Word: figura
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Italy is sunnily tolerant of sexual peccadilloes; in a land without divorce, why should an unhappily married man of wealth and influence not be allowed a mistress? What an Italian politician must guard against is making a brutta figura -roughly, a fool of himself. The late Communist Party boss, Palmiro Togliatti, left his wife to live with a woman 27 years younger than he; yet his standing in politics was unaffected. By contrast, Foreign Minister Amintore Fanfani was forced to resign from office in 1965 simply because his wife made a mistake. The right-wing magazine Il Borghese published...
...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...
...such a bella figura or prove himself such a furbo (big shot) behind the wheel as the Italian. He passes on the right, double passes on the left, triple parks, turns left from the right-hand lane, lunges at pedestrians, ogles the girls, looks at his handsome self in the mirror, waves his arms wildly and shrieks "criminali" and "bastardi" at other drivers. He plays Roman roulette, which means hurtling into an intersection without looking to left or right. The one thing he likes better than passing a whole row of cars is passing the car that is passing them...