Word: italian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Hall of Mirrors of Rome's block-long Quirinale Palace. Italy's 70-year-old President Giovanni Gronchi swore in his good friend Amintore Fanfani, 50, as Premier, along with a Cabinet of 19. Not since Italy became a Republic after World War II had an Italian government leaned so far to the left...
...Brief for Capitalism. Fanfani's idea of socialist adventuring stems from his long espousal of Italian left-wing Catholicism. Ever since his first days as professor of economics at Milan's Catholic University, Fanfani has argued the moral responsibility of both church and state to look after the needs of the people, and has had little brief for capitalism-at least the type of capitalism that Italy has long known. Said Fanfani in Catholicism, Protestantism and Capitalism, one of the 16 books he has written: "Capitalism requires such a dread of loss, such a forgetfulness of human brotherhood...
Fanfani is the youngest Italian Premier to take office since Mussolini in 1922. A teen-ager when Fascism began, he saw the corporate state as the ideal, and in what he calls a "temporary aberration" turned to Fascism. "Some day," he once wrote, "the European continent will be organized into a vast supranational area guided by Italy and Germany. Those areas will take authoritarian governments and synchronize their constitutions with Fascist principles...
...also knew where his genius lay, wisely rejected both the Wagnerian influence and the broader version of the Italian verismo style as practiced by Mascagni and Leoncavallo. Instead, he clung to his own romantic, melodious, bittersweet tales shot through with a uniquely warm lyricism and underscored with lushly singing strings. A painstaking workman who admired clarity ("The black scores," he said, "are the easiest to fake"), he left as his legacy only eleven operas. But 34 years after his death, the world of opera has not found a composer who can speak to the universal audience Puccini commands...
...garden was "rediscovered" when Salvador Dali journeyed there from Rome to pose in an ogre's mouth (opposite) while conversing with a white cat. Research by Italian and English scholars indicates that, far from being a surrealist chamber of horrors, the garden was originally a rather solemn effort to combine the wonders of the ancient world with figures from a pagan sacred grove. With sphinxes on either side of the entrance to give fair warning, Vicino Orsini did all he could to create the impression that some otherworldly spirit had brought the strange stone figures into existence, left...