Rag. Arturo De Fanti, bancario precario

Rag. Arturo De Fanti, bancario precarioⁱ, properly "Acc[ountant] Arturo De Fanti, precarious bank clerk" rather than "The Precarious Bank Teller" as it's known in English is a proper TV production.

To understand each other, "a proper TV production" isn't one in which teenaged girls in short skirts show their adolescent breast and everything else for the camera, like La Liceale & all might have mistakenly induced you to believe. No, a proper TV production is one in which adult women bare their souls & bosoms for the camera. The girls are at best condiment, not the meal, and exactly for that very reason : the lack of a soul.

In this installment, not so different from all the othersⁱⁱ, the story goes that Mr. Arturo De Fanti is a respectable burgeois fellow with a wife and a maid. Except, as he's also Italian, which is to say what you're slowly becoming - a morto de fame - he can't afford to pay the maid, and so she sits and watches TV all day long, while the wife strofina. He also has a mistress, and so a plan is hatched : how about if the mistress came to live with them ? As he fearfully explains, a mistress is a great expense, except should she live at home with the wife, in which case it's moreover savings. Plus she has a nice fur coat, which the wife might borrow (and which the wife subsequently learns, was bought by the Mr. in the first place).

So it is agreed, and they live together if not outright happily then at least somewhat burgeois-ily, which is to say routinely ; until the day Anna Maria Rizzoli (Vanna) goes out and is mugged! So wifey (Catherine Spaak aka Elena) points out to her she's supposed to keep her money in her bra, which turns out to have been exactly what the mistress was doing :

After she parades her tits qs the girls (wife + mistress) lovingly agree to carry their cash in their mutandine henceforth an' leave, while the maid (Enrica Bonaccorti), warmed up by the display, puts out her own :

Then it turns out that the wife also has a... how do you say mistress in the masculine in this god forsaken language ? Anyway, the happy group is introduced to L'amante de la moglie. Who, of course, has a wife, which shows up, along with her ex-husband that hates the current, not to mention a very murdersome fellow is liberated from prison and turns out to be none other than the mistress' own husband. Soon enough a moderately populous anarchist commune is sprawling in the house of the respectable borghese - and he's still not getting any!

This is what the TV is for, you know ? Its function is derisive not aspirational. You'll figure it out.

1. 1980, by Luciano Salce, with Paolo Villaggio and women. [↩]
2. Ever seen La mazurka del barone, della santa e del fico fiorone ? It's notable not only for having resolved a very hard problem of Romanian etimology (that, were it not for your most modest host Blogomirea would have forever remained unknown to the Romanian "culture" generally and its various "intellectuals" individually - by the way, who else do you know who's objectively contributed to his language in this manner ?), but perhaps in English also for the introduction. To quote :

   - Ooo, prenda me che sono vergine in cambio di tutte altre che forse non lo sono!

   So, the story goes, in 726 the summer was hot, and king Liutprand of the Longobards, accomplished ballet dancer and great devourer of frogs entered Romagna under the excuse of protecting the venerators of sacred images from the scourge of the iconoclasts. Everyone got thoroughly shafted, except the women and children had taken refuge in a fortified monastery on the land now occupied by the palace Pellacani.

   Towards evening, being well revenged on the casks, barrels and other Longobard enemies there present, the tired braves' mind goes back home, to the wife, to the fiancee, to the slave. Thereupon hearing the virginal songs of a bunch of blondy sluts praying and singing, none older than fifteen, they bust into the fortification with little difficulty. Just as they're preparing to ravage the countryside an' its Sabines a second time, one, santa Girolama, offers herself in trade, a virgin lamb to expiate the sins of all the other girls, not nearly as virgin. So the barbarians take her under a Ficus carica* nearby and fuck the living daylights out of her, much to the salivating astonishment of riper ladies in the audience, who count the deeds up to 33 altogether. Then she dies up in the tree, leaving behind a baby (just one!) and well... the church sanctifies the Ficus.

   Not a bad yarn, hm ?
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   * Need I explain what carici means in Romanian ? [↩]