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Dear Friends & Darling Romans

The original deluxe edition was published by Lippincott. This is an extraordinarily well-written and witty account of an American lady in Rome, written on several levels. Aside from being entertaining, the book is a wise and subtle study of Italians, as compared to Americans— and vice versa.

This book is a perennial best-seller at the kiosk on Via Veneto in Rome.

Cover & illustrations are by Nicola Simbari.

MARY CHAMBERLIN went to Rome for a three-month vacation, and, after three years, at the height of the Dolce Vita, wrote Dear Friends and Darling Romans. She had become—in spite of herself almost—a trenchant observer of things Italian: eating, drinking, births, cats, rented rooms, funerals, grandmothers, motorbikes, amore, especially amore. She had made friends with a complete cross-section of Italian life, including a favorite horse. She had noted, with the penetrating gaze of the American Midwesterner, the vagaries of Latin behavior and misbehavior. For contrast, she made a short eventful trip into Yugoslavia.

But this is no flippant pennyweight book; it is a wise and subtle study of the Italians, as compared to the Americans—and vice versa. Mary Chamberlin’s Italians are not cliché-Latins, but living, breathing human beings. Her implied criticisms of certain American nervous tics have nothing to do with the dismal wail of the usual ex-patriot. Mary Chamberlin is an extra-patriot, who loves and knows Rome as perhaps only an American ever can. Her book is brilliantly and unforgettably comic. The case histories of the ladies who have sworn off Latin lovers and founded a society called Italians Anonymous are sheerest of delights.

If you like a vigorous laugh that trails thoughts in its wake . . . if you are seriously concerned about America and its and how it earned its “place” in the world, this is your book. Even if all you want is to be amused, it’s still your book. It’s fresh and young and beautifully written, with something in it for everybody.

The Author

MARY CHAMBERLIN was born in Lebanon, Illinois, and is a graduate of Monticello College in Alton, Illinois, where she was admitted when only fifteen years old.

Mary Chamberlin and Lomax Study appearing in Private Lives circa 1933s. Mr. Lomax most recently appeared in the film Most Valuable Primate (2000)

She attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City and had a brief theatrical career, terminated by marriage and motherhood.

In 1954, she moved to Rome, where she has lived ever since. She is also the author of The Palazzo, published, as well, by IDKPress, and has written for television, magazines, films, and newspapers.

The script for her award-wining teleplay, The Ascent of P. J. O'Hara, is preserved in the archives of the Steven H. Scheuer Collection at Yale University, which has sent us a copy for possible publication.

Dear Friends & Darling Romans Press Kit (PDF)

Review appearing in
THE BOOK READER, Spring-Summer 2002

“One Italian Romance in a lifetime was enough.”

DEAR FRIENDS AND DARLING ROMANS. By Mary Chamberlin, illustrated by Nicola Simbari. IDKPress, paper. This beautifully written, elegantly observed book has a history. Author Chamberlin, an American, moved to Rome in 1954 and she's lived there ever since. But three years into her stay, she wrote this book and it was published for an audience of 1950s America. It's reissued now—and it's just lovely. Unvarnished America meets varnished, crazy-quilt, wild Italy. "I was in a country where Carmen and La Tosca packed the theater, and Elsie Dinsmore and Pollyanna played to an empty house." She applies for a room to a woman in her late thirties who introduces her to Mamma—together, the two go over recently divorced Chamberlin with the dogmatic eyes of the Catholic centuries. A very human story of a case history of one Elizabeth who came to Italy on a Fullbright, and after a confusing relationship realized: “One Italian romance in a lifetime was enough.” Trieste “has the atmosphere of being nowhere more than any place I know.” A trip to Yugoslavia results in culture shock as a man viciously beats a horse and everyone accepts the scene as totally normal. “The cries of the horse sounded louder than they had from above. Was there no way to make them understand that the horse's misery was their own..." The men of Italy, romance, a Latin dentist, the entire panorama of Italy and a Mediterranean culture ten times older than America's. An enthralling, wonderfully observed work of art from fifty years ago, rich with color and emotion and packed with intriguing characters. Chamberlin is truly a master storyteller.

Excerpts from
Dear Friends and Darling Romans

Ecco Roma

I came to Rome to spend three months, and I’ve stayed three years. I don’t live in Rome. I’m an American. I live in America. I stay in Rome. No Americans really live in Rome.

Paris is different. Americans actually do live in Paris. In Paris there are cults for them to embrace, mannerisms for them to affect, dives for them to haunt, causes for them to champion, and movements for them to resist or join. From across the Atlantic, the courses she offers in expatriatism seem complicated and inconstant, but this is simply because of the French flair for embellishment. In reality, they are as perennial and easy to follow as guided tours. Paris is a willing wanton tricked out in dusty pastel chiffon, playing hard to get. Paris only seems elusive. She makes the seduction look like courtship, and moves her man right in.

Rome gets up to no alluring tricks whatsoever. When an American stays in Rome, it happens much the same as when he goes to a cocktail party, promising himself he’ll leave after the second martini, and wakes up the next morning to find himself on his host’s living room sofa. It wasn’t Rome’s idea. It wasn’t anyone’s, including his own.

Although I laid no claims to being an authority, I considered anything but inadequately prepared for Rome. I knew all roads led to it, so that eliminated any problems attendant to boarding the wrong train. I knew that to endear myself socially I had simply to “do as the Romans do.” I had a list of “great” restaurants given to me by well-heeled friends who had been here before, and a list of “wonderful little” restaurants given me by low-budget and tightwad friends. I had the addresses of a few people whom I knew, and the addresses of more people I didn’t know, and still don’t.

Stored away in a cellar corner of my mind were several Latin declensions, and the first sentence of Julius Caesar to help me with the language. Lying near was the memory of a Roman villa carved out of Ivory soap for a project in Latin II, and I recalled with satisfaction that the entranceway was the atrium. Although many Romans now lived in apartments, I anticipated meeting no small number who revered the past enough to have preserved their atriums.

The cells in which I had confined my date, event and personality files hadn’t been too thoroughly packed in the beginning, and over the years the contents had rattled around into a state of some disorder. The First Punic War was still behind the Second Punic War, but it seemed chronologically improper for Charlemagne to have wedged in before Hannibal. I didn’t like it any better that a clump of late Renaissance painters had exchanged identities and shuffled behind some of their masters, but I wasn’t really alarmed. A good guidebook and on-the-spot observation would set things to rights. The succession of the popes I would leave to religious scholars, and those of the Catholic persuasion. It was sufficient that I approach the Holy City with American tolerance for freedom of worship, and a black mantilla to cover my head in churches as evidence of my deep and solemn respect, and that I depart from it leaving the impression that there are some Americans who consider canned spaghetti precisely as palatable as ground glass.

Faithful to custom, I watched the sun set on my first day in Rome from the Pincio terrace in the Villa Borghese. The obelisk in the great piazza below, the Dome of St. Peter’s, and the domes of dozens of lesser churches sparkled as if they’d been struck by magic wands, and then the day burned slowly away from a gold glow through a copper haze and went out behind distant lavender hills. I hadn’t known until then that the sun saves all the leftover gold from the day to pour over Rome. Angel trumpeters did not appear from behind the flat, fluffy, pink-white clouds to proclaim the coming of night, but when all the church bells rang out at once, I half expected to see them.

It had taken Rome exactly twenty-four hours to reduce me to a state in which anything seemed possible.

Omega

The black horses, dressed in the black plumes, still pull the ornate, black hearses through the streets of Rome to the cemetery in the Piazza Verano. The driver wears a Napoleonic hat. He sits erect, looking straight ahead. He seems to have driven through the centuries past, on into this one, and to have resigned his body and his spirit to the knowledge that this last ride is the long ride, and his destination lies at the end of time.

It takes six black horses to pull the hearses of the very rich. The strength of four black horses is sufficient to draw the carriages of the moderately well-off. Those who leave behind a meager store of earthly treasures are borne by motorized hearses, and if this makes a bit of brutta figura, they are beyond caring, and it doesn’t really matter.

It was Ofelia who told me that the cemetery was the most beautiful sight in this city of beautiful sights. Strangely, no guidebook points this out, and I’ve never seen a tourist there.

“It’s the part where the lights are that is most beautiful, Signora,” Ofelia said. “The ossario. Ask to see that when you go.”

I probably never would have gone to the cemetery if the Nonna hadn’t died, but somehow her being there made it seem less forbidding. I did not go to the cemetery with the family after her funeral, and it was six months before I went there to pay my respects. I didn’t know where she was buried, and I didn’t like to ask the Signorina. I held the idea that it wasn’t important to visit the grave, that it was enough to visit the place, and that the Nonna would have understood.

Beautiful isn’t the word to describe the Piazza Verano, although it isn’t unbeautiful. Outside the gates, there are dozens of flower stalls, and I had the sickening sensation that the flowers for the dead bloomed larger and brighter than the flowers for the living, and too sweet. I’d just step through the gate, I told myself and take a quick look around. It would be enough. The Nonna would understand.

I went through the archway, and stopped short. Before me lay a marble city, serene, immaculate, inhabited by marble people. I walked down Main Street. Before a small, white marble house, a little marble boy dressed in a sailor suit held a living rose toward a small marble girl, dressed in a pinafore. They were brother and sister, an inscription said. The little boy had lived from 1875 until 1887, and the little girl from 1881 until 1884.

I walked on. Other marble people stood before other marble houses, keeping company with marble angels. Through the window panes in the doorways, I saw that the houses were furnished. There were chairs to sit on. The altars were covered with clean, lace-edged cloths, and on them were set family photographs, and prayer books, and bowls of fresh flowers. Tiny lights burned under images of the Virgin.

A small house, recently built and more modern than the rest, had a picture window, hung with starched white curtains. On a table inside, there was a framed picture of a handsome young man riding a bicycle, which had evidently been enlarged from a snapshot. It faced a marble tablet, on which was inscribed, “Your dearly loved soul awaits me in heaven. Your adored body waits for me here, and I wait alone now, knowing that God will reunite us in our sacred chain for eternity.” The promise was signed in the hand of the handsome young man’s fidanzata.

Not far from the small modern house, the photograph of a young girl was mounted under glass on a modest tombstone. She was posed seated on a rooftop ledge with her legs crossed. She wore a white blouse and a gay, striped summer skirt, and sneakers and bobby socks. She had been seventeen years old when her last picture was taken, and so beautiful that it was enough for her family to inscribe nothing but her name under her photograph and follow it with an exclamation point. Lise!

There were photographs everywhere. Mammas, papas, bambini, nonne, looking exactly as they did, dressed as they had been, doing what they were, when they had to stop.

Loro, I whispered to myself. Well, wouldn’t you know? Wouldn’t loro? Wouldn’t they just have to go on being themselves to the very end . . . and on past it, more than likely? Beautiful wasn’t the word. The word was “right.” It couldn’t be any other way.

I knew that officially the little houses are mausoleums. Some of them are as large as small parish meeting houses, with enough room to seat twenty-five people in comfort. Others are no larger than a child’s playhouse. Many of them have been decorated with costly mosaics and inlaid marble, and a possible eye to bella figura. That, too, is as it should be, for loro’s mausoleums aren’t monuments to death. They are monuments to life and to love.

It was a long walk from the gate to Ofelia’s place with the beautiful lights. I was expecting to find the lights elevated in some sort of display, or trimming a roof of some building, the way churches are decorated on festival nights. Ofelia’s lights were on the ground. Double rows of bulbs that appeared to be about fifteen watts, edged concrete slabs that were perhaps a yard and a half square, and had the appearance of cistern covers. There were sixty or so of these squares, set apart in orderly rows in a paved area that was fenced off by a wrought-iron grating, painted dark green. About half of the lights were burning. A man sat in a little house the size of a ticket window. Outside the house, more lights were fixed to a sort of switchboard, which the man seemed to operate in some connection with the lights that circled the slabs. I couldn’t imagine what it was all about.

“What are the lights for?” I asked the man, after a while.

He gave me a long look up and down before he answered. “For the dead,” he said, as if I were the only person in the world that this could be news to.

“Oh,” I said.

The man looked at me some more, and I looked at the lights. “I suppose they are for all of the people all over the cemetery,” I said, after another while.

The man shook his head. “They are for the people who are buried here,” he said.

“Here. Where?” I said.

“In the ossario. In those wells,” he said.

“I don’t understand. I’m sorry. I’m an American,” I said.

“Oh, I thought you were French,” he said, and smiled. “Allora. This is where the poor are buried. They can’t afford tombs, and land is very scarce in Rome, so they are buried in the earth far ten years. At the end of that time, their bones are dug up, and they are buried here in a common grave.”

My hands turned icy as the iron rail they held. I’d never in my life suspected such a practice existed. It seemed so primitive, such an indignity for them to be all jumbled in there together. I tried not to think of the details that must attend such a custom. It was dreadful beyond belief.

I thought of all the poor people I have come to know in Italy who have no hope of saving a cent toward buying the cheapest private corner to rest in. I thought of the rubbish man, and the shepherds, and the peasants with the horse, and the maids I’ve known, and the portieri, and the little boys who deliver the wine, and all the smiling lips and velvet eyes in the windows and doorways of old tenement houses. And then I thought again. They’d always known what it was to be together, ten in a room, and three or four in a bed. They crowded in buses, and laughed and jostled and joked about it. They had known all along what I had learned just now. They would go on being together. It was the way of life and the way of death for them, for without each other it would be lonely.

“How much is it to light a light?” I asked the man. “Five lire,” he said, and I gave him one hundred. For sixteen cents, twenty more lights burned around the rim of one of the well tops, and I saw with Ofelia’s eyes that they were beautiful. If you ever go there, give a few cents to turn a light on. Loro would for you.

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