Need 301 Redirection help... need to redirect parent and all children to homepage

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My client is not opening a portion of their business until later and instead of deleting the pages entirely and adding alternate page paths to the homepage to catch them, I would like to like leave the pages on the site, hide them from Nav, Sitemap, Indexing etc., and redirect any traffic to the parent and all children pages under that particular directory to the homepage for now.

Example: I want traffic tohttp://www.vivoaz.com/mercato to go tohttp://www.vivoaz.com.
Another Example: I want traffic tohttp://www.vivoaz.com/mercato/pasta... (or anything under the mercato parent) to go tohttp://www.vivoaz.com.

Here is the my current .htaccess settings:
# -- concrete5 urls start --
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}/index.html !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}/index.php !-f
RewriteRule . index.php [L]
RewriteRule ^mercato/ http://www.vivoaz.com [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^mercato/ /[b]l?[/b] [R=301,L]
</IfModule>
# -- concrete5 urls end --


Is it an order thing? Nothing is happening for the parent or the children of the mercato parent.

barkingtuna