Word: giovanni
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ordered the assassinations last year of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, two widely admired magistrates who had made Mafia busting their life's work. Public outrage over the murders, and the seeming untouchability of those who committed them, stiffened the Italian government's resolve to confront organized crime. The national assembly swiftly passed sweeping antiracketeering laws that permit wider use of phone taps, property searches, confiscation of the property of suspected Mafiosi and guarantees of protection for state's witnesses...
What comes next for this young virtuoso? The opera schedule is daunting: The Barber in Houston next spring, her American debut; Don Giovanni in a heavyweight Salzburg production conducted by Barenboim in 1994; the Met's Cosi fan tutte the following season. Bartoli is happily caught up in her repertory, but her fans, as well as many opera managers, already ache to see her expand it. Why not the big-money operas -- Verdi and, above all, Carmen...
...remote-controlled bomb obliterated anti-Mafia prosecutor Paolo Borsellino and five police bodyguards last week, no one could miss the message: the Mob would kill anyone, anywhere, in its campaign of intimidation. The brave efforts of a handful of Sicilian judges and prosecutors like Borsellino and Giovanni Falcone, assassinated in a similar blast in May, had won only feeble support from Rome. Nonetheless, the courts managed to put more than 400 suspected mobsters on trial and convict the vast majority of them. But now the Mafia has challenged the prosecutors to back off, and its bloody taunt has thrust...
...Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591-1666) was known from childhood and, since his death, to art history as Guercino -- "the Squinter." Thus he joins Masaccio ("Tom the Lump") and Sodoma among the notable Italian painters who survive in pejorative nicknames. One flinches to think what this practice might have done to the self-esteem of artists in the late 20th century had it gone...
Still, you may luxuriate in the landscapes and in the performances -- by Rupert Graves, Helen Mirren, Giovanni Giudelli and (of course) Helena Bonham Carter -- that subvert caricature. And you are permitted to weep at the film's climax: a last embrace of two not-quite lovers, closest at this instant of separate, mutual despair. It is a sweet, seductive, haunting final shot...