Word: lire
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...bloody profession. The film opens on his last visit to her. "How will you kill me this time?" she coquettishly asks. "I'll cut your throat," he replies. And so he does, as they make love. With deliberate clumsiness, he steals her jewelry (but not her 300,000 lire), leaves his fingerprints in the shower and bloody shoeprints. Then he takes two bottles of champagne back to the office to help his colleagues celebrate his new promotion to head of the police department's political intelligence division...
...largest, after Germany's. Yet a primitive and easily manipulated stock exchange, an outmoded bureaucracy, and unenforceable tax laws encourage Italians to invest their money abroad. Even before last winter's series of strikes and government crises, Italians reverted en masse to their old habit of carting lire across the border by the suitcaseful...
Administrative Ploy. Devaluation was prevented by Guido Carli, governor of the Bank of Italy, who made three shrewd moves. First, he raised the interest rates on Italian bonds to make them as attractive to lire investors as foreign issues had been. Next, through a neat administrative ploy, Carli made currency speculating less profitable. Foreign banks had been required only to report their lire intake by phone to their nearest correspondent bank in Italy to receive full credit in any currency. Carli decreed that banks abroad would have to send the lira bills to Rome before they could get foreign funds...
...those years, anything went. To eke out their meager stipends, parish priests could (and did) sell a 14th century predella out of the back door of their church for a few lire. The art market was full of floating masterpieces at whose origins dealers winked. The outstanding picture in the bequest, Sassetta's Our Lady of the Snow, is arguably the greatest surviving work by this unprolific Sienese master and worth, according to a spokesman at Christie's, "about $1,500,000." But it was stolen 60 years ago from the high altar of the church at Chiusi...
...autumn strikes. Yet to achieve the rate of investment necessary for the economy to continue to grow, the country needs a government capable of inspiring confidence. Until such a government comes to power, even Italian officials admit that the new rules will not stop the flow of lire across the border...