Word: giovanni
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...sided with the republican cause. According to an old tradition, the great sculptor, who was then at work on the Medici tombs, hid in the bell tower of a church on the other side of the Arno. But ten years ago, a memoir was discovered in the handwriting of Giovanni Battista Figiovanni, the prior of San Lorenzo who was in charge of the Medici tombs project. "I saved him from death," the prior wrote of Michelangelo, "and I saved his belongings too." It was in this very room-well hidden by its trap door, but at street level and adequately...
...adding that he could no longer withstand the opposition he received. Without even bothering to call the confidence vote-defeat was, after all, a certainty-the Premier held a crisp last meeting with his Cabinet, then set off in his blue Alfa Romeo to tender his resignation to President Giovanni Leone at the Quirinale Palace. There Moro requested the showdown that he had maneuvered for weeks to avoid and that he had called "not our choice, but a rigorous and difficult duty." Moro recommended to Leone that he not try to form a new government but call general elections...
Naming only three Italians, Paul surprised many Vatican observers in bypassing the Vatican's top diplomat, Archbishop Agostino Casaroli, and Archbishop Giovanni Benelli, one of his closest advisers and the Deputy Secretary of State. However, promotions would have removed them from their present posts, which cardinals do not fill, and Paul may consider them indispensable. Two of the new cardinals were in pectore (in the breast), meaning that their names will be kept secret unless the Pope discloses them; these secret cardinals might be his two aides. Recent appointments in pectore have been from Eastern Europe, but Paul last...
...takes the form of a communist coup, instigated by Henry Kissinger, with the support of Moscow and the Vatican. In this Machiavellian satire of an Italy just prior to 1984, the Prince and his courtiers are actual political figures: the head of the Partito Communista Enrico Berlinguer, "the Professor," Giovanni Leone, current president of Italy, and a host of others. By using these Italian politicians for characters, the author sharpens the point of his wit--the more so since, like a good cartoonist, he draws caricatures which are not so exaggerated as to be unimaginable, and whose features are distorted...
...political satire of the book is also clever and facile. The portrait of Giovanni Leone (whom the author envisions as still president of the Italy of 1980 in which the coup occurs) is condescending but sympathetic. The bite of the satire is playful; Leone is irritated by the noise of electric guitars because he "was himself . . . a great connoisseur of Neapolitan songs." Reactionary forms of music, Neapolitan songs have all the melodrama "Italy" suggests...