ROME -- It is perhaps a commonplace to describe a book as Proustian. But Eric Salerno’s dazzling memoir Fantasmi a Roma richly deserves the accolade, conjuring up vividly, as it does, the lost Roman world of journalism of some 60 years ago, when such bucaneering figures as Reynolds Packard, Bruce Renton and Leslie Childe held court at the Foreign press association in the Via della Mercede.

 I met Eric in Libya in 1984, when I was a young reporter for United Press International. He was then the respected middle east correspondent of Il Messaggero newspaper, the oldest Rome daily, and generously shared his profound knowledge of the looking glass world of the regime of Col. Moamar Kadhafi. Forty years on, he has become the guardian of historic memories not just of Italy and Italian journalism at the time, but also of the fearless, forgotten foreign correspondents based in the Eternal City who explained Italy to readers in Britain and the United States.

 Eric’s unusual family history was marked by the Cold War. He was born in the United States from where his father was deported to Italy because of his membership of the Italian Communist Party. At age 12 he hawked newspapers on the streets in Rochester N.Y., shouting out the latest on the Rosenbergs’ fate on the electric chair.

 In Rome, Eric’s dad became foreign editor of the left-wing afternoon newspaper Paese Sera where Eric subsequently began work at age 17 as a volunteer crime reporter. In 1964 his father went into hiding amid speculation about an imminent right-wing coup.

 Using his English, Eric mingled with the quirky correspondents who drank at the foreign press club bar a stone’s throw from the Spanish Steps. He was befriended by Packard and his wife Eleanor, known as Pibe, and is almost certainly the last person alive who knew them.

 'Pack' was renowned for his falstaffian career at the United Press, the romantic news agency, later known as UPI, that he lampooned in his classic novel ‘the Kansas City milkman.’ He was a fierce drinker and inveterate whoremonger, as recounted in his scabrous but hilarious memoir ‘Rome was my Beat.’ His formidable wife was among the first American women war reporters, charming Count Ciano when covering the Abyssinian war.

 Eric was 20 when Pack and Pibe introduced him to screwdriver cocktails, that they would quaff from 5 p.m. at the bohemian press club bar.  “Everyone knew that she was a much better reporter than him. But at the time a woman journalist was regarded with suspicion, or disinterest.” When Eric later joined Il Messaggero only one woman journalist worked there, fashion writer Nanda Calandri.

 Eleanor in 1944 was the first woman to be received in an audience with a pope wearing trousers. Pius XII took the experience in his stride. She is surely one of the most overlooked pioneering figures in the history of female journalism, whose biography is long overdue.

 “They were the most picturesque but certainly the most serious and competent correspondents of the old generation,” Eric said.

 Eric also brings to life two old friends of mine --Bruce Renton, a congenial former British intelligence officer who was known as the ‘Ambassador of Whisky’ after marketing the first malt whisky sold in Italy, and Leslie Childe, a colourful cockney correspondent for the Daily Telegraph who liked to recount how he interviewed a girlfriend of Karol Wojtyla before he became the priest who went on to be Saint Pope John Paul II. His dispatch supposedly began: "Last night I interviewed the woman who fucked the pope." 

 Intermingled with such disreputable ghosts of the Eternal City of yesteryear are Eric’s eagle-eyed observations on the state of the capital he makes as, now in his 80s, he wanders the Roman vicoli of his youth, pouring scorn on“the sea of ever more obese tourists who are more interested in what they see and read on their mobile phones than what they have around them.”

 One of his most poignant memories is Eric watching as the grotesque figure of Mordechai Louk, an improbable spy who Italian police, acting on a tip off from Mossad, rescued from inside a huge suitcase that the Egyptian Embassy in Rome in 1964 tried to load in the hold of a comet jetliner bound from Fiumicino airtport for Cairo.

 In such turbulent times journalists were in Italy respected figures, far more so than today when reporters’ influence has been largely eclipsed by internet and sinister social media run by the likes of the monstrous Elon Musk.

 Eric’s wonderful memoir ends with an account of street fighting in the working class district of Testacccio between police and demonstrators who flouted a ban on a march in July 1960 to recall the martyrs of the anti-Fascist Resistance.

 Riot police bundled Eric into a paddy wagon with 20 demonstrators but the Rome police chief, Emilio Santillo, ordered him released. “No, no, not him. He is a reporter.”

 Fantasmi a Roma is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the Eternal City in its colourful heyday of the 1960s dolce vita era and the genesis of the fantastic stories that led superb journalists of the calibre of Reynolds Packard to make Rome their preferred base.

  Fantasmi di Roma, Eric Salerno, Il Saggiatore, 248 pages, 17 euros.

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