Word: emilia
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Moving In. By that time Comrade Leonilde Jotti, graduate of a Roman Catholic university in Milan, onetime language teacher, wartime partisan and postwar Red Deputy, had become Togliatti's mistress, though 27 years his junior. So completely did the buxom, black-haired girl from Reggio Emilia capture the affections and feed the ego of the brilliant, moody Togliatti that he got a legal separation from his wife, Rita Mon-tagnana, a white-haired intellectual, and went off to live with Nilde Jotti in a high-walled villa on Rome's Monte Sacro (Sacred Mountain...
...first, voters of Reggio Emilia's deeply Red 13th district were flattered to have so important a personage as la Compagna as one of their Deputies in Rome. They voted her into Parliament in 1948 and 1953 by handy margins. But as the years passed and Nilde lived high on the remote Sacred Mountain, local Red leaders began to grumble: she spent too much time in Rome and neglected her own people. Legally married Communist wives resented Nilde's special position. Scurrilous jokes circulated about the affair of Togliatti, now 65, and Nilde, 38. And there...
Like most of Emilia's mayors, the mayor of Ruina is a Communist, but he proved to be in no hurry to tangle with the church. He found a fast face-saver: an old town ordinance stipulating that all gravestones must be approved by the city council. Since the offending stone had not been approved, the mayor ordered not merely the symbols but the stone to be taken away...
...news spread through the region, priests and mayors locked horns. "Politics cannot go beyond the tomb!" wrote a Red-strafing priest, Reggio Emilia's Don Wilson Pignanoli, in his paper. La Liberta. "Inquisition!" cried the party-lining Socialist paper, Avanti!. "It seems to us that a dying man should be able to choose for his tombstone the symbols he believed in while he lived, whether they are religious or political. What about the Star of David over tombs of Jews? And lamps which illuminate the headstones of free thinkers...
...week's end the Communists seemed unenthusiastic about pressing the matter. Growled one comrade: "Politics in the piazzas, religion in the churches, peace for the dead." Meanwhile, throughout Red Emilia, farmers and workers, priests and parishioners were peering through weed-grown cemeteries to see what other instances of mortuary Marxism they could find. Most notable example, in addition to dozens of hammers and sickles: the well-known Italian version of the revolutionary slogan-"Push on, 0 people, push on to Redemption Day"-painted on a headstone...