Zabaglione's local fame was based on his forensic eloquence. If it was known that he was going to plea at a criminal trial, the cobblers’ and tailors’ and carpenters’ shops emptied, the concierges abandoned their lairs, and everyone who could went to listen to him. Many of his famous speeches had become proverbial. During the first years of the dictatorship he had had to make tremendous efforts to cause his rhetorical feats to be forgotten. He had transformed his old Mazzini-style beard, which he had worn since he was a young man, into a Balbo-style goatee; and he shortened and thinned his hair, changed the way he knotted his tie, and tried, though vainly, to lose weight. But if these were the most visible and hence the most painful sacrifices to which the former tribune of the people had had to subject himself, there was no counting the minor mortifications that he had to endure, such as having to sacrifice his ideas, being careful in what he said about the government, and breaking off relations with his suspect friends. In spite of the undeniable determination he had put into all this, he had not succeeded in completely rehabilitating himself, and he was consistently left out in the cold by the new institutions.