Risotto Nero

Risotto is a tall, powerfully muscled man of twenty-eight. His head is wrapped in a black hood strung with small metal beads that spell out his name, hiding his hair, while pale bangs, dark in earlier art, hang nearly to his brows. His eyes are the most arresting feature: red irises set against wholly black sclera.

He goes bare-chested beneath a long, collarless black coat cinched by straps that cross his torso in an X, and his trousers run in bold horizontal bands of black and white. In the photograph that first introduces him, he appears without the hood and wearing dark lipstick.

As the head of La Squadra Esecuzioni, Risotto carries himself with grave seriousness, fixed on his objective and methodical in how he stalks a target. He circles Vinegar Doppio, whom he suspects of serving Diavolo, coldly reading each of the young man's movements before he strikes, and his knack for anticipating an opponent nearly finishes Doppio outright. Beneath that composure, though, lurks a temper that flares into sudden violence, as when he snarls at Doppio to get to his feet.

He is acutely observant, catching the flick of Doppio's eye toward the noise of Aerosmith's engine and inferring a Stand user from it. For all his chill, he holds a real devotion to his men. He swears to avenge them, and the anime shows him defusing a quarrel between Formaggio and Illuso, being first to question the disappearance of Sorbet and Gelato, and lingering longest at their funeral.

Risotto came into the world in Sicily in 1974. At fourteen he lost a cousin to a drunk driver and, unsatisfied that a prison term was punishment enough, hunted the man down and killed him four years later, sliding into the criminal underworld soon after. He gained Metallica at twenty-one and led La Squadra in eliminating politicians, gangsters, and anyone else who threatened Passione. His Stand consists of countless tiny beings living in his blood, letting him bend nearby iron to his will through magnetism, a power matched by a razor-sharp tactical mind. Resentment festered under the Boss, who denied the squad their own territory, and when Sorbet and Gelato were executed for probing his identity, the team was leashed still tighter, until word of the Boss's daughter Trish gave them a new opening.

Two days before Bucciarati took charge of Trish, Risotto searched her room and found a photo of her mother shot in Sardinia. When a plane went down off that coast, he reasoned Trish would head there and lay in wait. From a cliff he watched Vinegar Doppio, pinned him down, and pressed him about a hidden envelope, not realizing the boy had slipped the photo beneath his shoe. Catching Doppio react to the sound of Aerosmith, he pegged him as a Stand user and, gauging the Stand as a short-range power type, kept his distance while probing with blades, needles, and scissors conjured from iron.

The duel turns when Doppio's uncanny foresight and odd behavior lead Risotto to a shocking conclusion: the frightened youth is the Boss himself. He orders razors to burst from Doppio's skull, only to be gunned down by Aerosmith. The Boss reveals that the knives Risotto had thrown pointed toward Bucciarati's group, turning Narancia's Stand against the larger target, which was Risotto. Riddled and dying, he makes one last bid, guiding Metallica caught on Aerosmith to fire at the Boss, but King Crimson erases the crucial half-second and Risotto is the one who takes the bullet, ending his life.