Word: contis
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Though Maggie was born in Karachi, India, she was brought up in lower-middle-class South London. At Italia Conti's dramatic school for children, where Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence studied, Maggie got her start as a fairy in A Midsummer Night's Dream...
...missing: surly, bewhiskered Olinto Conti, who was Riofreddo's only avowed Communist...
...taps." Counting on his fingers, he said: "There's him, there's his wife Maria, his daughter. Think of it, three votes for the Communists. What a disgrace for all of us." Then he brightened. He had hit on a scheme. He knew that raven-locked Maria Conti, the only woman in Riofreddo who wore modern clothes, hated the drudgery of housework: she was a career woman at heart. Swinging his green umbrella. Father Francesco promptly departed to make Maria Conti head of the women's branch of Catholic Action...
...this happy moment a wild shout was heard at the back of the barn. The audience turned to see allegory brought up to date. Brandishing a long broom, Maria Conti rushed in behind her Communist husband. "If you think you can keep me just listening to your ideas when it's my duty to occupy an important official post," she shouted, "you'll have to buy me a new broom...
Four weeks ago, canny Giovanni Vis-conti-Venosta, Premier Bonomi's Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs, got tired of trying to work through the Roman dusk by candle and carbide light.* One afternoon when Britain's High Commissioner, prim Sir Noel Charles, was to call, Visconti-Venosta personally ordered every candle and sputtering carbide light in the Palazzo Chigi doused. Sir Noel walked into Stygian gloom, groped his way through the Chigi's interminable passages and waiting rooms, conferred ghost-to-ghost with Visconti-Venosta. whose face never cracked a smile. Next day Visconti-Venosta wrote...