Word: ferragosto
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...Calabrian Mob, which began to accumulate wealth in the 1970s and 1980s through kidnapping and extortion, has grown exponentially in the past five years as it has teamed up with Colombian cocaine producers. The "Massacre of Ferragosto," the gangland killing of six young Calabrian men one August night in 2007, in Duisburg, Germany, was the bloodiest sign that the crime syndicate was spreading its influence across the continent...
...derives from the Greek word for "honorable man" - controls wide swaths of territory through intimidation and extortion. The payoff has been great: it has grown into a world leader in cocaine trafficking, with an estimated $47 billion in annual revenue. But the toll has been heavy. The "Massacre of Ferragosto" - the gangland killing last Aug. 15 in Duisburg, Germany, of six young men from in and around San Luca - was the first major 'Ndrangheta killing to occur on foreign soil. Violent death is more common in Calabria, where three people were killed in a five-day period in late March...
...padre è Michele,” my dad said, and instantly hoards of other relatives poured out of the house exclaiming “Santa Maria!” and smothering our cheeks with kisses. They ushered us into the kitchen where the women were preparing the Ferragosto lunch, comparable to American Thanksgiving. Half an hour later, more food had been made, extra chairs were fitted around the table, and my brother and I were instructed to sit at the kids’ table with a cousin whose name was Maria Grazie—forever “Maria...
...Twombly is a textbook case of High and Low in one parcel: an Alexandrian painter in love with entropy and yet capable of toughness. He can summon a carnivalesque energy, as in Ferragosto IV, 1961. He enjoys the blooming and buzzing of nature, though his responses to it in recent years -- evocations of the rural hill landscapes around his studio in Gaeta -- are formulaic and hark back to Dubuffet and, earlier, to Soutine's Ceret paintings. The phrases he writes on the canvas are place names and snatches of poetry, done in a faint cursive script that is always...
...nothing else, the Italian way of government almost slavishly honors traditions. One is the prolongation of political crises to a degree that commands the awe, if not exactly the envy, of the rest of Europe. Another is an unfailing respect for the sacrosanct mid-August "Ferragosto" vacation, when millions of Italians, especially the politicians, seek a respite from the inconclusive politicking of Rome and leap to the seashore like cats onto tuna...