Mozz Mamma Meets Polizia Municipale

To use an Italian expression, yesterday things went really storto (crooked). First, I had to work on a Sunday. I had to cover the Pope’s Weekly Angelus message from his window in the Apostolic Palace above St. Peter’s Square at noon. It is no big deal. Someone from our office has to do it every weekend and yesterday it was my turn. Still, working on a Sunday is a bit of a pain and being a frazzled, working Mamma everything always seems doubly complicated for me.

My Sunday morning started at 4am when my husband had to leave for the airport to go to Korea for some consultancy. Then I had to get up at 6am to take Caterina to her Scouts for their early morning departure for a day trip. Nico was at a friend’s house so I left Chiara at her grandparents before heading into the office.

As usual I was in my beat-up old blue Fiat Punto. There are scratches all down the side. The front right headlight is smashed, (that happened in a little fender-bender a few weeks ago when I was late getting Nico to Water Polo) and the front passenger door now has problems opening. Yes, the floor is filled with empty drink bottles, old candy wrappers, and broken umbrellas, and the dashboard is littered with pens, receipts, CDs and other miscellaneaous items. The knob at the top of the gearshift regularly falls off and sometimes I can be seen at red lights bent over searching under the seats for it, but nonetheless, I love my Fiat Punto, it is my loyal steed, we’ve spent hours and hours on the Rome traffic battlefield together.

Just around the corner from the grandparent’s home, my Fiat Punto and I got flagged over by two nasty police officers with big motorcycles, boots and helmets. What is it about these guys? They want to be big, tough and mean and make you feel small and humiliated.

They began giving me the third degree. Why wasn’t I wearing my seatbelt, where were all my documents etc. etc. etc. ??? I told them that I was going to work at the Vatican, that my cameraman was waiting for me and I had to hurry and I had just dropped off my daughter and I would definitely have put my seatbelt on at the next light. (White lie, but they weren’t going for it anyway.)

They slammed me with a 76 Euro (100 dollar) fine for the seatbelt. But that wasn’t enough. They kept on going through my documents – driver license, ownership certificate, insurance, exhaust certificate etc.

Then I got mad. I asked them why they didn’t pull over all the rich people zooming past in Mercedes, BMVs and fancy SUVs. Why did they have to pull over a hassled working Mamma on a Sunday morning just because she had a messier looking car.

I thought about my post on Kitty Softpaws. What would Kitty Softpaws do? She would have some feline, swashbuckling way to get out of this one. But it wasn’t coming to me.

Then they informed me because I had a second-hand car and my name wasn’t on the documents, I clearly had not done the “passaggio di proprieta'” (property transfer) and they were going to hit me with a 600 euro fine (800 dollars). I called my husband to find out if he had done the “passaggio di proprieta”. He was in the Munich airport boarding the plane for Seoul and did not want to hear about my problems with the Polizia Municipale. He said it had been done and turned off his phone. I told the police it had been done and they could not give me a fine for it. They said my documents were missing the sticker that showed that it had been done.

At that point I lost it. I am ashamed to say that I was no Kitty Softpaws, I burst into tears and turned into a sniveling, soggy, useless Mozzarella Mamma. Getting a 600 euro (800 dollar) fine while going to work on a Sunday morning was too much. I am sure my Grandmother Pinney would have been thoroughly fed up if she had seen me. She believed in some straightforward expressions such as: “Always keep a stiff upper lip,” “Pull Yourself up by the Bootstraps”, “Don’t take any flack from anybody” “Buck-up Ducky”. Virginia Pinney had her share of difficulties in life, but no one ever got her down. How could her granddaughter be such a sloppy sissy?

The Policeman told me they would have to keep me there while headquarters did a search to find the “passaggio di proprieta'” if I wanted to avoid the ticket. Snuffling, I said I would wait. As I sat in the car one of the policemen came up to the window and tried to justify his nastiness. He began explaining to me how inflexible a policeman was in San Francisco who gave him a parking ticket for parking in a tow-away zone.

This irked me. I have learned since being in Italy that as an American citizen, I am held responsible by Italians for anything American. I regularly am held responsible for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, people always used to blame me for President George W. Bush, I frequently get blamed for American obesity, I get blamed for the death penalty, I get blamed for American gun-laws, and for Guantanamo. Anything about the United States that people don’t like, I am expected to respond to. And now I was being asked by an Italian policeman who had just given me a 76 euro ticket and was contemplating giving me a 600 euro ticket, why an American policeman had treated him badly in California.

I sat their flabbergasted. Finally the response came to me, “well it is a good thing you weren’t in Texas, the cops there probably would have shot you dead right on the spot for talking back.” (I might have been fantasizing about the Coen brothers movie “No Country for Old Men”). He looked at me for a second, not sure whether to believe me and then said “meno male” (literally translated “less bad,” but means “thank goodness.”)

It took forever, and I missed the Pope, but word finally came back from headquarters that the “passaggio di proprieta'” had been done so they did not give me a fine just for not having the sticker. Phew, close call.

As I drove off I tried to think what Kitty Softpaws would have done. Maybe she would have secretly slashed their motorcycle tires with her sword, maybe she would have slipped her soft paws into their pockets and taken away their ticket booklets.   Oh, I wish I were Kitty Softpaws.