Maybe I should have already known, but it turns out that Charles—or should I say Carlo—Ponzi was born in Lugo, 15 km from where my entire family is from. There’s a lot more I didn’t know about his story, and the podcast makes for a very interesting and entertaining companion while I’m out for a walk. It’s also very well produced, and—with actors filling in for characters that have been dead for decades, and whose voices were probably never recorded—it’s a good compromise between a work of investigative journalism and a radio play.
My main gripe, inevitably, is with the botching of the little Italian spoken in the show. Let’s forget that Ponzi would have probably spoken Romagnolo, not Italian, with his mother, and that his accent in English would have been nothing like Sebastian Maniscalco’s rendition—I get it, breaking the stereotype would have been distracting. But if they couldn’t find someone who spoke Italian, couldn’t they at least find someone who could teach the actor playing Ponzi’s mother how to correctly pronounce the language, instead of making it sound like a half-assed hybrid with Spanish? I bet even Siri would have done a better job.
All that aside, it’s still an astonishing story even a century later, and the mechanism of the Ponzi scheme kinda reminds me of something. I just can’t put my finger on it…
(Update: oh, right.)