Word: fanfani
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...began the way any Italian comic opera should: amid flowers, panoply and applause. The fanfare last fall was for little Italian Foreign Minister Amintore Fanfani, off in New York greeting the Pope, making speeches and generally cutting a bella figura as the first of his nation to be honored with the presidency of the U.N. General Assembly. Then-omen of trouble-came the first slip: he fell on an icy New York sidewalk, mildly injuring...
...mishap hit the headlines back home, all Italy chuckled. Fanfani had hardly smoothed down his dignity and limped away when the next blow came. He found himself involved in a Hanoi "peace feeler" to the U.S. that turned out to be a dismal flop. Of course, he felt he was only doing his duty-that it was the responsibility of any statesman to pass along to the President of the U.S. the slightest intimation of an end to the bloody Viet Nam war. The folks back home, however, were less impressed than amused at this "amateur peacemaking." Particularly since Fanfani...
...beat the Communists at their own social-welfare game, he was largesse to a fault. La Pira lived alone in a bare room above a clinic and gave away most of his salary. He was equally openhanded with the Florentine treasury, which ultimately cost him the mayoralty job. Fanfani and his buxom, dimpled wife Biancarosa (White Rose) have not only been close friends to La Pira, but have also regarded him as their health and spiritual counselor. They even had one of the Saint's old hats around to wave over the heads of their seven children...
When La Pira's touch failed to exercise healing powers in Viet Nam, Fanfani gamely went ahead with his final duties at the U.N., gaveling the session to a close and returning home-just in time to find himself guffaw-deep in a whole new farce with La Pira. This time the unwitting agent of humiliation was his own Biancarosa. Aiming to rescue La Pira's and her husband's image, she had invited the chief editor of the rightist satirical weekly Il Borghese, one of La Pira's harshest critics, to meet the old family...
...Italy got the joke, all right, but the returning Amintore was not amused. First he blew his 5-ft. 1-in. top at his wife, and when she tried to escape by closing a door in his face, Fanfani reportedly kicked it in. Only when things were settled at home did he manfully face up to the chortling outside world. "Unjust and unfounded considerations and judgments of a friend and the improvident initiative of a member of my family," he wrote Premier Moro with as much dignity as he could muster, "rightfully or wrongfully have cast doubts on the conduct...