The Spinning Tops

A U.S. bluejacket staggered through the thick odor and the rude sounds of the old port of Naples. A ragged urchin tugged and chanted at him: "You wanna girl, mister? I gotta my sister for you. Come on, Joe! Cheap!" the sailor pulled away, then slumped drunkenly to the sidewalk. Mouse-quick, the eight-year-old tried to grab the sailor's wallet, but the sailor weakly pushed him away. Unable to roll the man, the urchin sped away to sell him: in Naples bigger urchins pay 500 lire, perhaps 1,000 lire, for news of a likely victim to beat up and rob.

The young pimps, pickpockets and purse snatchers of Naples are called scugnizzi, from scugnare, which means to spin like a top. Aged anywhere from six to 20, they live in the streets, watching each other with hard, wary eyes, and working whenever they can—as lookouts for burglars, messengers for black marketeers and smugglers, cigarette-butt snipers* and racketeers of all kinds. On any night there may be thousands of them on the prowl. When the police catch them redhanded, they serve a term in the reformatory, or are taken home to their parents (if any) and are back on the streets again next day. But one man in Naples catches the scugnizzi in a different kind of net.

Concealed Weapons. Blond, blue-eyed Father Mario Borelli, 35, son of a Neapolitan sheet-metal worker, began his ministry in 1945 preaching to factory workers. Four years later, assigned to the city's youth, he got permission to use Naples' 500-year-old, bomb-blasted Church of Mater Dei as a meeting place. He set up an organization of young workers, but the youth that interested him most were the scugnizzi.

The scugnizzi, however, were about as interested in talking to a priest as to a policeman. Young Father Borelli decided that he would have to go underground. He took off his cassock, donned a dirty cap, jacket and trousers, and slipped into the jungle of Naples at night. "I was afraid," he admits.

At a Salvation Army bread line he joined a knot of scugnizzi for a handout, then drifted off with them. Suddenly a big teen-ager turned on him and snapped: "Who are you?" "What do you want?" countered Father Borelli. The leader ordered: "Take your hands out of your pockets!" "Why?" asked the priest. The scugnizzo lunged forward with a razor, and Father Borelli removed his hands. Thus he learned a scugnizzo rule: concealed hands mean concealed weapons.

He made friends by talking about America. "All scugnizzi dream of going to America," he says. "Everybody in Naples does." Gradually he overcame their distrust, spent night after night huddled with them on bakery gratings. "When they rolled drunks or practiced immorality," he says, "I simply indicated indifference." In the cold dawn he would splash his face in street fountains before returning to his daylight duties (which included teaching 14 classes a week at a Roman Catholic college in Naples).