Word: flaminio
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Eurocommunism coming to power in the NATO alliance. The defeat also raised the prospect of an intraparty challenge to Berlinguer's leadership, since it appeared to be a repudiation of his gradualist "historic compromise" strategy of joining the government in a national alliance with the centrist parties. Said Flaminio Piccoli, president of the Christian Democrats: "The Communist Party has lost its referendum on entering the government...
...lush and sensuous as the costumes they wore, a troupe of actors known as the Glorious Ones played their hearts out to street audiences in 17th century Italy. Their improvisations were passionate and bawdy, but so charming that even Church-supported French nobility were seduced into laughter. Impresario Flaminio Scala concocted such a dynamic group by painstakingly typecasting each member perfectly. So all they needed to do--Armanda the grotesque but sharp-witted dwarf, Pantalone the cross miserly Jew, Dottore the pompous doctor of quackery, Brighella the spiteful gadfly, and the others--was get up on stage and play themselves...
...could only feel a love that was laden with hate and scorn; thus they were impotent or sterile. Her second pronouncement is harsher, but contained in an incongruously mild aside. Speaking of her husband Francesco, who by the end of the book had wrested command of the troupe from Flaminio Scala, she commented...
...these intuitive and somewhat pat perceptions, nagging self-doubts dangle at the end of each memoir. But instead of developing their restive psyches, Prose disappointingly cuts the players short. Armanda the dwarf, for example, acknowledges the tension that arises from Flaminio's perfect typecasting, from his refusal to recognize her private soul. But the plot does not allow time for her to develop potential feelings of self-worth that can replace an identity culled from the glory of the stage. Instead, her memoir trails off in confusion, with a lame admission to Flamino that "I myself was never quite sure...
Isabella is the only one who comes close to self-fulfillment. She realizes that perhaps it is possible to infuse creativity into her roles, a creativity balanced between Flaminio's self-consuming and haphazard improvisation and Francesco's constricting memorization. She realizes that her talents have been developed as self-protection, not self-expression, as a shield against her naturally unbounded generosity, a self-destructive and explosive emotion which often vented itself in endless hours of duck-like squawking. But the best she can do, speaking from the wrong side of the heavenly gates, is whisper her confession into another...