The Truth About F. Scott Fitzgerald's Drunken Brawl in Rome

New York Times

27-03-2025

One ill-fated night in December 1924, F. Scott Fitzgerald got into a drunken brawl that ended up in a Rome police station, where he punched an officer and was severely beaten by some others.
In a letter to a friend ten years later, Fitzgerald described it as 'the rottenest thing that ever happened in my life,' an event so traumatic that his biographers say he could not bear to discuss it. But Fitzgerald fictionalized the incident twice, initially in a travelogue called 'The High Cost of Macaroni,' written in 1925 but published posthumously, and more famously in his 1934 novel 'Tender is the Night.'
In the novel, a very intoxicated Dick Diver, the protagonist, has a vicious scuffle in Rome with some taxi drivers, gets arrested and, after hitting an officer at a police station, is 'clubbed down, and fists and boots beat on him in a savage tattoo.' He ends up arrested, bloody and broken, only to be salvaged by his sister-in-law and officials from the U.S. Consulate. In Fitzgerald's case, his wife Zelda came to the rescue.
Biographers of Fitzgerald have taken the writer's fictitious accounts as fact. But official reports by Italian police and diplomats from the consulate in Rome, uncovered by Sara Antonelli, a professor of American literature at the Università Roma Tre, suggest that doing so can obscure the full truth.
'I had this buzzing thing in my head for years,' she said. 'The fact that in all the biographies they kept saying that what you read in 'Tender' happened to Fitzgerald. But I'm a literary critic — this is not the way things work.'
Antonelli's quest for clarity took more than three years and many hours mining the historical archives of Italy's various police forces. At Rome's central state archive, she uncovered a single pink folder labeled 'Arrest of the Foreigner Scott Fitgerat' with five sheets of paper inside: an initial report by the carabinieri, the military police force that detained and beat up Fitzgerald on the night between Nov. 30 and Dec. 1, 1924, along with follow-up reports by the Italian national police, the country's civilian force.
She compared those reports with an account of the incident drafted by a lawyer for the U.S. Consulate in Rome, which she found at the Library of Congress. 'The two do not agree on many points,' she said of her findings, which are included in 'Domani Correremo Più Forte' ('Tomorrow We Will Run Faster'), a biography and literary assessment of Fitzgerald that will be published in Italian on April 1. The chapter on Rome will be published in The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review in late spring.
According to the short carabinieri report, 'a rather tipsy' Fitzgerald had been stopped by a couple of night watchmen who found him trying to get into the Caffé Imperiale, a night club, that had already closed for the evening. The author was detained at a carabinieri station, where he flew into a rage, then punched an officer in the nose, provoking 'a reaction' from other officers who locked him in a cell 'after an energetic scuffle,' the document says.
After being alerted about the scuffle, Zelda immediately asked the U.S. consulate to intervene. In a memorandum drafted by the consular official overseeing the case, there is no reference to Fitzgerald being drunk, and blame is shifted to aggressive taxi drivers and an argument over the cost of a fare. The beating in the police station is mentioned almost in passing, with Fitzgerald having 'recollection of having been treated very ill.'
It's clear, Antonelli said, that both sides decided it was better to let the matter drop. Fitzgerald risked jail time for hitting an Italian officer, and the police had no interest in pursuing a case against a man who had been badly beaten by the carabinieri. Moreover, Romans were distracted at the time by reports of a serial killer, briefly cited by Fitzgerald in 'Tender Is the Night.' 'They had something else to think about' than a disorderly drunk, Antonelli said.
She added that she believes the full story explains why both Scott and Zelda decided not to tell anyone about what happened in Rome. 'It was evidently too violent, too unbearable, too shocking for both of them,' she said.
'We hate Rome,' Fitzgerald wrote to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, just before the writer and Zelda left for the island of Capri in February 1925. Adding to Fitzgerald's contempt for the city was that they had arrived in Rome ahead of a Roman Catholic Jubilee. The couple were used to renting homes when they traveled, but he wrote in 'The High Cost of Macaroni': 'To the Roman business man, Holy Year is that period when he counts on making enough profit out of foreign pilgrims to enable him to rest for twenty-five years more.' That is still the case in 2025, another Holy Year, in which an expected influx of pilgrims has driven housing costs sky high.
Luca Saletti, an archival expert who helped Antonelli track down the police documents, said it was 'plausible, that the situation got out of hand because neither the carabinieri nor Fitzgerald understood each other.' This was likely aggravated, he said, 'by Fitzgerald being a foreigner during a time of growing nationalism.'
The documents suggest that both sides tried to 'shut down something that could have become very unpleasant,' Saletti said.
Kirk Curnutt, a Fitzgerald scholar and professor at the Troy University in Alabama, said 'the incident was a deep source of shame and embarrassment to him, but he wasn't so embarrassed that he wasn't ever going to use it as material.'
'That's what a writer does,' Curnutt added. 'You use your elements of your biography to create art.'