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 In his unpublished novel Apocalypse Wow!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 Like his other big unpublished work on the Paleologo of Monferrato family, Apocalypse Wow!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.