Standing by Fumo is no ordinary task. On Monday, Zinni sat calmly in the second row, directly behind Fumo, showing little expression even as profanity-laced e-mails were somewhat awkwardly flashed to the jury to display Fumo's obsessive hostility toward barking dogs, leaking pipes, meter readers, clutter, and, notably, his second wife as they were divorcing. ("[Blank] her and ignore her . . .," Fumo wrote.) On the other side of the courtroom, in the back, sat Fumo's 36-year-old daughter, Nicole Marrone, watching as her husband, former Fumo aide Christian Marrone, testified against her father. It was the first time, Zinni said, that she had ever seen Nicole, who has been estranged from her father since before her 2003 wedding. "She's a beautiful girl," Zinni said. Zinni wore a simple black, short-sleeve skirt suit, black high heels, a gold crucifix around her neck, and a ruby-and-diamond ring on her left hand that she said was a present from the senator. With layered, long, brown hair that reaches below her shoulders and little makeup, she looks younger than her years. She kissed Fumo on the lips during a break and placed both of her hands on his face as she spoke to him. When they left for lunch, they were holding hands. "Certainly, it's hard," Zinni said of attending the proceedings in a brief conversation before court began Monday. She has declined to be interviewed further about the relationship, citing her two sons, who are in their 20s, and her desire for privacy. "That's what a mother should do," she said in a previous telephone call, and then, echoing a phrase more than a few people in South Philly have been known to use in trying to be helpful, suggested: "Call the senator." Zinni, who dated City Councilman Frank DiCicco, a Fumo ally, before becoming involved with Fumo, is from a family of Passyunk Avenue dress-shop owners who lived in the Girard Estates section of South Philly, and a graduate of St. Maria Goretti High School. Her parents had a shop, Zinni's, around the corner from Fumo's Tasker Avenue headquarters. Carolyn Zinni's shop on Baltimore Pike in Springfield is also called Zinni's. Zinni, who was married to a physician with whom she had two sons and then to a police officer, has an easy manner, addressing customers in her shop, which caters to bridal parties, proms and other dressy occasions, as "honey" and "sweetie" as they thumb through catalogs and try on dresses. Zinni's sister, Maria, who now owns Mia's dress shop on Passyunk Avenue, also declined to be interviewed, except to say that the family had known Fumo for years. Her parents now live above their store. Friends of Fumo's who have followed his tempestuous personal life, now so intertwined with his legal troubles, are amazed that at 65, with a federal indictment pending that could land him in prison, he seems to be in a mature relationship. He and Zinni have been seriously involved for about a year. "Vince is a very layered, very complex character who has always had trouble with intimacy, in my view," said one close friend who asked that her name not be used because of the trial. "The whole idea that Vince would find a companion under these circumstances is remarkable." The friend insists that Fumo - after two failed marriages, a by-all-accounts obsessive relationship with a girlfriend, Dottie Egrie Wilcox, in which he is alleged to have arranged for a half-dozen surveillances, and then a relationship with another woman some three decades younger - is sincerely searching for a mature relationship. "He wasn't sure anyone would want to be with him, with the hurricane around him," the friend said. Zinni "is good-hearted. She has come to genuinely care for and love him. On some level, he is very grateful." Fumo, in his public announcement that he would not seek reelection after a heart attack last March, credited Zinni for calling 911 from his now-much-testified-about Green Street mansion that night and saving his life. "If she didn't have the guts to just say 'We're calling 911,' I probably wouldn't be here today," Fumo said. Friends of Fumo say Zinni's relationship with him has endured despite his legal troubles and solidified after he was hospitalized. After court was over the other day, with his estranged daughter in the hallway, Fumo had stayed behind, putting together some extra plastic shelves for the files. "[Blank]," he swore in the nearly empty courtroom (bringing to mind a prosecutor's insistance that expletives are "part of understanding his personality") as he jammed together the shelves - which a friend suggested he do partly because his hired lawyers could not be bothered, but also for its therapeutic effect. Fumo had seemed a bit rattled by his daughter's presence; he had paused to look at her during one of the several times he walked by her. But minutes later, he was whacking away at the shelves, the better to hold the files that document what his volatilities - personal and political - have wrought. Asked about Zinni, the serene exception to the storm around him, Fumo declined to comment except to agree with others' descriptions of her charms: "Obviously, I think so." Contact staff writer Amy S. Rosenberg at 215-854-2681 or .