Word: scugnizzi
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Dates: during 1956-1956
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...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...
...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...
...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...