Word: lire
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Pallante got some money from his father, a retired forester, saying that he needed it for examination fees at the University of Catania. For 3,500 lire (about $6) he bought a .38 pistol and five cartridges. Then he took a train to Rome, and there rented a room in a cheap boardinghouse. He went to the Monte Citorio Palace, where Italy's Parliament meets, and asked for a visitor's card from a Sicilian delegate, Francisco Turnaturi. (Later Turnaturi denied that he knew Pallante. "When he insisted he came from Randazzo, a place where I had many...
...each other's backs. "Let's go home!" cried one woman. "The danger is over." While Romans celebrated democracy's victory, swarms of the city's ragged children roamed the streets, tearing down election posters in order to sell them as scrap for a few lire. It was a sharp reminder that the danger was far from over. The victors still had a price to pay for their 18 million anti-Communist votes. The price was land and bread for Italy's workers and peasants...
...Vittorio Veneto, in Rome's most luxurious cafés, aristocrats were discussing, over cream puffs, how to get out of Italy in a hurry. In front of the cafés, crippled children on crutches hobbled in a pathetically grotesque dance, hoping for a few lire from wealthy passersby. It is such contrasts, an expression of the fact that Italy's upper classes still live in luxury while two million unemployed must worry about their daily bread, that help Communism most in Italy...
...soon established that Tardini's and Montini's names had been forged to the orders. Their findings led directly to blond, youngish Monsignor Eduardo Prettner Cippico, a well-born native of Trieste and a Vatican archivist. Though his salary was meager, Cippico owned an 18,000,000-lire apartment in Rome, an Alfa Romeo, a Fiat and a Chrysler. He liked to entertain expensively. The day before Easter last year, waiters at a fashionable restaurant at Posillipo, near Naples, had their hopes of an afternoon off dashed when Cippico phoned that he would be lunching there...
...campaign. But above all, the Communists talked about the high cost of living. In Rome's working class street, Via Gesú e Maria, a Communist tailor kept his shop open late at night. "The government was pledged to combat inflation," he told neighbors, "yet artichokes cost 70 lire each-artichokes alia Romano, have become artichokes alia signorile [of the rich...