Word: lire
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Italian Communists sent a 5,000,000-lire Alfa Romeo sports roadster, the kind that Prince Aly Khan gave to Rita Hayworth. The French Reds sent a chromium-plated racing bicycle. From the Communist Party in Hungary came a red plastic telephone which, instead of sounding a bell, plays the Internationale. And from a well-wisher in North America (Moscow did not name him) came the headdress of an Indian chief, with a salutation hailing Stalin as "the greatest of warriors, honorary chief of all Indian tribes...
Since 1888, regulated, police-supervised prostitution has been a source of state revenue in modern Italy. Today the Ministry of the Interior collects an annual n to 13 billion lire a year in fees from 722 brothels employing nearly 4,000 girls...
Like Enemy Airplanes. Bordello-keepers united against the anti-brothel bill and raised a 60 million lire ($96,000) fighting fund. In one house in Milan, any customer signing a petition against the bill was awarded one free visit. The girls and the worried madam in a swank Naples house appealed to venerable Senator Benedetto Croce, Italy's foremost philosopher, to block the bill "so that they too might have a prosperous holy year." Letters against the bill poured in on Senator Merlin, who had herself toured Rome's brothels to collect ammunition for her side...
...reassuring figures showing Italy's rising food production. He hopefully pointed to ECA projects in Italy which are trying to educate the peasants to use their land to better purposes. At La Sila, not far from Melissa, the Italian government, with ECA help, is spending 15 billion lire ($24 million) on a project to improve the land, plans to settle 20,000 peasant families there. They will be instructed in crop rotation and other modern agricultural methods, get new tools and fertilizers. The U.S. has earmarked about $240 million for about 100 similar reclamation projects in Italy...
...army Bailey bridges set on the bombed rubble on ancient edi- fices. Inflation is particularly bad in Italy--the lira is a mere fiftieth of its prewar value. American wallets were much too small for the wads of paper money they had to hold. The thousand lire note, worth about $1.75 this summer, was the size and consistency of a large piece of Kleenex...