Mariella and I drive out to Quinzano to the offices of Il Secondo Circoscrizione. Lucia Cametti receives us in her spacious, window-filled office on the second floor of a stately old building. Quinzano is really a suburb of Verona, only five minutes from Bixio by car. There’s a good pizzeria right next door to Lucia’s building at which we’ve eaten a couple of times. How do I know Signora Cametti’s a right-winger? Mariella told me she’s a member of Alleanza Nazionale, almost the most right you can get in Italy.* Forza Italia, Berlusconi’s party, is on the left hand side of Alleanza Nazionale. They’re particularly committed to kicking out all the Muslims and Africans and Gypsies – the Eastern Europeans can stay as they make excellent housekeepers.

Maybe I should have turned down the chance to meet with her on the grounds of her noxious politics, but I find that I’m not much disturbed. I’m sure I won’t be asked to do propaganda for the Italian right-wing, so why not use the connection? As it turns out, Lucia really likes my work and immediately offers me a show in another little outlying town called Parona for next March. Her assistant Maurizio Flora is in on the meeting too. He’s a pleasant, nerdy sort of fellow with a withered right hand, came here to Verona from Milan because he couldn’t take the urban crush. I tell him I felt the same way when I used to live in New York. He responds, in Italian, “at least there, you could see the ocean.”

*L. Note: There are actually two more parties (that we know of) farther right of Alleanza Nazionale: Forza Nuova who are the equivalent of skinheads, and Lega Nord, who want to make the Northern part of Italy its own country. Ugh.