Word: leonarda
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Leonarda Cianciulli, wife of a Government clerk, had 14 children. On her husband's mean pay it was hard to get food, soap and candles to light their rustic home amid the ricefields and stunted mulberry trees of the Po Valley. But she had imagination. To the villagers of Correggio she was known as a poetess and fortune teller; lovelorn women came up the canal path to her whitewashed door, with a few coppers for the cards...
When Faustina Setti, 50-year-old frugal spinster, plunked down her savings (30,000 lire) on the promise that the poetess would find her a mate, Mona Leonarda proffered a glass of drugged wine, then felled the spinster with a hatchet, chopped her into nine pieces, and kept the change...
...trial in Reggio Emilia last week Poetess Leonarda gripped the witness-stand rail with oddly delicate hands and calmly set the prosecutor right on certain details. Her deep-set dark eyes gleamed with a wild inner pride as she concluded: "I gave the copper ladle, which I used to skim the fat off the kettles, to my country, which was so badly in need of metal during the last days...
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