and a whole series of adventures take place whereby this and that noble title changes because of irregular adoptions of handsome servants by bachelor nobles, in a whirl of scandal based upon the Roman life of the gossip magazines of the 1980s. Names change; partners change, from male to female or vice versa; fortunes are made through vice and talent, or talented vice; sexes change; social mobility is extreme, but all is done with style so as not to muddy the waters of hypocritical Roman society. Comedy is rife and Giorgio Quintini is good at a genre which has always been undervalued by Italian critics. A comic page and a half where Giorgio jokes about the use of female nicknames among male homosexuals may be found in the posting here for 23rd June 2015 on "Le Marie".

To close the book the author projects the reader into the future, which for him in the mid eighties was a possible two thousand and something, in which there is a general restoration of monarchy all over the world, with an even greater amount of institutionalised corruption than normal (Italy is the model for this). And it ends with the election of a new Pope who takes the name of the very first one, which is a sign that the Apocalypse, with the end of the world, has come.

Here, near the end of the book, some pretensions of the Italian aristocracy are the butt of Quintini's humour as he imagines an absurd future for the country.

Giorgio Quintini was a lifelong opponent of the establishment to which he belonged and which he knew and sometimes manipulated well. He often said he longed to see the day when Russian tanks would stream along Via del Corso and Via della Conciliazione, but he had not foreseen the fall of the Berlin wall and the embracement of the very worst aspects of capitalism by the nations of the Eastern Bloc.

The novel took him nearly two years to write in his spare time, as he was also running a gallery at the same time, and the final page is dated, “Roma, primavera 1987”. 

I believe that the novel deserves a small but dedicated readership. The author’s original typescript exists, as do a couple of photocopied versions. Perhaps one day we may be able to have them transferred to a disc and made available to anyone interested.

FRIENDS - GIAMPAOLO MARIOTTI

GIAMPAOLO MARIOTTI

or

"PRINCIPE CORSINI"

Giampaolo Mariotti was, perhaps still is, an elegant aristocratic looking gentleman of below medium height with a fine Roman nose and profile. He came from Perugia and lived in Rome and other places and appears on page 2 of Giorgio Quntini's novel, I malnati, as "Giancarlo", for he accompanied Giorgio to Paris and shared bohemian lodgings there with him. Although I have a vivid recollection of Mariotti, I can find no photograph of him, though many years ago Giorgio sent a press cutting with one, which may still exist somewhere. However, there are many photographs of Giorgio on this blog and, as he says on page 12 of his novel, they were often taken for brothers, also because of the way they moved and behaved.

Mariotti appears briefly in Giò Stajano's banned novel, Roma capovolta (1959), as "Giampaolo", who is often with "Quintino" (Giorgio) and looks like a copy of him. They had known each other since Giorgio went to live and spend his adolescence in Perugia.

In later life Giorgio saw much less of him and tended to keep him at arm's length because of his criminal record, which, however, amused him. At a certain point in his life Signor Mariotti had very credibly started to pass himself off as the Prince Corsini. There is a page on him in Giò Stajano's memoirs, La mia vita scandalosa (pp. 53-54), although Giorgio has annotated that at the time Giò met him he was not a confidence trickster at all.

On 5th April 1987, the La Repubblica newspaper published an article on his career in crime, which is reproduced below.

E DAVANTI AI GIOIELLI DIVENTAVA MR. HYDE

ROMA Buon giorno, ho visto un delizioso cabochon in ventrina, una pietra tagliata alla perfezione, quasi una citazione barocca. Sa, vorrei fare un regalo a mia moglie, è colonnello della Croce Rossa. Sì, un pensierino da abbinare al tailleur Chanel. Domani sera abbiamo un party in casa Colonna. Lei naturalmente conosce donna Vittoria.... Il biglietto da visita di Giampaolo Mariotti, 58 anni, di Perugia, era questo, cortesia e conoscenza evidente dei personaggi del jet set. Più l' uso di un cognome abbastanza celebre per sopire i dubbi dell' orefice. A Milano funzionava bene quello del principe Ferdinando Caracciolo, a Venezia quello del professor Bracci, a Torino quello di Francesco Ferlaino, fratello del presidente del Napoli, a Roma, quello di Luciano Braghetti Peretti, presidente dell' Api. Un gioco delle parti che gli è servito a truffare, in tre anni, centinaia di milioni in gioielli. E' stato arrestato venerdì notte in un albergo della stazione Termini, l' hotel Siracusa. Prima di essere portato in carcere ha chiesto agli agenti un pullover beige.Per favore ha detto posso portarlo con me? Non mi piace uscire con i calzini che stonano col resto dell' abbigliamento. Si è conclusa così una carriera eccellente iniziata nel 1984. Giampaolo Mariotti, capelli radi, pettinati all' indietro, non molto alto, l' aria distinta di chi, nel mondo, si è sempre trovato a suo agio, era stato rinchiuso nel carcere criminale di Aversa. Un soggiorno obbligato dopo l' ennesimo imbroglio. E una perizia psichiatrica che aveva stabilito: sdoppiamento della personalità. L' uomo, 3 anni fa, a dicembre, aveva ottenuto un permesso di 5 giorni per buona condotta. Vado a trovare mia sorella a Perugia aveva detto ma non si era più presentato. La sua vita, che sarebbe piaciuta allo Stevenson di Jeckyll e mister Hyde, si svolgeva tra una stanza di albergo e l' altra, su e giù per i treni, a spasso per via Montenapoleone, via Roma, via dei Calzaiuoli, nelle boutique specializzate in collier, negozi di lusso, ma di classe. La sua tattica era raffinatissima: entrava per acquistare un ninnolo, (Sa, la mia nipotina è appassionata di animaletti... diceva) e poi si fermava a parlare con il proprietario. Quattro chiacchiere sulla season, un commento sul giardino all' inglese dell' industriale più in voga, una battuta sulla nuova moglie del marchese Paternò, sull' esistenza dei suoi alter ego, sapeva tutto, era una specie di enciclopedia. Poi togliendo un invisibile filo dalla impeccabile giaccia di cachemire, pagava con un assegno e usciva, auspicando magari ci vediamo domenica al Circolo degli scacchi. E la conoscenza continuava: gli acquisti aumentavano e così l' amicizia e la fiducia dei negozianti, fino al colpo finale: un collier da 100 milioni, un anello da 150. Allora lo pseudo principe Caracciolo, alias Roberto Grimaldi, alias professor Bracci, alias Braghetti Peretti spariva dalla circolazione, lasciando, nelle casse del gioielliere assegni con tanti zeri, falsi o rubati. Comunque, a vuoto. Il misterioso personaggio era stato segnalato alla polizia di tutta Italia, l' associazione degli orafi avevano lanciato l' allarme ma la camaleontica capacità di Mariotti di cambiare cognome e perfino prununcia (conosce tre lingue: tedesco, francese, italiano ed è in grado di rifare qualunque dialetto) rendeva impossibile l' identificazione. A Roma però ha fatto un passo falso, ha giocato troppo. Il commissariato di Castro Pretorio era in possesso di una foto segnaletica e di un voluminoso dossier sul novello mister Fregoli. Da giorni la polizia setacciava i luoghi deputati alla ricettazione degli assegni rubati. Lui, Giampaolo Mariotti invece passeggiava per via Sistina, dove aveva conosciuto un gioielliere, Daniele Branca. Una persona a modo, un perfetto gentleman, sempre vestito con blazer dal taglio perfetto, scarpe di marca. E conosceva i miei amici, sapeva nei dettagli avvenimenti e pettegolezzi riguardanti i miei clienti dice ora l' orefice a me si è presentato come Luciano Braghetti Peretti, con il suo tesserino dell' ordine degli ingegneri che spuntava discreto dal porta-carte quando tirava fuori il libretto degli assegni. E, nella gioielleria oggetti d' arte Branca, Mariotti ha comprato, oltre ad una serie di piccole cose di valore, una borsetta d' oro dal peso di 300 grammi, costata circa 13 milioni di lire. Uno sfizio per la sua collezione mi ha confessato spiega ancora Branca (che, grazie al ritrovamento della polizia del Monte dei Pegni, ritornerà in possesso della scatola' ) lunedì scorso mi ha invitato a cena, nel suo appartamento di Porta Pinciana. Ma il numero civico non esisteva. Intanto la polizia continuava a frugare negli alberghetti, del centro, mostrando l' istantanea invecchiata. Giovedì dopo una estenuante ricerca in circa cinquanta piccoli hotel tra piazza dei Cinquecento e via Giolitti, l' ultima chance, l' hotel Siracusa. L' avevamo trascurato dicono gli agenti perché in genere è frequentato da barboni, ci sembrava strano. Il truffatore era lì, in una stanza al terzo piano. Ha esibito tremando i documenti, ha guardato con un pizzico di scoramento le carte di identità con i nomi falsi, i documenti dei vari ordini professionali contraffatti, i libretti di assegni (Banco di Napoli, di Sicilia, di Roma) le polizze dei gioielli, le sessanta paia di scarpe allineate, le decine di tubetti di lucido per calzature, le cravatte di seta. Non dite niente a mia sorella, è l' unica persona al mondo che mi vuole bene ha chiesto al commissario, mentre lo ammanettava.

ALESSANDRA ROTAhttp://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/1987/04/05/davanti-ai-gioielli-diventava-mr-hyde.html

Giorgio, who remained in contact via telephone while he was in Rome, said that Giampaolo Mariotti had managed to escape prison by being declared incapable and not responsible for his actions. We do not know if he is still with us. He would be 86 now.

WRITER - "IO CATERINA"

"IO CATERINA"

Monologue of Catherine II, "the Great", of Russia

If one wishes to date Giorgio Quintini's writings exactly one can only regret that he did not keep a diary, although many of his friends may be happy that he didn't, as he had an eye for recording scandal. One of the last monologues he wrote, if not the last, seems to have been this one in which Catherine the Great of Russia looks back on her life and recalls it, mostly in chronological order.

Catherine II of Russia by J. B. Lampi

Catherine II of Russia (1729-1796) interested Giorgio as another of those strong women who ruled in a world of men. They fascinated him. This "Messalina of the North", who was notorious for her enjoyment of sexual relations with various younger and attractive men, was an appropriate subject for his pen. At the centre of the monologue is the line, "I was the only woman who used power to get sex, where women used sex to get power." When she finishes, a second monologue starts which shows her from the opposite point of view of her servant girl and personal maid, Mascia. Giorgio Quintini here looks forward to the period when the servants would abandon and betray their masters in the Bolshevik Revolution. (Although he never voted in Italian elections, Giorgio's political sympathies were with the hard left wing.)

The monologue was written in Ovada and appears to have been given at least twice for the local cultural association "Due Sotto l'Ombrello". Once in Villa Elvira, where he had performed other works (for a manuscript introduction to that occasion exists), and once at Ovada's Scalinata Sligge, according to the newspaper cutting attached below, which unfortunately bears no date.

The Villa Elvira performance, done by Giorgio himself in the part of both Catherine II and of Mascia (we have said elsewhere that for this sort of reading Giorgio Quintini's naturally high pitched voice was an advantage), was preceded by a shortish but discursive introduction on Catherine herself and containing various digressions about her and other ruling houses which he thought might entertain his listeners. This is the manuscript first page of that presentation.

In his file on the monologue Giorgio Quintini, who was ruthless with books if they served his purpose (some friends never lent him books because of this), attached the portrait of Catherine as a stout and aging queen by Lampi (1751-1830). It clearly appealed to him and his monologue is from the narrative voice of this Catherine, who is old, like Giorgio himself. In the opinion of the present writer, however, the author does not penetrate the feelings of his character as he manages to do with Colette and other subjects of his. This develops into a nostalgic listing of her lovers, which is not adequately counter-balanced by the denunciation of her maid, Mascia. However, this is a personal point of view.

The Lampi portrait Giorgio attached to his manuscript.

In a local paper, Simonetta Albertelli reviews "Io Caterina" at the Scalinate Sligge

When Giorgio Quintini had personally typed his manuscripts, the typescript became the original copy, which he usually signed and sometimes but rarely dated. He seems to have destroyed his first rough copy manuscripts. On one occasion, with Il Gestore, he also had the play put onto a computer disc and it was printed also in a readable acting copy. "Io Caterina", whose title and first words look back ironically to the famous letter to the Pope by the patron saint of Italy, St Catherine of Siena ("Io Caterina, serva e schiava . . .", which Giorgio and the present writer used to quote when we had household chores to do), is on twenty-one leaves of A4 typing paper, 1 to 15 for Catherine and 16 to 21 for Mascia. Here is the opening and then the last and signed page.

The opening of the monologue by Catherine the Great

The close of the monologue by Mascia, her servant.

FRIENDS - GIUSEPPE REPETTO

GIUSEPPE ("PINO") REPETTO

When Giorgio retired from what might be called some sort of regular job he found that his pension and other funds would not allow him to live comfortably in the city which was his birthplace and which he had called home for so long. He was also having to give up his flat in Via Giulia and to find another place to live. Having mismanaged certain opportunities he’d had through his family, he was forced to think hard about his future and was very lucky to have a good friend in Giuseppe (“Pino”) Repetto.

Pino Repetto at the Gianicolo, Rome

Pino had known Giorgio since 1974 and had other close friends in common. For a certain period he had rented a room in Giorgio’s flat to use when he needed to be in the capital; he hailed from Ovada in Piedmont but had a job which often kept him in Rome. However, by the time Giorgio had to move Pino had his own flat overlooking the Colosseum, where later on Giorgio would stay when he came on his rare visits to Rome.

Pino, who is a practical man, did a few sums and suggested that Giorgio could afford to live in the provinces; he suggested that if he came to Monferrato, not only would he be returning to the land of his ancestors, but would also find friends to give him a hand. Pino found him a very reasonable flat in the centre of the town, which overlooked the river. He also arranged for the move.

Giorgio took to living in a provincial town very well. After all, he had lived in Perugia and many of his oldest friends in Rome had already passed away. In Ovada, as can be seen in various other postings here, Giorgio became a large fish in a small pond and soon found his way around. Not being able to drive, Pino took him to many of the ancestral sites he had never before visited but which he knew from his historical research. He also introduced him to a set of younger people whose company Giorgio enjoyed in the way of any elderly raconteur.

GQP at Casaleggio Boiro (Monferrato) 

granted to William the Old of Monferrato by Frederick Barbarossa in 1164

When Giorgio put his finishing touches to the unpublished book which he considered his life’s work, I Paleologo-Oriundi di Monferrato, he wrote a few lines of acknowledgment to five people. The last of these, whose name ends Giorgio’s book, was Pino: “un ringraziamento anche a Giuseppe Repetto, di Ovada, che è stato una preziosa guida negli antichi feudi monferrini.”

GQP at Casaleggio Boiro (photos by Pino Repetto)

When later on Giorgio became unable to manage for himself, it was Pino who helped him in many very practical ways and on uncountable occasions. He was instrumental in finding him his last home, the Castle of Lercaro, just outside Ovada, where Pino took the present editor to visit him shortly before his death. 

If it is true that “a friend in need is a friend indeed”, then Pino Repetto can certainly claim to be that. He was directly responsible for Giorgio Quintini Paleologo’s having a decorous and interesting old age in Monferrato.  

WRITER - "Le Marie" (from "Apocalypse Wow!")

"LE MARIE"

As a writer Giorgio Quintini was given to the kind of digression which you might find in Sterne, although he usually returned to his plot fairly rapidly. In his unpublished novel Apocalypse Wow! (finished in 1987), he often allows himself the pleasure of opening windows onto the current Italian and especially Roman social scene. Like his other big unpublished work on the Paleologo of Monferrato family, Apocalypse Wow! is the fruit of years of experience in the world. It will be the subject of a later post, but this one and a half page digression in the 239 typescript pages of the novel, can stand on its own and might amuse.

The text is self explanatory. I had hoped to include some photographs of a couple of the Marys, but find that they are living nonagenarians, and so cannot do so. Here then are the famous Tre Marie, which is also the name of an Italian panettone cake, often bought to take to dinner parties at Christmas in Rome because of its name.

In the novel one of the protagonists (an Englishman, Bobo Bullington-Smith) needs to visit a doctor specialised in STD, known to all and sundry in certain Roman circles as Maria-Antibiotica. This gives Giorgio an opportunity to speak directly to his readers about the whys and wherefores of such a name, revealing that nicknames beginning with Maria were common among many single men.  Giorgio's ironic narrative voice, full of understatement, comes through in this passage.