Word: franca
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...last four months a mysterious voice has been heard in Africa. Every afternoon at 18.18 me on the short-wave band, the voice shouts subversion in Swahili, the lingua franca of Negro East and Central Africa. Samples: ¶ "Awake, nationals of Africa; open your eyes and march forward. My brother compatriots, how long will you remain slaves of white settlers? How long will you allow your blood to be sucked by these white pigs? How long will you permit these white pythons to spit in your faces? My brothers, the time has come to be masters of your own countries...
...current Prince Orsini is 37-year-old Filippo Napoleone, who replenished the declining fortunes of his house by marrying Franca Bonacossi, a provincial sugar-beet heiress from Padua. Franca, a woman of ambitious piety, filled her home with cardinals, bishops, monsignors and assorted clergy, urged that her husband be appointed Prince Assistant to the Pope in place of his father (who had been disqualified when he married a U.S. divorcee). She succeeded. But stocky, handsome Filippo Napoleone was bored by cardinals as dinner guests. He preferred to drink cocktails and talk to pretty girls in nightclubs. He never went home...
Troublesome Tunes. Gioconda de Vito was born in the south Italian hill town of Martina Franca, locally famed for its bandits, where her father was a well-to-do owner of vineyards. Music was in the air, and she was picking out tunes on the mandolin before she was four, soon switched to the violin. Curiously, she could not (and still cannot) carry a tune. This failure almost cost her the chance to study at the Pesaro conservatory, but her fiddling got her by, and in two years she had carried away all available prizes...