Word: contessa
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...telling, Contessa trails a shoestring of good description: the Riviera, where the "international set gathers the way an annual fungus gathers on a beautiful tree"; the public-relations counselor, "who can be many things-some of them punishable by law"; the unusual Hollywood romance: "You could tell it was for real, because they never gave out interviews about getting married...
Freed from Trouble. As a future tragedian. Leopardi began life with every possible disadvantage in his favor. His mother, Contessa Adelaide, made piety seem more a crime than a virtue. When children-her own or other people's-were stillborn or died in infancy. Mother Leopardi "experienced a deep happiness . . . inasmuch as [they] had flown to heaven, while their parents had been freed from the trouble of bringing them up." Of Leopardi's father. Conte Monaldo, it is reported that he once took off his pants in the street and gave them to a beggar...
...hand in a long time. He not only plays a wealthy Wall-Street type (complete with Homburg, furled black umbrella, Brooks Brothers suit and briefcase), but wins the hand of lissome Audrey Hepburn in Paramount's forthcoming Sabrina. In The Barefoot Contessa, recently filmed in Italy with Ava Gardner, he is a tough old movie director...
...life is slipping away. She has been a successful actress and great beauty; now, after a ludicrous stab at playing Juliet, she is through with the stage and, even worse, aware that her beauty is dead. Lonely and anxious, she is taken in tow by a ravenous old contessa who supplies her with "beautiful" young men as escorts. Mrs. Stone, good American that she is, pays them as expected but politely declines their ultimate services. But when she meets Paolo, a gigolo with the face of an angel and the soul of a pig, she falls hard...
...large, Italians conducted democracy's most vital business, in a holiday spirit tempered by dignity and humor. In Milan, Contessa Castelbarco, Toscanini's eldest daughter Wally (see Music), was the first voter at her polling place in a schoolroom. The lone Communist member of the election board unctuously escorted her out, thanked her for voting. "Thank you," she replied sweetly. "But are you the host...