Word: lire
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...Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain - actually print more books, publishing in France still enjoys a mystique rivaling that of cinema. Authors like Bernard-Henri Lévy and 2001 Goncourt prizewinner Jean-Christophe Rufin are megacelebrities, and book-themed talk shows are standard TV fare. Notes Pierre Assouline, editor of Lire magazine: "The French have always felt writing was the noblest form of communication, and most honest kind of reflection. To write is to live, but to be published is to exist before the world." The rentrée littéraire is the high point of the publishing year...
...Europe, old fears about Y2K returned as 2K2 loomed. Jan. 1 was the date for the 12-nation switch to one currency, and in the hours leading up to it, there were nightmare scenarios about riots and self-destructing cash machines as lire, francs, guilders, pesetas and deutsche marks were converted into euros...
Naturally, this had led to worries about merchants taking advantage of the confusion by sneaking in price hikes, or just rounding up their prices with the conversion. At Bar Pamphili in Rome, a single espresso costs 1,100 lire, the equivalent of 57 euro cents. Pay in euros and the same cup costs 60 cents. "We rounded all the prices, some up and some down," owner Giuseppe Scaramuzzo is quick to explain. "Anyway, today is just the first day. It's like an experiment." The early evidence is that most businesses have played fair, with a little cajoling from watchful...
...house in the fashionable Prati section near the heart of Rome. The interest was a painful 12.5%, but the Longos had little alternative, since that was about the average rate on a home mortgage in those days. Anna, a civil servant, says that life became a matter of pinching lire. "We couldn't ever go away anywhere," she recalls. "We didn't even go out to the cinema...
...PILOT: All that's keeping the human element alive in an ever more relentlessly robotic info-storage world is a few square inches of warm, floppy leather in our hip pocket: the wallet. The wallet, where strangers' business cards go to be forgotten, where 10,000-lire bills from a three-year-old Italian vacation retire, where 1997 restaurant receipts and 1994 family snapshots dwell. Where it takes 10 minutes not to find what you're looking for amid the detritus stuffed over the years into that labyrinth of folds and pockets. And where, occasionally, you come across a long...