Word: il
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...blackshirted Fascists and cheering farmers tramped into a freshly cut wheat field near Aprilia one day last week to hear Premier Benito Mussolini officially open Italy's harvest season. Bustling up to Aprilia, one of the towns built on land reclaimed from the Pontine Marshes, in his automobile, Il Duce stripped to the waist, clambered atop a threshing machine. There he proceeded to blast away at early-spring predictions by observers in the U. S., Britain and France that Italy's vital wheat crop would fall far below normal this year. Folding his brawny arms across a tanned...
Last year Il Duce won the first victory in his twelve-year "Battle of the Grain," the drive to make Italy independent of foreign wheat imports. Due to years of intensified cultivation and reclamation of some 6,600,000 acres of swampland, Italian farms last year produced about 300,000,000 bushels, 20,000,000 more than the nor mal national need which was Mussolini's goal. The coldest, wettest winter since the turn of the Century, followed by a prolonged spring drought led to anticipation that this year's crop would fall to 220,000,000 bushels...
...Italian people therefore will have the necessary bread to live, but even if it had been lacking, we should never-I say, never-have been compelled to seek any aid whatsoever from those so-called great demo-plutocracies. . . . Comrade mechanics, start the motor. Comrade farmers, the harvest begins," proclaimed Il Duce. Stepping down from his perch, he pitched in with the threshers, for an hour jerked open stacks of wheat and tossed them into the hopper. He repeated his performance later in Pontinia, Littoria and Sabaudia, three other towns built in the Pontine area (TIME...
While Italians may have enough bread to eat this year, it will not be the kind they want. Il Duce, ever conscious that in event of war a closed Mediterranean would leave Italy seriously crippled for food and raw materials, annually stores part of the wheat crop as a war measure, sells a sizable portion abroad for needed foreign exchange. Thus last year, while the nation on paper produced enough for home use, Italy in fact suffered a wheat shortage. Bakers, unable to purchase sufficient wheat flour, eked out their dough with substitutes like corn flour, bean flour, ground lentils...
...horseback-riding, fencing, airplane-piloting, swimming, skiing Leader Mussolini, the traditional politician's ample paunch is evidence of a decadence not to be tolerated in his Party. Il Duce's news-organ Il Popolo d'Italia laid the law down recently: "Excessively fat members are undesirable in the Party ranks. . . . Their hearts, minds, nerves and muscles are all Fascist, but their bellies, no!" To Rome last week were ordered 45 special secretaries and inspectors of the Fascist Party. In the Forum Mussolini, with Il Duce watching, with pantherlike Fascist Secretary Achille Starace leading, the testees swam, jumped...