The Polpetton Hash

First published in 2002 by Genoese author Mrs Orietta Callegari, the Polpetton (Italian for Hash) provides a disturbing insight into the maverick Radical Party, including its leader Marco Pannella, reporter Mauro Suttora and activist Roberto Granzotto.

Chapter I – The Polpetton Hash

The collar of his raincoat up, his bristly beard unkempt and his trademark thick specs maths-prof-framed, at 10:19 pm on Wednesdays 24 October the lanky investigative reporter from Milan got off the punctual intercity train Fogazzaro in Conegliano Veneto railway station. It had not been difficult, five hours before in via Rizzoli, to persuade the publisher to send him to interview the radical dissidents of Castelfranco Veneto, those who like annoying mosquitos pricked the leader Marco Pannella with their Veneto Liberale political stunt. “We must pump them up in order to deprive the Mesopotamian satrap of the ideological monopoly in liberal thought”, that was the political line of the powerful publishing group owner of the influential weekly magazine Domani, or “Tomorrow”.

“Veneto Liberale, go to hell!”, thought instead the journalist going beyond the Castelfranco station and paying from his own pocket the conductor to get further east to Conegliano, a place where according to the information patiently collected in months of hard work as a mole in the internet political fora, there were more interesting subjects. That was the bigot and harlot plain between the Piave and the Tagliamento rivers, where the liberal thought opened up like a fan to embrace the immense basin of political unrest which on one side went beyond the melancholic Trieste, formerly Mittel-European, down to the cursed Balkans, and on the other side pushed beyond the springy Prague of 1968 till dispersing itself in the boundless Siberian steppes of Hramovian memoirs.

It was there in Conegliano where he would have begun the investigation on the two roberts, the oenology tycoons who kept under their thumbs the Radical Party as a cover for their suspicious transnational mafious activities: Robert Granzotto, the former Formula 1 driver founder of the tentacular financial empire Maletton, and Robert Polezel, the electronic engineer who made a fortune selling robotics technology to Australian terrorists. A satanic sneer lightened up the reporter at the thought of how his evergreen opponent Sir Beppe de Severgnin would have eaten himself up with envy when his masterpiece “Polezel & Granzotto Plc” would have hit the bookshelves. Bare-headed under a light rain, from the first track Mauro Suttora headed towards the exit in search of taxi driver Zoppas, whom he never met but knew that he looked like Ulster republican leader Gerry Adams.