On the morning of March 9th, 1890, the greatest showman in the world packed up his circus and left Rome under cover of dawn. He owed a duke 500 lire, and he had no intention of paying.
His name was William Frederick Cody — Buffalo Bill — and the day before, in a muddy arena at the edge of the city, a handful of Italian horsemen from the Pontine marshes had done something that no one on either side of the Atlantic thought possible: they had beaten his cowboys at their own game.
It remains one of the most delicious episodes in the long and colourful history of Rome — the day the myth of the American frontier collided with the quiet, stubborn pride of the Italian countryside, and the frontier blinked first.
The Circus Comes to Town
Buffalo Bill arrived in Italy in February 1890. He had been touring Europe for years with his Wild West Show, a colossal travelling spectacle that brought the mythology of the American frontier to audiences who had never seen anything like it. The show featured stagecoach raids, sharpshooting displays, mounted battles, and performers who had actually lived the stories they were re-enacting. At various times, the cast had included Sitting Bull, Elk Horn, and Calamity Jane.
The caravan that rolled into Rome was staggering in scale: hundreds of performers, horses, buffalo, and enough equipment to fill dozens of railway wagons. They had sailed from America to Naples, performed there to rapturous crowds, then travelled north along the Via Appia toward the capital. For the Roman shows, an enormous horseshoe-shaped arena was erected in the Prati di Castello district — a still-rural area between Monte Mario and the Tiber, in what is now the Prati neighbourhood.
The operation that preceded the opening night would be recognisable to any modern marketing executive. Rome was blanketed with posters, handbills, and newspaper advertisements. The buzz was enormous. When the first performance began on February 20th, at half past two in the afternoon, the arena’s 5,000 seats were not nearly enough. Tickets cost five lire — a significant sum at a time when a labourer might earn two or three lire a day — and still people queued for hours.
The show was everything it promised to be: cowboys on bucking broncos, lasso demonstrations, mock attacks on stagecoaches, war dances, and at the centre of it all, the tall, theatrical figure of Cody himself, riding into the ring with his flowing hair and fringed leather, firing his Winchester at glass balls tossed into the air. Rome was mesmerised. For several weeks, the Wild West Show was the only thing anyone talked about.
Even the Pope got involved. Leo XIII received Buffalo Bill and his troupe in a private audience at the Vatican. According to the accounts of the day, the cowboys and Native Americans knelt respectfully and crossed themselves as the pontiff entered. It was a scene worthy of the show itself.
The Duke’s Challenge
Among the Roman aristocrats who attended the show was Onorato Caetani, Duke of Sermoneta, whose family had held vast landholdings in the Pontine plain south of Rome for centuries. The Caetani estates were cattle country — flat, marshy, malarial in summer, and worked by a class of horsemen known as butteri.
The butteri were the cowboys of the Italian marshes, though they would never have used that word. They were rough, quiet men who spent their lives on horseback, managing semi-wild herds of cattle and horses across the waterlogged pastures of the Agro Pontino. They wore dark corduroy trousers, velvet jackets, black hats, and heavy cloaks against the rain. They carried long staffs rather than lassos. They had no mythology built around them, no dime novels, no circus. They were simply very, very good at handling horses.
The Duke watched Buffalo Bill’s cowboys perform their bronco-busting routines and was unimpressed. During a reception with the show’s entourage, he said something to the effect that his own butteri could do the same, and probably better. The remark reached Cody, who — never one to let a challenge go unmet — invited the Duke to put his money where his mouth was.
The terms were agreed. A wager of 500 lire — a small fortune — was placed on a straightforward contest: the butteri would attempt to saddle and ride Buffalo Bill’s American broncos without being thrown, and the cowboys would do the same with the half-wild horses of the Pontine marshes. The date was set for March 8th.
The Day of the Challenge
Rome woke up that morning to rain. Heavy, persistent, the kind that turns dirt to mud and makes everything harder. The arena at Prati di Castello was soaked. The ground had become a swamp — which, for men who had grown up in the marshlands of the Agro Pontino, felt a great deal like home.
The butteri who arrived that day were led by two capi mandriani — head herdsmen — from the Duke’s estates: Alfonso Ferrazza and a thirty-year-old from Cisterna di Latina named Augusto Imperiali, known to everyone as Augustarello. With them came Francesco Costanzi, Cesare Fabbri, Achille Fasciani, Achille Laurenti, Angelo Petecchi, Bernardo Quinti, and Filippo Valentini. Nine men in dark clothes, mud-spattered before they even entered the ring, with no fringed leather and no fanfare.
The crowd was enormous. Despite the rain, thousands had turned up, paying full price for a spectacle that the newspapers had been building up for days. The Americans went first, attempting to mount the Italian horses. The Pontine animals were nothing like the trained broncos of the show: they were smaller, wiry, unpredictable, and thoroughly uncooperative. One by one, the cowboys were thrown.
Then the butteri took their turn with the American broncos. The horses bucked, twisted, and reared. It made no difference. The Italians held on. And then came Augustarello.
Imperiali approached his bronco with the unhurried calm of a man who had been doing this every day of his life since he was old enough to sit in a saddle. The horse fought. Imperiali didn’t. He absorbed every movement, settled into the animal’s rhythm, and within moments was riding it at a gallop around the arena, waving his hat at the roaring crowd.
The butteri had won. The arena erupted.
The Morning After
What happened next depends on which version of the story you believe, and in Rome, there are always at least two.
In one telling, Buffalo Bill took the defeat with grace. He ordered champagne for the winners and, while the corks popped, entertained the crowd with a final flourish of sharpshooting, picking off the flying corks with his rifle without missing a shot. A showman to the last.
In the other version — the one that Romans have preferred to tell for over a century — Cody did not take the defeat well at all. Stung by the humiliation of seeing his own cowboys outperformed by a group of unknown Italian herdsmen, and unwilling to part with the 500 lire he owed the Duke of Sermoneta, he did what any self-respecting frontier legend would do: he ran. The next morning, before dawn, the entire Wild West Show was dismantled. Tents were struck, wagons loaded, horses corralled. By the time Rome woke up, Buffalo Bill was gone — and the Duke’s 500 lire went with him.
Whether the debt was ever settled remains a matter of local debate. What is not debated is that when Buffalo Bill returned to Italy in 1906 for another tour — performing in Milan, Verona, Bologna, and Palermo — he carefully and conspicuously avoided Rome.
In the dialect of Rome, there is a word for unpaid debts: buffi. To leave one’s buffi behind is the mark of a scoundrel, the kind of man who slips out the back door while the bill sits on the table. And so the episode gave birth to a saying that Romans still repeat with a grin whenever someone skips out on what they owe: “Pure Bufalo Bill lascia li buffi” — even Buffalo Bill leaves his debts behind. It is the kind of line that only a city with two thousand years of practice in mockery could produce.
The Hero of Cisterna
Augusto Imperiali returned to the Pontine marshes and went back to work. He was not a showman. He was a buttero, and butteri did not seek fame. But fame found him anyway.
In the years and decades that followed, Augustarello became a folk hero. His victory over the cowboys entered the local oral tradition and was retold with increasing relish at every gathering. A school in Cisterna di Latina was named after him. A statue was erected in his honour. His story inspired books, articles, and even a biographical comic strip. He was interviewed repeatedly throughout his long life, always recounting the same day — March 8th, 1890 — with the same quiet understatement.
Imperiali died in 1954 at the age of eighty-nine. He is buried in the cemetery of Cisterna di Latina, a modest grave for a man who, for one afternoon in a rain-soaked Roman arena, proved that you didn’t need a Wild West Show to know how to ride a horse. You just needed a marsh, a herd, and a lifetime of practice.
An Italian Western
The story of Buffalo Bill and the butteri is, at heart, a story about two kinds of authenticity. On one side, the polished, theatrical version of the frontier — the America of dime novels and circus rings, where danger was choreographed and heroism was a performance. On the other, the unadorned reality of men who worked with animals in difficult country and had never thought to make a show of it.
It is also, unmistakably, a Roman story. Romans have always enjoyed seeing the powerful brought down a peg, and the image of a group of muddy herdsmen from the marshes humbling the most famous showman on earth has lost none of its savour in 135 years. If you walk through the Prati neighbourhood today — all elegant apartment buildings and busy streets — there is nothing to suggest that an arena once stood here, or that a crowd of thousands once cheered as a man called Augustarello rode a bucking bronco into legend.
Italy is full of stories like this — moments where the grand narrative meets the local one, and the local one wins. If you enjoy travelling through the country with an ear for these hidden episodes, Italy Trails offers self-guided itineraries designed to take you through the places where history actually happened, far from the usual tourist circuits.
Finding the Story
The Prati neighbourhood where the Wild West Show was staged is today one of Rome’s most central residential districts, just across the Tiber from Castel Sant’Angelo. No plaque marks the spot. The arena is long gone.
Cisterna di Latina, Imperiali’s hometown, is about an hour south of Rome along the Via Appia — the same road Buffalo Bill’s caravan followed north from Naples in 1890. The town has a small statue dedicated to its most famous buttero. The Pontine plain itself, drained in the 1930s, is no longer the marshy wilderness the butteri once rode through, but the flat, wide landscape still carries an echo of that older world.
For more stories of the Italy that exists beyond the guidebooks — from forgotten heroes to unexpected encounters — explore the routes and inspirations on Italy Trails.
And if you ever find yourself in Prati on a rainy March afternoon, spare a thought for the morning the greatest showman alive packed up his circus in the dark, tiptoed out of Rome, and never came back. Some debts, it seems, are easier to dodge than a Pontine bronco.
Travel the Roads History Travelled
From the Via Appia to the Pontine plain, from Rome’s hidden corners to the villages that time forgot — discover Italy at your own pace with a self-guided Italy Trails itinerary.