Word: contrada
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Silvio Capuana could never forget the poverty of his youth, or the pain and contempt it had brought him in the Apennine village of Contrada, where he was born 60 years ago. Reared in a two-room hovel swarming with flies, brothers and sisters, all as dirty and hungry as himself, he had spent his childhood working long hours in the local wheatfields for a few pennies a day, resenting the shouts of harsh masters and dreaming of a better life. As soon as he was old enough, he fled to seek his fortune in Canada...
When Silvio came back to Contrada in 1933, he was 40 years old, a man of substance, with a real pearl stickpin in his cravat. He built a luxurious villa outside the village, and proceeded to show his contempt for the Contradese in a perverse display of ostentation and charity. He refused to enter the village but gave generously to the local church, and twice each year he would drive his blooded Arab horse around the outskirts to the back door of a house in which some Contradese girl cried her heart out because her family lacked money...
Wealth v. Brains. At home, Silvio amused himself by decorating the gardens of his villa with a weird menagerie of statuary whose faces bore a startling resemblance to the stuffier citizens of Contrada. Nevertheless, most of the villagers were content to accept Don Silvio as a wealthy, if eccentric, benefactor...
...president of Contrada's town council, Carmine, a dedicated Monarchist, set himself to bait the sulky showoff, Silvio, an ardent Demo-Christian, at every turn. When Silvio planted cherry trees on the borders of his property, Carmine made him cut them down because they overhung the village highway. When Silvio built himself a tomb in the local churchyard, Carmine complained that its steps were on public property. "Material wealth can never replace brains," he gloated when the steps were ordered removed...