Italy: Hail Morea by John Hooper The Guardian 2:45pm 24th Dec, 2003   December 23, 2003    This is a Christmas story. Indeed, the very name of its principal character means "Christmas". But this is a Christmas story with a difference. Its hero is a man whose first name is Natale, which in Italian is the equivalent of Noel.    In the words of his nephew, Angelo, Natale Morea is "an oddball: a homosexual and a transvestite". He was born almost exactly 57 years ago in a village near Taranto, in the "heel" of Italy, and to be born a homosexual, let alone a transvestite, into a poor, socially conservative, southern Italian village, is to begin life already bearing a heavy cross.    As soon as he was able to get together the money, in 1977, he fled to the more tolerant north, to Milan, where he got a job working in a costume jewellery factory.    Then, one day, the factory closed down, Natale Morea was made redundant and, seven years ago, he returned reluctantly to his native village.    Things were little better. Angelo Morea told the newspaper Corriere della Sera, he remembered his uncle breaking down in tears one day.    "It would have been better for me to have been born crippled than gay," he quoted him as saying.    Natale Morea opened a business of his own, an amusement arcade, but it did not thrive and, by some accounts, he ran up debts before fleeing his native village for a second time.    He headed for Rome where, little by little, his life fell apart. He ended up homeless on the streets of the capital.    Earlier this month, he was sleeping rough near the Pyramid of Caius Cestius, the mausoleum set into the city walls, built for a wealthy Roman magistrate, when there arose one of those events on which the entirety of a human existence can turn.    It was the early hours of a cold Sunday morning. A group of young women had left a nearby district of bars and clubs when they were set upon by a band of young men. It is still not clear to the police whether they wanted to rob them or rape them.    In any event, it was the sort of ugly, violent incident from which many a "respectable" member of the public would turn away in fear and horror.    Natale Morea did not. He put himself between the women and their attackers, allowing them to escape, and paid for his courage with a beating so dreadful it put him into a coma.    In a split second of decision, Natale Morea - the "queer", the "cross-dresser" - proved himself to be more of a "real man" than any of his many persecutors, and, in so doing, went from a social outcast to a national hero.    Lying unconscious in his hospital bed, the man called Christmas is unaware that his name has figured on the front page of almost every Italian newspaper under headlines proclaiming him "the heroic tramp"; or that the president of his home region has said that Natale Morea "has given us all a lesson in humanity".    He does not know that a village in the centre of Italy has voted to provide him with a modest monthly allowance for the rest of his life.    Or that the mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni, is to visit him in hospital on Christmas Eve, on his birthday, to leave at his bedside a gift donated by the property arm of the city's electricity company: the keys to a flat in the eastern suburbs.
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