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By Root 259 0

She wasn’t a celebrity like her daughter, but a mother’s love is not something taken lightly in Italy. She cried constantly, painfully, honestly. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her puffy face permanently blotchy. She is the martyr of this saga; she is also a good person. Even when she knows she should, she simply cannot hate people, though she was well-versed in the family’s enemies list. On one sticky July afternoon, she and her cousin Dorothy Craft Najir, who lives in Hamburg, approached the gaggle of reporters “de-Knoxing” amiably at the outdoor tables of the Brufani Hotel bar. Stories filed, video transmitted, most of us were bent over a BlackBerry or cell phone, texting husbands, wives, lovers, and editors after a long day in court. The main topic of conversation was how to nab press tickets to James Taylor’s Umbrian jazz concert the next night.

Edda and Dorothy checked out the group. Two family favorites, Chapman Bell of NBC and Sabina Castelfranco of CBS, were there, but they were sitting with the “axis of evil”—British tabloid reporter Nick Pisa and me. So Edda and Dorothy walked on. Later, over the usual network-paid dinner, Edda asked Chapman how she could possibly stand to be around us. This trial is Edda’s life, of course, not just another story, so she cannot fathom how we can all write and say such different things about her daughter, yet still be friends. What she didn’t understand is that the TV reporters’ honest views were not that different from those of the print press—but TV people had to toe the party line to get the family on camera. The TV producers would sometimes send text messages to find out where the unfriendlies were—so they could avoid us while they were with the family and know where to hook up later. It was a touchy situation that everyone understood. There can be no hard feelings when it comes to the politics of access.

Yet after the network meal, mellowed by wine, Edda, rather than return to the agriturismo, would sometimes choose to tag along with her dinner hosts to see what happened next. One night, early in the trial, she came with two TV reporters to the Joyce Pub, where the foreign press routinely gathered for night-caps and shop talk. We all sat at a back table littered with shot glasses and beer bottles. Everyone had had too much to drink. Leaning over Nick Pisa, Edda held my hand and pleaded with us to believe in Amanda. “She is innocent,” she says, her eyes welling up.

A few months later, on a far more sober occasion, Edda and I sit together over lemon sodas on corso Vannucci. “My family would kill me if they knew I was meeting you,” she says, missing the irony of the threat. Then she tells me that I had been the worst, one of the very worst, to write “these lies and leaks” about Amanda.

“Like what?” I ask. “What did I write that wasn’t true?”

Her phone rings. It is Madison Paxton, Amanda’s best friend, who is spending the summer with her in Perugia. They talk for a few minutes and then hang up.

“Madison says I should spit on you,” Edda says, laughing apologetically. “She’s just young. She doesn’t understand this stuff.”

“So what have I written that is not true?” I ask again.

“I’ve never read your stories,” she says. “Chris just tells me that you are the worst.”

We talk about the sex scandal involving Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Italy is buzzing about the orgies at his summer home, and I use my BlackBerry to send Edda the link to an El País newspaper story that shows the Czech prime minister, nude and sexually aroused, at Berlusconi’s Sardinian villa.

“I don’t understand how he can cheat on his wife like that,” she says about Berlusconi. “What’s wrong with this society where men think it is OK to have affairs?”

She frowns. Maybe she is thinking of Curt, who left her for Cassandra, when Edda was pregnant with Deanna. But she shrugs and happily goes back to gossiping about Berlusconi’s orgies. I dish more dirt, and we giggle like girlfriends. Then she remembers I’m the enemy.

OF ALL THE FAMILY, Edda spent the most time in Perugia, especially in the summer