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salvo of Italian profanity that would help clarify the graffiti written on the walls and bridges around Rome when I later was exploring the margins of the old city with Leah. I caught the word
morte
, which made me think that Mimmo was threatening murder, and the word
stronzo
, which was an all-inclusive street term roughly equivalent to “asshole.”
    Mimmo freed one arm and threw a roundhouse punch at my chin, but I caught the arm again and lifted Mimmo off his feet, slamming him firmly against the wall of the bakery. People had begun screaming and when I looked down I saw Leah’s terrified face. Worried for her, I tried to find a way to extricate myself gently from a scene that was assuming the dimensions of grand opera. Then Mimmo spat in my face and for a brief moment I thought about tearing the man’s head off, but again, I saw my daughter and knew that I had to disengage and do it quickly before the police came.
    I placed Mimmo on the ground near Sophia, who had begun to scream at me to put her husband down. Then I picked up Leah and said
“Mi dispiace”
to Mimmo and his wife several times. A number of the women in the crowd began cheering and clapping as we walked swiftly away. When I heard a police car approaching I was suddenly filled with dread.
    I disengaged from the crowd cleanly but then every eye in the Campo was on me as we walked swiftly toward our apartment. We ducked into a café on the Vicolo del Gallo where I often took Leah in the afternoon for ice cream. The proprietress was a motherly, solicitous woman who paid great attention to Leah and gave her a piece of candy every time she learned a new Italian word.
    I ordered a cappuccino for myself, and ice cream for my daughter, and failed to note that I had been followed into the café by Signor De Angelo. The signora fixed Leah an ice cream first, then made my cappuccino in that elaborate hissing ceremony that Italians perform with such style. I did not hear or see Mimmo De Angelo buy a bottle of beer or drink it.
    The next thing I knew the base of the bottle had caught me just above the eyebrow and the side of my face went numb as blood poured down it. I caught Mimmo’s arm on the second downswing, lifted the much smaller man into the air, and laid him down on the zinc bar flat on his stomach. Leah was screaming and so was the proprietress and so was Sophia and so it seemed was half of Rome as I held Mimmo flat on the bar and watched in the mirror the blood run down my face. Then I ran with Mimmo, sliding him like a sack of laundry down the bar, picking up speed. For ten feet, I ran with Mimmo, knocking off glasses and coffee cups and spoons as I held him by his belt and the back of his shirt. When the bar ended, I let go and Mimmo flew through the air, over a table of surprised customers, and crashed into a pinball machine in a shower of glass and noise and blood.
    That night, Leah and I stayed at the Regina Coeli prison on the Tiber River listening to the Roman women on the Janiculum hill calling to their lovers in the prison below. A prison doctor sewed up the cut along my eyebrow with five stitches and argued with the administrator of the prison that Leah was an orphan whose mother had just died and could not be separated from me for any reason. The guard who took Leah and me to a cell asked me what kind of pasta I would like for dinner and did I prefer red wine or white with my meal. Later, I wrote an article for
European Travel and Life
on my stay in prison and awarded the prison restaurant two stars.
    Leah and I were minor celebrities when we walked out of Regina Coeli. The short time in prison had improved my skills in Italian immeasurably and I suggested a stay in jail as a surefire way to master the language for any American who was serious about being bilingual in a short amount of time.
    But the most durable result of our incarceration was the status and visibility it granted us as citizens of the piazza. Many of the oldermen who sat on