Word: ardito
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Such a hero is The White Stone's Don Ardito Piccardi, a priest haunted by the conviction that he no longer believes in God. As a religious novelist, Italian Author Carlo Coccioli, 40, is not quite up to the writing company he wants to keep. But with persistence, he tags manfully after the bigger models and every so often matches their literary stride...
Quest or Quarry? The White Stone is a sequel to Coccioli's Heaven and Earth (TIME, July 28, 1952), in which Don Ardito grew in power as a preacher while losing his capacity to love his fellow humans. That novel ended with an act of expiation in which the priest persuaded a German officer in World War II to execute him for acts committed by others. The present novel begins by reducing that sacrifice to irony. Perhaps as a symbolic agent for the humbling of Don Ardito's spiritual pride, the German officer stages a mock execution...
What follows is one of those journeys through the circles of hell-on-earth, in which Don Ardito gradually acquires the stigmata of saintliness. This pilgrim's progress is made somewhat confusing by Novelist Coccioli, who chronicles his hero's life solely through scraps of letters, diaries and notebooks. In quest of his own soul, Don Ardito meets a homosexual who reminds him, in perverted fleshly form, of his own once fiery love of God. And he is tempted by a devil named Mr. Page (for pagan) who tells him that God is simply another invention...
...held Kashmir, is the world's second highest mountain: 28,250-ft. Mt. Godwin Austen, known to mountaineers as K-2.* For years, K-2 has been regarded as unclimbable. Last week the news came through that the unclimbable had been climbed by an Italian expedition led by Ardito Desio, 57, a geology professor at the University of Milan...
...became known as the "Italian mountain," as Everest was the British, Nanga Parbat the German, Annapurna the French. (In the '305, Americans joined in on K2. reached 26,000 feet in 1938, 27,000 in 1939, 25,800 in 1953.) Professor Ardito Desio had climbed with the Duke of Spoleto. The professor is a mild-mannered little man with a Punch-andJudy nose and a mountaineer's reputation of being "stubborn as sin." Last spring Desio organized another Italian expedition, with eleven mountaineers, five scientists and a Pakistani army colonel...