Arturo San Agustín went one day to visit Ester Pujol, director of the Catedral label, where he has already published a couple of travel books (Sunrise in the Gianicolo and Sentimental Passport). He found her – he assures – reviewing on the computer the Italian mambo that Sophia Loren dances in the Lina Wertmuller film Saturday, Sunday and Monday.
It was the perfect trigger: both recognized themselves as devoted fans of the Roman interpreter. "He suggested that I write about her," the writer confesses. She did something more than that, and in her own way, and the result has just appeared under the title Sophia's red hat.
"Arturo has made the book he wanted, in his style, halfway between fiction and non-fiction," the editor points out.
They told it at the lunch-presentation with an Italian accent that the publisher and Albert Arbós from Interprofit organized in Vila Viniteca and where the attendees, a well-matched group of colleagues from the Barcelona press who are also friends of the author, enjoyed appetizers such as mortadella favola from Emilia Romagna, the culatello di canossa and the coppa stagionata from Lombardy, before launching into the hearty orechiette with ragù from the Bronzo restaurant.
For cheese lovers there was a festival with seven varieties ( robiola three milks, pecorino fiore sardo, erborinato San Carlone with saffron, parmigiano reggiano 2011 reserve Guffanti, etcetera). And for wine tasters, Ca del Bosco brut, Ceretto Arneis Blange 2021, Passopisciario Contrada, Franco Marinetti Marasco Barolo.
Do I have to insist that the banquet orchestrated by Quim Vila was one of those that is remembered? It was.
And it is that Arturo San Agustín, a veteran of communication (he was an award-winning publicist before consecrating himself as a columnist in El Periódico, where he won the Ciutat de Barcelona prize, and later in the pages of this newspaper), is a beloved guy who is shown in the antipodes of the exhibitionist informer. With his usual stealth and very low voice, he has entered everywhere and knows both the secrets of high Catalan politics and the equivocal meanderings of culture, without ever having forgotten his origins in Barceloneta, to which he dedicated the beautiful evocation En mi neighborhood there were no rats.
And very especially Saint Augustine is passionate about Italy, a country to which he travels and about which he has also often written; Already in his book Sapore di sale he told how he had accompanied Joan Manuel Serrat through Liguria, together with the Lombardi brothers from the Tramonti restaurant.
In Sophia's Red Hat she combines two of the areas of the Italian world that most attract her: the Vatican and the cinema. From the first she extracts the retired Cardinal Piero Vanosso, tall and slender, one of those enigmatic and cultured Ciceros who guide her in the Eternal City; from the second, a car of evocations about the Cinecittà studios and the golden age of Roman productions.
I reproduce an anecdote. Sophia Loren, the main thread of the story, performs the first casting for a blockbuster: Quo Vadis. She meets the director: “Do you speak English?” asks Mervyn Le Roy. "Yes," she replies. "Have you read the novel Quo Vadis?" "Forks". "What is your name?". "Forks".
And another: Marcello Mastroianni comments to Vittorio De Sica about a new project: "Commendatore, this movie is shit." And De Sica replies: yes, but if we don't do it, who will pay our debts? (In his case due to roulette).
The writer sends his alter ego Luis Uruén to walk the Via Appia Antica in the footsteps of a Loren in imperial robes, to the Palazzo Mattei di Giove in the literary act of a nostalgic marquis, and to Lake Brecciano to follow the story of the corpse of Charlotte. As in his 2020 title My earthly days in Mallorca, San Agustín plays in Sophia's red hat with the permanent misunderstanding between narrative journalism and a novel with a journalistic tone, both wrapped in humor and poetry: an Arturo formula as personal as it is non-transferable.
