"And there were songs to show your disrespect after you'd been dumped," Spina said.
Once the music had started and everyone's eyes turned up to see Bonanni emerging from her apartment with a surprised expression and a pink dress, Spina went into a rendition of Paradise Serenade, crooning, "Wake up, wake up, oh tenderness awake!"
As a large orange bus screeched to a halt behind him, he deftly stepped aside while picking up the slack in his microphone wire.
The accordion player, Villari, remembered a time when such amplification wasn't necessary.
"Now they want all the power and spectacle," he said, admitting, however, that the buzzing scooters and bleating horns present a challenge even when they perform in quieter courtyards.
While many cars rushed by without a pause, a young couple on a scooter stopped to listen, caressing each other under the streetlight. A pedestrian put his cellphone up to the speakers, and neighboring shutters opened to reveal old women with cotton-ball hair looking dreamily down at the young lover and his surrogate singer.
But not everyone was so enamored.
"The music could be more modern," said Laura Gentili, a 29-year-old secretary licking a gelato cone and watching the serenade from the corner. "I mean, traditional love songs are not exactly the top."
"I wouldn't want one," she said. "I mean the days of Romeo and Juliet are over. And what if you walk out there and you're wearing curlers? It would be a tragedy."
But Spina warned against declining a serenade, recalling the "only time in history" when a woman absolutely refused.
"It was the eve of their wedding," he said. "The next day in church, he was the no-show," Spina said, adding that the serenade and subsequent wedding went ahead a week later. "This is a gift that a man makes to a woman. You don't refuse it. You accept, and that's that."
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