Word: melissa
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Sheep of Melissa. The great hunger for land has been gnawing at Italy's vitals for years; it has nowhere been more fierce than in Melissa, a grey, forlorn village in malaria-ridden Calabria, where the wave of land seizures began, in bloodshed, more than a month...
...Melissa's 6,000 people, 1,840 are unemployed. The peasants live in filthy hillside hovels, ten and twelve to a room. Between them, 6,000 people hold 7,400 acres of hard, rocky land, which means an average of little more than an acre for each-barely enough to stave off starvation. Some 4,000 acres, including fine, fertile land by the nearby seashore, are owned by Marquis Anselmo Berlingieri, whose family has held them for centuries. Most of Berlingieri's land is uncultivated; he finds it more profitable to graze his sheep...
This year, as the autumn sowing season arrived, Melissa's gaunt people turned hungry eyes on one of Berlingieri's idle hilltops. One foggy morning 300 of them went up with axes and picks. The carabinieri soon arrived. In the battle that followed, three of the squatters were killed, several others wounded. The police charged that the squatters started the fight, with gunfire and hand grenades; two carabinieri were seriously wounded. The carabinieri blamed the Communists, and the Communists, eager to make political capital from the peasants' discontent, promptly replied that all the Melissa casualties were indeed...
Premier de Gasperi held one of his rare press conferences, gave out 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...
Born. To Dinah Shore, 30, dark-eyed scorch-singer, and George Montgomery, 31, cow-puncher-turned-cinemactor: their first child, a daughter; in Los Angeles. Name: Melissa Ann. Weight...