ROME — The stocking repairman is long dead, the hat seller is gone too, but down Via Merulana the sparks still fly around Sergio Zoppo, his hands, the color of ore, skimming knife blades across grindstones.
The steel heats and hums, a kind of music in the late morning air, coiling through the roar of buses, the whine of motorini. He looks up, glasses dangling on a string around his neck, his blue smock smeared with minerals and grime. He smiles, this man with stories and cut fingers, smiles at the time when he was a boy, darting through alleys with razors and scissors, when Rome's neighborhoods rang with the call:
"Ladies, the arrotino has arrived."
The arrotino was not a Romeo. Well, this is Italy, so maybe sometimes he was a secret lover. But mostly he was a man who sharpened knives. Back then he came riding a bicycle rigged with a grindstone powered by chain and pedal and cooled by a tin can dripping water.
They are disappearing, these craftsmen, characters of another era. It makes a gray-haired mender of butter knives, swords and daggers wonder what happened to those things he was once so sure of.
"We are scarcer in the neighborhoods. We are really becoming extinct," Zoppo says. "Some guys call themselves arrotini, but they are not. They drive around in cars with loudspeakers on the roofs. They're gypsies. The world is not the same. We all used to know one another. But, today, I know the guy on the right side of my shop, but not the one on my left. People aren't interested in human contact anymore. We're all strangers."
Zoppo can conjure up Sant'Elena Sannita, that southern Italian town his grandfather struck out from in 1881 to open an arrotino shop in Rome. His father, Nicola, carried on the trade, and when Zoppo was still a boy, in those days when World War II was over but the ruins of it remained, he quit school and learned the family business, watching his cousin pedal out, racing toward butchers, balconies and housewives.
"There was a lot of work back then," he says. "The country was restarting and people were trying to find their place again."
For decades, the big business was sharpening straight razors for barbers. The arrotini expanded into soap and shaving cream, and eventually many of the fortune seekers from Sant'Elena Sannita slipped into the perfume market, which made more money than knife sharpening. Rome's streets filled with strange and alluring fragrances: talcum, tonic and lavender. There's a book about these men, "The Perfume Sellers of Sant'Elena."
