Ben, the Marquis & Anna Maria (Part 3)

There follows another interruption, while the now overflowing café debates on the merits of cricket and croquet, and the fact that Italy has never beaten England at either one or the other. However, there are some present who are only too ready to dispute this statistic – the argument fired more by political differences than anything else (an elderly monarchist and his communist peer get so angry they almost come to blows) and the proprietor’s generosity (in my honour) with the Grappa and the Limoncello, a lemon flavoured liqueur.
I want to hear more about my grandfather.

Needing a suitable building in which to set up headquarters, Major Ben Booth requisitions the biggest and most impressive villa, which turns out to be the summer residence of a Neapolitan aristocrat, Mario, the Marquis of Castelvetere, who boasts a bloodline all the way back to Julius Caesar. He is serious aristocracy.  He is also the father of Giuseppe ‘Pipotto’ Carfora, the boy taken away by the Germans.  The Marquis has never done a day's work in his life.  Due to severe gambling debts and his inexhaustible pursuit of women, he has squandered most of the family's once sizeable fortune, which might be what prompts his Milanese wife's epic remark to Ben: "It is better to marry a Milanese road-sweep than a Neapolitan prince!" However, in spite of his august ancestry and some spirited resistance, he is finally compelled to accept the invasion of his home and privacy.
It soon becomes apparent why Ben encounters so much resistance from the Marquis: his four very beautiful daughters. Mario is very jealous of whoever goes anywhere near his girls, and has extremely ambitious marriage plans for each of them. Nothing less than a Duke will do.
Poor Mario.
Ben hasn't been in the house forty minutes when he falls madly in love with beautiful, highly vivacious, nineteen year old Anna Maria, one of the Marquis' daughters, the girl Ben heralds as the 'most beautiful woman to have ever walked the face of this planet!’
The Marquis doesn't want his daughter to have anything to do with Ben. Though an intelligent and sophisticated man, he succumbed to all the anti-English propaganda put out by Mussolini and the fascist party before and during the war.
“Where were Mussolini and your beloved fascists when your son was beaten to within an inch of his life and carried off to a German concentration camp?” asks his wife, Tecla.
Mario waffles something unintelligible, and, wanting to restore what he believes to be the status quo, turns to his daughter and says: “Tell him he is not welcome here!”
“My father wants you to know that you are most welcome here,” Anna Maria tells Ben in her horribly broken English, “and that his humble house is your home.”
“Thank you,” my father says to the Marquis with a warm smile and a slight bow of his head.
Ignorant of his daughter’s ‘translation’, and totally flummoxed by Ben’s warm smile, the Marquis shrugs and says: “Boh! L’Inglesi! Pazzi! They are all mad!”
Considered neither romantic nor passionate by his men, just a warm and wonderful English gentleman, Ben’s courting of Anna Maria comes as a huge surprise to them.

He organizes a dance, complete with military band, to be held at the officers' mess which, before the arrival of the British, was the village café - the very same one Robert is sitting in today - with the much younger café proprietor wearing immaculate mess kit and serving behind the counter.  Anna Maria will be the guest of honour.

The café proprietor is interrupted again as some of the old timers and their wives re-enact the events of that evening, most of them vying for the roles of Ben and Anna Maria, and the exact spot where the two danced…
The café proprietor manages to regain control, and continue the story.

Naturally, the Marquis refuses point-blank. “I would rather die - or worse: vote communist - than see my daughter fraternise with the perfidious English, the enemy.

MORE TO COME