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There are estimated to be at least as many medical doctors in a similar situation; these famished professionals being the end-product of the determination of every middle-class Neapolitan family to have a uselessly qualified son. The parents are prepared to go hungry so long as the son is entitled to be addressed with respect as avvocato , or dottore .
    Lattarullo had succeeded in staying alive on a legacy originally worth about a pound a week, now reduced by devaluation to about five shillings, and in order to do this had worked out a scientific system of self-restraints. He stayed most of the day in bed, and when he got up walked short distances along a planned itinerary, stopping to rest every few hundred yards in a church. He ate an evening meal only, normally composed of a little bread dipped in olive oil, into which was rubbed a tomato. Sometimes he visited another professional man in similar circumstances and they exchanged gossip, sipped a cup of coffee made from roasted acorns, and starved socially for an hour or so. He gave the impression that he knew everything that was going on in Naples. I walked back to his flat with him, and found him living in two rooms containing three chairs, a bed, and a rickety table on which stood an embittered aspidistra plant. The lighting and the water had been cut off years ago, he said.
    It appeared that Lattarullo had a secondary profession producing occasional windfalls of revenue. This had to be suspended in the present emergency. He admitted with a touch of pride to acting as a Zio di Roma – an ‘uncle from Rome’ – at funerals. Neapolitan funerals are obsessed with face. A man who may have been a near-pauper all his life is certain to be put away in a magnificent coffin, but apart from that no other little touch likely to honour the dead and increase the bereaved family’s prestige is overlooked.
    The uncle from Rome is a popular character in this little farce. Why should people insist on Rome? Why not Bari or Taranto? But no, Rome it has to be. The uncle lets it be known that he has just arrived on the Rome express, or he shows up at the slum tenement or lowly basso in an Alfa-Romeo with a Roman numberplate and an SPQR badge, out of which he steps in his well-cut morning suit, on the jacket lapel of which he sports the ribbon of a Commendatore of the Crown of Italy, to temper with his restrained and dignified condolences the theatrical display of Neapolitan grief.
    Lattarullo said that he had frequently played this part. His qualifications were his patrician appearance, and a studied Roman accent and manner. He never uses the third person singular personal pronoun lui , asall the people who surround him do, but says egli , as they do in textbooks, and he addresses all and sundry with old-fashioned politeness as lei . Where the Neapolitans tend to familiarity and ingratiation, Lattarullo shows a proper Roman aloofness and taciturnity. When Lattarullo meets a man he says buon giorno and leaves it at that, and he goes off with a curt goodbye. This, say the Neapolitans, who are fulsome and cloying in their greetings, is how a real Roman gentleman speaks. If anybody at the wake happens to have noticed Lattarullo about the streets of Naples on other occasions, he takes care to keep it to himself.
October 20
    A narrow escape today while motorcycling along the Via Partenope. I was riding towards the Castel Nuovo, through an area badly damaged by bombing, with the sea on the right and semi-derelict buildings on the left, when I noticed a sudden change ahead from blue sky, sunshine and shadow, to a great opaque whiteness, shutting off the view of the port. The effect was one of a whole district blotted out by a pall of the white smoke sometimes spread from the chimneys of a factory producing lime. On turning a bend, I came upon an apocalyptic scene. A number of buildings including a bank had been pulverised by a terrific explosion that had clearly just taken place.