Dante’s Beach, Ravenna
The other day the Telegraph launched a daily newsletter called ‘Characters’ about its remarkably popular obituaries column. Announcing the initiative, the obits editor, Andrew Brown, singled out for praise in the ‘lovable rogues’ category Maurizio ‘Zanza’ Zanfanti, the Rimini Romeo, who slept, it is reliably said, with 6,000 women.
Zanza – short for zanzara, Italian for mosquito – was the most famous Latin lover of the Italian package holiday boom times during the 1970s and 1980s, whose epicentre was Rimini, just down the Adriatic coast from me. He died, aged 62, in 2018.
I was pretty chuffed because, although Telegraph obits are unsigned, I was the author. Andrew even quotes me on the moment of Zanza’s death after ‘a heart attack at around two in the morning in his Mitsubishi Pajero 4×4, parked in a small peach grove owned by his family, seconds after making love with a 25-year-old Romanian woman, who raised the alarm’. He adds: ‘Zanza’s life story grew into an internet viral sensation after his Telegraph obituary.’
But then I read a depressing piece in the Daily Mail by Rowan Pelling, former editor of the Erotic Review and self-styled ‘sex expert’, on how to achieve a fulfilling sex life. And it made me wonder: has #MeToo turned the Latin lover into a sex criminal? Is he, too, like the novel, dead as an art form?
For Rowan writes: ‘Young men of my sons’ generation would never dream of chatting up an attractive stranger in a pub, for fear of being thought “creepy”… I say to men that no one will give them the benefit of the doubt in a bedroom scenario gone wrong and to never go near a tipsy woman.’ So let us pray then, for the young men of Britain. And for the young women.
I, on the other hand, am in the Romagna, which the ignorant call Poor Man’s Tuscany but I call Tuscany without the British, and which has a proud tradition of rampant womanising. Another famous romagnolo, Benito Mussolini, from Predappio in the foothills of the Apennines, slept with 5,000 women – according to my research.
Both Zanza and the Duce defeat hands down Casanova, a Venetian, who claimed in his memoirs to have slept with 122 women, a paltry sum which even I – a mere inglese – beat. Zanza came from a family of poor peasant farmers and was a butta-dentro (thrower in) at a nightclub in Rimini called Blow Up. His job was to search for women on the beach and in bars and entice them, with free tickets and smooth talk, to go there with him. Most of his conquests were Swedes, Norwegians, Danes and Germans.
He was short and swarthy, like a sawn-off version of Bowie’s early days guitarist Mick Ronson, with caveman hair and shirt unbuttoned to the waist. His secret was his gentle charm and life-enhancing humour. In 1984, the German tabloid Bild dedicated two pages to him headlined ‘Sex Bomber Der Nation’.
As I wrote: ‘In a typical three-month summer season, he used to say, his average tally was 200 women, roughly two a day, rising to four a day in the infernal heat of August.’
Which brings me to one of Zanza’s star pupils, my old friend Davide Fabbri, now 59, whose nickname is ‘Il Vikingo’ because he has long blondish hair. Fabbri was a young stripper at Blow Up where Zanza eventually became ‘artistic director’. When I edited a monthly magazine called Le Ragioni dell’Occidente, a supplement of the regional newspaper I used to work for (neither exist any more), I gave the Viking a column.
We had met because he liked what I wrote in the newspaper laughing at the comunisti, who with their heirs have controlled regional and local government in the ‘Red Romagna’ since the fall of fascism. He is the great nephew of the Duce’s wife Rachele and liked my Mussolini biography.
He had started a school for ‘Aspiring Latin lovers’ and I got him to write about the secrets of the art of seduction. His tally, he told me, was between 800 and 1,000 women.
His lessons included: how to crash your supermarket trolley correctly into the chosen candidate’s trolley and study the contents to see if she is available; and how to accelerate your Vespa so the candidate puts her arms around you, then brake so she squeezes you more tightly, and then how to touch the underside of her thigh in the correct way and ask: ‘Are you cold, piccolina?’
We hadn’t been in touch for a few years, but I wanted to ask him about the impact of #MeToo on the Latin lover. Looking online, however, I discovered that he had had some kind of Saul-like epiphany and now defined himself as a ‘deacon’ and ‘exorcist, Knight of the Order of the Archangel Michael, hunter of demons, and disturber of the occult’.
Videos depict him in a coarse white monkish habit in town squares brandishing a large wooden crucifix and railing against ‘masonic satanists’ such as George Soros. News reports tell how in February last year he got a suspended six-month jail sentence for covering with white paint in the dead of night a mural in Rimini depicting a bald man with a beard breastfeeding a baby. He described his actions as an exorcism.
When we spoke on the phone, he remained proud of his past life as a Latin lover and said that, as a deacon, he had not had to take the vow of chastity. He still works by night, a 20-minute drive down the coast from me, as floor manager in a lapdancing club above a petrol station in Cervia.
But he said: ‘I do feel a bit bad that I slept with so many women for sex and not love. Do you have any idea how many I made cry? It was not always noble. Now I just want love.’
Since he received ‘the call’, his mission to combat evil has become more important than his mission to shag women. What call? Apparently, when tied to a cross as Jesus one Easter in Piazza del Popolo in Ravenna, he heard a voice that did not come from the gathered crowd tell him three times: ‘Defend the weak, in my name, do it!’
As for #MeToo, he said: ‘Sounds like a return to the Middle Ages when men met women only if introduced by family. Such meetings must happen naturally. Thank God Italy has not yet succumbed.’ Amen.
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