Word: brindisi
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Like many a latter-day political bigwig, Julius Caesar prepared for greater things to come by serving as a highway commissioner. His job was to take care of the Appian Way, the great road that stretched from Rome to Brindisi on Italy's southern coast. Laid out in 312 B.C. and already famed in Caesar's day, the Via Appia became known, in the centuries that followed, as the Queen of Roads. Many a victorious Roman legion marched homeward in triumph along its stone paving and over its skillfully engineered bridges. Wealthy Romans built their most sumptuous villas...
...Letter from Italy. Nevertheless, a few people in Italy remembered Francesco, and at the end of World War II he was pleased to get a letter from Francavilla Fontana, his struggling home town on the featureless plain of Brindisi. The letter was from a family with ten children, so desperately poor that they were reduced to clothing themselves with paper bags. Francesco did not know them, and furthermore his shop was making only $15 a week. But, he reflected, his wife was making good wages at a ladies' belt factory; on re-reading the letter he could not help...