Word: curiousities
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...beaten track 60 miles northwest of Rome stands one of the strangest witnesses on earth to man's love of the curious and bizarre. Near the Villa Orsini at Bomarzo is a whole sculpture garden of beasts and ogres carved from volcanic rock (see color pages) on the site. Rarely has sentiment taken a more bizarre turn. Created in the 1560s by Duke Pierfrancesco ("Vicino") Orsini, the sculpture garden was meant not only to astonish and delight, but to serve as a memorial to Orsini's deceased wife...
Some of the sources of Orsini's inspiration can be guessed at. The ogre seems borrowed from the Mouth of Hell leading to Pluto's cave, as illustrated in medieval manuscripts on Ovid. The curious words ringing the ogre's mouth-Lasciate Ogni Pensiero Voi Que Entrate (Abandon all thought, ye who enter)-refer to the cup of forgetfulness ancient Greeks thought was drunk before crossing the river Lethe. The dragon-fighting lions (probably an oblique reference to political feuds) derived from a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci. The elephant with castle was a symbol used...
...professor of English literature at Princeton; on the Isle of Wight. The early commercial success of his verse was a sensitive point with Noyes, who abhorred the hack reputation, denied that he "had made poetry pay." Born a generation after his time, Traditionalist Noyes was sharply articulate about "that curious modern tolerance for things which ought not to be tolerated." Novelist Hugh Walpole was once kicked out of Noyes's house for suggesting to one of Noyes's daughters that she read James Joyce's Ulysses. "Filth," said Noyes, to whom the stream-of-consciousness device...
...face by entering into the parliamentary game. He answered questions skillfully. When one right-wing speaker compared him to Robespierre, who started the Terror and in the end died by it, De Gaulle (according to Figaro Littéeraire) turned to Minister of State Guy Mollet and murmured, "Curious. I always thought I was Jeanne d'Arc and Bonaparte. How little one knows oneself...
...Greeks fled the trap is told in a third-person narrative by the man who led them out of the trap: Xenophon, a 30-year-old Athenian, who was a friend of Socrates and the world's first war correspondent; he accompanied the expedition as a curious observer, not a soldier. This modern translation by the late Professor William H. D. Rouse (the Iliad and the Odyssey) marks another important addition to the ancient classics that are being turned into briskly readable, contemporary English by such able writers as Robert Graves (The Golden Ass of Apuleius. Lucan...