Word: lire
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...dead, apparently of a heart attack. Found on Farouk's body were a gold wedding ring, a cigarette lighter, a watch, a pill box initialed 'F,' a pair of dark glasses, a loaded Beretta automatic, identity pa pers, and a billfold containing $115 in Italian lire and $2,500 in U.S. bills...
...vanished into thin air. It was then that the street-wise Neapolitan children called scugnizzi (spinning tops) began their practice of buying and selling American G.I.s. One would pick up a soldier, promise him everything, and lead him into back streets. Another kid might buy the prospect for 300 lire, and he was thus passed from hand to hand until an older scugnizzo decided it was time to act. The G.I. was first made muscio (dead drunk), and once he had passed out, his clothes were literally sold off his back, beginning with shoes and ending with underwear. That normally...
...time since the war, never wanted to collect the dividend tax from the Vatican, but were under strong pressure from their Socialist coalition partners. Said Socialist Vice-Premier Pietro Nenni early last year: "No Socialist can take the responsibility for giving the Vatican tens of billions of lire." Caught in the crossfire, Christian Democratic Premier Aldo Moro asked the Vatican for a list of all its Italian stockholdings, assuring the Holy
...sorrow and good fortune. During the last war, a man was murdered and a treasure hidden on the land you own." The peasants, quivering with avarice, scuttle off to the appointed spot and dig up the treasure: an iron casket crammed with smoldering brilliants. "Worth at least six million lire," the bishop announces appreciatively. "But the church has no interest in them. By the terms of the murderer's will, they belong to you-on one condition: you must faithfully offer up 500 masses for the salvation of his miserable soul." The peasants turn pale. At 1,000 lire...
...belonged to the nomadic Kocerli tribe (hence the nickname), Kocero was born 38 years ago in a tiny, ten-house village. For a while he was poor but straight, but in 1950 he killed his brother-in-law in an "affair of honor," stole more than $250 in lire and gold coins and fled for the hills. From then on, Kocero virtually ruled what few roads there were in the southeast. In a single day, he and his band of five or six men looted 200 people by halting one bus after another on a main highway, made off with...