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whose shop smelled of cheese and pork and whose ceiling was hung with fifty legs of prosciutto. Huge wheels of Parmesan cheese as large as truck tires were rolled out from the back. There were five brothers and each brother had a unique and tragic personality as though they had bit parts in five different operas. Each was a law unto himself and they lent a note of improvisation and theater to the selling of their fragrant produce. It was outside of their store that I ran into trouble when I remembered I had forgotten to buy olives.
    As Leah and I again walked the length of the Campo, past the knife-sharpener on his stationary bicycle and the booths that sold lungs and offal, we ran straight into one of those fire-breathing marital scraps of the De Angelo couple. Though it took us a while to learn their names, I had witnessed several fights between Mimmo and Sophia De Angelo before in the Piazza Farnese. Mimmo was a laborer and an alcoholic and could often be seen with a bottle of grappa drinking alone on the stone bench that ran for fifty metersacross the front of the palazzo. He was stocky and built low to the ground with hairy shoulders and thick, powerful arms. When sitting in the piazza drinking grappa from the bottle, he seemed to grow dark rather than drunk. Once the darkness came he began muttering expletives at everything about his life that he found disappointing. His wife would generally come upon him in this condition and their screaming at each other was loud enough to be heard by pedestrians walking along the Tiber and those coming out of the Piazza Navona. Whatever protocols the De Angelos kept in the privacy of their apartment did not apply to their violent public encounters. Leah and I had watched several of them from our window high over the piazza, and for sheer volume and quality of invective this Roman couple were in a class by themselves. The quarrels usually ended with a distraught and weeping Sophia breaking into a shameful run back to her home after realizing that the whole piazza was listening to and thoroughly enjoying the couple’s histrionics.
    “He’s mean,” Leah had said.
    “Italians don’t hit,” I assured her. “They just yell.”
    But these domestic quarrels between the De Angelos began to grow in frequency and decibels. Sophia was pretty and theatrical and ten years younger than her hard, inattentive husband. Her legs were beautiful, her figure full, and her eyes brimmed with pain. Each day Mimmo drank more and Sophia wept more and their level of language became more charged with the ancient sorrow of the poor and the hopeless. Maria told me Mimmo was threatening to kill Sophia because she’d shamed him among his neighbors and that a man was nothing if he lost his sense of honor before his friends and countrymen.
    None of this should have had the slightest importance in my life. The De Angelos were local color, a troubling coda in the war between the sexes, one I was grateful had nothing to do with me.
    But on that particular day our first year in Rome, I was buying olives from the olive vendor, a grumpy, unsunny man whom I was beginning to like for the originality of his sullenness, when I heard Leah scream. I looked up as a punch landed against Sophia’s cheek.
    It was not the blood that ignited my temper, nor the tears, nor the pleading. It was the deep pity I felt when I saw the terror inSophia’s eyes and the hopelessness I had seen so often as a child. But I was not out of control when I approached Mimmo and was very aware that I was in a foreign country where the customs were unfamiliar and my interference might be fiercely resented.
    Mimmo was about to strike again, but I grabbed his arm. Mimmo went berserk when he saw me interfering in his disciplining of his wife. He tried to hit me with his free hand, but I deflected the blow and held both of Mimmo’s arms to his side.
    “No, signore,” I said respectfully in my halting Italian.
“È malo.”
    Mimmo let loose with a