Word: gold
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...centuries ago the vermilion hills north of Rio were black with men digging for gold. At the height of the California-size boom, the rich towns of Minas Geraes built resplendent churches, lavished fortunes on their adornment...
Time has been unkind to the gold towns of Minas Geraes. Their old wealth is long since gone; the red dust of Minas cakes their half-deserted streets. But Aleijadinho's heroic monuments remain. Each year in mid-September, Mineiros rise from their huts and hamlets and journey by foot, by truck and by train over the scarred hills to the shrine-church of Congonhas do Campo. Last week, as they had for a century and a half, some 200,000 Brazilian peasants made the pilgrimage to kiss the sacred image of the Dead Christ in Aleijadinho...
...Kiss for Bom Jesús. Inside, they moved forward past the gold and white side altars, past the two ornamented Aleijadinho pulpits. The only sound was the soft scuffing of sandaled feet. Reaching the altar, the pilgrims handed their candles to a priest, kissed the recumbent image of Bom Jesús, dropped their offerings in a box beside the altar. Some paused to honor the old tradition of "measuring" the figure with a piece of white binding tape that would later hang in their huts as a souvenir. Then they went back to the dusty hill towns that...
...glittering reminder of the old days. The British, acting on a 1946 tip, had dug up the crown of the Hohenzollerns, hidden during the war under the false step of a crypt in a tiny church. This week, after some careful investigation to make sure of its authenticity, the gold-heavy gewgaw, studded with 150-odd rose-cut diamonds and topped by a giant sapphire, was on its way back to its rightful owner...
...northern France) and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he studied. The narrator tells nothing of what makes Matisse one of the greatest painters living. But the moment the camera closes in on the 78-year-old master himself, Matisse takes charge. Blinking a little behind his gold-rimmed glasses (the floodlights apparently bothered him), Matisse faces the camera and his invisible interrogator with a grandfatherly smile, direct and forceful...