1980

Another black period begins for D’Artagnan. The Trattoria degli Studenti closes and his shanty is destroyed by the city authorities, who knock down the entire shantytown to build a school. All the families of the shantytown are assigned a house, but D’Artagnan gets nothing because he is single. So in September he is homeless again. One of the students, Marco Cinque-the author of the poem In memoria di Ele D’Artagnan-looks after him for a while, providing food and a little money.

1981

Returns to Rome after a concert tour, Pietro finds D’Artagnan at his door, desperate and in terrible condition. He takes D’Artagnan in as a guest, in his tiny apartment (4x4 meters [two hundred square feet]), but living with him there is almost impossible: a flood of words, dreams, plays, ironies, stories, jokes, ideas, and inventions, tears and paranoia, every single day. So Pietro decides to take him to the rehearsal studio of his musical ensemble Spettro sonoro. According to an agreement between D’Artagnan and the members of the group, he has to leave during rehearsals: about three times a week, for four or five hours at the most. The studio is in Via degli Zingari, next to the Colosseum. Beginning on April 4, 1981, D’Artagnan will live there for almost three years. He is so happy to have a place to sleep. He produces some of his best paintings. Unfortunately, the majority are lost.

1982

D’Artagnan is again in the exhibition I cento pittori di Via Margutta, but, because he can’t pay the registration fee, his work is off in a corner, away from the main action. Still, he receives the first encouraging criticism of his paintings from Domenico Cerrutti, the only one remaining documented critical response.

1983

The rehearsal studio is completely filled with D’Artagnan’s stuff, and he becomes more and more nervous when the musical ensemble is there. The arrangement has become impractical for the musicians, and they decide to give up the studio, and stop paying the rent. Three members of the ensemble-Franco Presutti, Guido Zaccagnini, and Pietro-pay the rent for three more months while they try to find D’Artagnan another place. They find a few, but D’Artagnan rejects them because they are too vulnerable to attack by his enemies. So he is left to his fate. Nobody pays the rent, and after three months, on August 31, 1983, he is homeless again. He agrees to store all his stuff in a wine cave belonging to Pietro Feliziani, an artisan working with wine barrels (and a good friend of Pietro Gallina), on the Testaccio Hill. D’Artagnan’s suitcases will remain in that damp grotto till his death. Thus many of his last works were destroyed.

1984

It seems that in this period D’Artagnan fled from place to place to avoid his “enemies”: after a life of terrible misfortunes, he is getting more and more paranoid. He has fewer moments of joy and serenity, despite the fact that he had always responded to misfortune with courage and a smile, challenging his destiny. But he is now a 73-year-old man, even if he doesn’t look it. He meets Pietro with a certain frequency in the bars of Testaccio or at his mother’s house, where he goes to help her pay her bills or run errands in exchange for her company, a little money, and a meal. No work at all for cinema or TV. He paints rarely, because he has no regular place to work.

1985/86

D’Artagnan doesn’t want to tell anybody where he sleeps; he says that it is better for his friends not to know, because they might be forced, against their will, to reveal his whereabouts to his “enemies.” He is seen in the neighborhood of the old railway station of Trastevere, where he lived for almost 10 years in the shantytown. There are people who know him and help him there, in bars, stores, restaurants, and among the street venders. Some of them tell to Pietro, who is looking for D’Artagnan, that he spends the night in an abandoned religious school in Viale Trastevere. Others say that he sleeps under certain bushes just in front of the public school where his shanty used to be. D’Artagnan always goes to the famous wine restaurant Cul de sac, next to the Piazza Navona, where Marco Cinque offers him something to eat and takes one of his last pictures. He goes regularly to check on his suitcases in the Testaccio wine cave, and he always brings a cappuccino to Pietro Feliziani, the barrel artisan owner of the place, to thank him for the safekeeping of his paintings, photos, and documents. But Pietro Feliziani dies suddenly, and the cave is left to Sandro Righi, a pilot for Alitalia, who has been part owner for years and understands the situation; he will continue to safeguard D’Artagnan’s suitcases, and he and his wife, Yvonne, will ultimately save all the suitcases from complete destruction. On the 5th of March, Pietro receives a letter [from whom? D’Artagnan?] that says he [who? Sandro Righi?]has “sold” D’Artagnan for a hundred million lire. They [who?]meet later for a nice dinner prepared by Pietro, and, amid smiles, jokes, and bits of theatre, the question is happily resolved. It is on this occasion that D’Artagnan announces that, in the event that his “enemies” kill him, he wants his true story to be written, as he wrote years before to Pietro, and he says for the first time that his paintings are not to be shown in Italy, the country that was the origin of all his suffering.

1987

This last period of D’Artagnan’s life is terrible. He is a man that walks along the streets of Rome with a sword and an umbrella[both a sword and an umbrella] ready to attack people who don’t believe his sad life story, and who don’t believe that he is the son of Arturo Toscanini. He also thinks that his family, for reasons of inheritance, decided to kill him. No paintings during this period. Or if there were he sold the few he could produce under the circumstances, or they were destroyed in his suitcases, stored in the damp cave. On the 13th of October, D’Artagnan is found almost dead in Via Bezzi next to Viale Trastevere. He is taken by ambulance to the Forlanini Hospital. Pietro is in the U.S.A. and he will learn about the death only later. Doctors save D’Artagnan for a while; when he regains consciousness, he refuses food, because he thinks it may have been poisoned by his “enemies” (the C.I.A., K.G.B., Italian Police, Vatican killers). He also refuses medical tests, believing that the machines are instruments of torture or designed to kill him. Yet the psychiatrist simply diagnoses “chronic psychosis” and does not transfer him to a mental hospital. D’Artagnan dies on the 23rd of October from “cardiac collapse in consequence of malnutrition.” On the Rome City Register his rejected family name “stinelli” Michele is still there, like that of a living person. At the hospital, he had his union card-he was a member of the trade union for cinema actors-on which he was registered as Michele Lombardi, his true family name. So he got his victory over the social institutions, by creating a person named Michele Lombardi only with the sacrifice of his death. Now there is a bizarre situation: “stinelli” was born but didn’t die; Lombardi was not born but died, according to the records of the hospital and of the Prima Porta Cemetery, where, sadly, he was thrown into a common grave.

Translation from Italian by Kate Dejardins, Mary Norris and Pietro Gallina