Problema, Officer?

Occasionally something happens to you in Italy and you begin to think that Fellini was not a great surrealist film-maker, but just a simple documentarian, telling it like it is.

A few days ago I walk into the alimentari (deli) after squeezing through bumper-to-bumper traffic on the tight cobblestone street, people standing by their cars yelling, all horns a-honking. So far, fairly normal. The whole thing is caused by a double parked police car, lights flashing, doors open, engine off. This too is normal, only slight less so. Inside the alimentari, one of the Longhi bros. (the store owners), his wife, and two poliziotti are having twice as many animated conversations.

“E che succede ?!”, I ask. (What’s happening?)
“Sta’ffa’a spesa,” answers Longhi. (In Roman dialect, he’s grocery shopping.)
Must admit I skip a beat here, but I do see that he is indeed slicing some prosciutto for one of the policemen.
“No, fuori!”, I exclaim. (No, I mean outside!)
“Ahhh . .”, says the prosciutto purchasing policeman, looks-in-the-know exchanged all around.
“St’amo aspetta’ ch’a signora di sopra finisca i piatti,” he states, matter of fact. (We’re waiting for the signora upstairs to finish her dishes.)
Now I’m truly confused. 5 seconds pregnant pause, during which I can actually hear prosciutto fibers part.

All of a sudden four more or less comprehensive summaries of the events are shared/hollered at me, from which I reconstruct the following:

Apparently a couple in the building across the street were having a good old-fashioned, door-slamming, furniture-banging screaming match, so someone justifiably called la polizia. The police came tearing over and charged into the apartment, only to find themselves in the middle of a hurricane of objects and crockery gone ballistic, launched by the man’s better half . . so they decided to buy some time (and lunch) while waiting for her “to finish all her dishes”.

Fellini would have probably thought, as I did, “With truth like this, who needs fiction?”