Word: expo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...private train car of a Pennsylvania Senator, was struck with a vision of a new America; he returned alone to spend two weeks studying the event, "more surprising, as it was, than anything else on the continent." He consciously imitated Edward Gibbon on the steps of the Expo's Administration Building -- but where Gibbon, sitting on the steps of Rome's Aracoeli church, had a vision of the falling Roman Empire, Adams saw a rising empire. Another visitor to the fair, historian Frederick Jackson Turner, delivered a famous paper there, saying that the internal frontier was closed; but America would...
When Foreign Minister Gianni De Michelis decided to promote Venice as the site for Expo 2000, much of Italy -- and Europe -- shuddered. Most of those opposed to the idea feared for the fragile health of a city already under attack by pollution and threatened by rising sea levels. Still, the 47-nation International Bureau of Exhibitions was expected last week to choose the jewel of the Adriatic over Toronto and Hannover as the Expo site...
Nonsense, retort the Expo's supporters, led by Italy's Foreign Minister Gianni De Michelis, who is using his position to pressure some of Italy's allies into supporting the proposal when it comes to a vote. He and his fellow advocates, including his brother Cesare and the business consortium, argue that the fair would transform Venice into the "new capital of Mitteleuropa," a center of communications and research. Half the local population has abandoned the city in the past 40 years, they note, leaving behind a hollow tourist playground built on a crumbling, honeycombed island. Without such an ambitious...
...Expo planners envision a vast, ultramodern "workshop of ideas" spread out over the entire 7,090-sq.-mi. Veneto region. The "ideas network" would be centered in the 80-acre Arsenale, the old shipbuilding yards of the Venetian navy. Along the edge of the lagoon, from the polluted petrochemical shores of Marghera to Marco Polo airport, a "Riviera of culture and technology" would be tied together by an aboveground metro. Planners promise that the construction would create 5,000 jobs, as well as a sophisticated electronics- and-communicati ons system to serve the city in the next century...
What the supporters cannot explain is how Venice could withstand an invasion of up to 500,000 visitors a day -- five times the city's capacity, according to the opponents' estimates. Even without the Expo, Italian tourism will reach record levels by the turn of the century: 2000 is a Holy Year, when tourists will flock to Rome, while Milan may be serving as host for the Summer Olympics. To spread out the traffic, Expo organizers propose holding their fair from January to April -- just when the canals most frequently overflow their banks. Argues Cesare De Michelis: "The idea...