the individuals who lived this story who shaped this piece of history are people who don’t come from normal families that is if we give them the benefit of the doubt they come from poor families but more likely they come from devastated families families that really no longer exist that was the case with Mario Iovine whose father was a contented cuckold as they say in my town cornuto e contento he knew his wife would go to bed with anyone that she went to bed with everyone but he lacked the courage and the will to put a stop to it so his wife who was Mario Iovine’s mother cheated on her husband continuously with countless men and on her deathbed she asked the parish priest to absolve her of her sins saying I am the magdelene the sinner and so Mario Iovine grew up as a figlio di nessuno a son of nobody but for good measure the son of a whore because you are figlio di nessuno when your family is poor or when your parents are dead or else if you’re a foundling an orphan on a doorstep but it’s even worse when you’re the son of a whore the son of a slut when your mother is widely known or notorious as an easy lay or as a slut

his mother was unquestionably one of the reasons for the choices her son made in his life because he never felt that he was part of a family his mother never took care of him his father was basically absent and then he died and they say that his mother was an attractive woman not in the sense of pure physical beauty but rather in the sense of a carefree cheerfulness a beauty that comes out of a lust for life she was a woman who would go with anyone who gave her a little affection a little warmth with anyone who gave her presents or would treat her nicely and be close to her a woman who in any other town might even have been a normal person a woman who did what she wanted and it’s nobody’s business but her own but in a small farming town in southern Italy where the only way a female was allowed to grow up and be considered a normal woman was to be married with her virginity intact a woman like Mario Iovine’s mother was naturally looked down upon as a slut and a whore and so he was the son of whore

Mario Iovine’s father was a hired hand a day laborer who worked in the fields when he could but he was also a drunk and whenever he wasn’t working he was at the bar or to be accurate in the cantina sociale or collective wine cellar at the time in my town there were no bars there were cantine sociali which were genuine cantinas or wine cellars where the owner served wine and people would go there and stay until they were completely drunk my father would always tell about the two drunks who were returning home late at night and one of them walks the other one home but once they get to the second drunk’s house he says to the first now I’ll walk you home and they keep it up until five in the morning back and forth until they sober up and tell each other to go fuck themselves Mario Iovine’s father would always sing in the street on his way home from the cantina he would shout out with a bottle in his hand c’aggia fa chille me piasce what can I do about it I just like it as if to say he knew he had a problem but he was cheerful about it