Latin lover died doing what he saw as duty
Maurizio ‘‘Zanza’’ Zanfanti, who has died aged 62 while in flagrante, was the most famous Latin lover of the package holiday boom in Italy, of which the epicentre was his home town Rimini. In his prime, women queued up to be seduced by him and, according to legend, he slept with thousands.
He died of a heart attack at around 2am in his Mitsubishi Pajero, seconds after making love with a 25-year-old Romanian woman, who raised the alarm.
Maurizio Zanfanti was born into a family of poor peasant farmers who lived near Rimini, on Italy’s Adriatic coast. He left school at 16 with no qualifications and in 1972 became a buttadentro (thrower-in, literally) at a notorious discotheque called Blow Up. His job was to search for women on the beach and in bars and entice them with free tickets and smooth talk to go with him to Blow Up.
The work paid him a pittance, but gave him carte blanche to accost young women at will and engage them in conversation.
His rise to fame as a seaside endof-the-pier version of Casanova was as rapid as the rise to fame of Rimini as a citadel of hedonism. So effective was he that he quickly earned the nickname ‘‘Zanza’’, short for zanzara – the Italian word for mosquito.
Such was his status as a serial seducer of the tourists from northern Europe who flocked to the Adriatic in the 1970s and 1980s in search of sun, sea and sex that he was often front-page news in Germany and Scandinavia.
In 1984 the German tabloid Bild dedicated two pages to him, calling him the ‘‘Sex Bomber Der Nation’’. A pop song he and Blow Up staff made reached No 2 in Sweden.
Short and swarthy, he had dense caveman-style hair which he dyed golden brown. He wore his shirts unbuttoned to the waist or a skimpy leather waistcoat, to display to full advantage his chunky gold chains, tanned torso and hairy chest. He invariably wore platform heels and had a fondness for tight leather trousers.
But he was blessed with innate charm and it was this – they say – that bowled over the women. A Norwegian, Mette Homburg, now 50, told the Corriere della Sera: ‘‘He had the air of being a macho man but he was so nice, and so funny.’’ For three years, Mette returned each summer to Rimini just for Zanza, and they remained friends. ‘‘I knew he had loads of women, but it didn’t matter.’’
In a typical three-month summer season, he used to say, his average tally was 200 women, roughly two a day, rising to four in the infernal heat of August. He knew how many there were because he recorded each one, with brief details, in notebooks. ‘‘They were nearly all foreign women,’’ he said. ‘‘The Italians had to make do with my brother.’’
After his death, Walter Lanzetti, who owned the Blow Up disco, insisted that, unlikely as it might seem, what drove Zanfanti was a sense of duty. ‘‘He didn’t do it for fame, or to be top of the cucadores
‘‘They were nearly all foreign women. The Italians had to make do with my brother.’’
[Latin lover] league tables which existed in those days. He just wanted to make women happy. Zanza was a romantic.’’
However, the arrival of Aids in the 1980s, combined with a growing awareness of feminism, began to curtail his activities: ‘‘1988 was a lean summer,’’ Zanza conceded. ‘‘Only 120 women.’’
He never married but is thought to have fathered nine children dotted about Scandinavia and Germany. Asked once if he had ever been in love, he replied: ‘‘I cannot allow myself to do it. I cannot allow myself to stop . . . Work is work.’’
His family’s parish priest refused to allow his funeral in their local church, not because Zanza was a notorious sinner but because the priest did not want – or so he said – a media scrum in his church.
Instead, the funeral took place at the cemetery in Rimini in which Zanza was afterwards buried. Hundreds of people, including the mayor, were present.
Throughout his life, Zanza lived on the first floor of the family farmhouse above his mother Teresa, who is 80 and still owns a fishmonger’s nearby, brother Loris and sister Mara, neither of whom is married. They all survive him.
Though his mother was ‘‘not happy’’ (as he put it) with the life he had led, he did his bit each day at the fish shop and on their farm. ‘‘He was a good boy, who always helped me.’’ – Telegraph Group