Word: mussolini
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Moravia's ostensible subject is suicide. His 27-year-old Italian hero, Lucio, is headed for Capri on holiday in 1934, the fateful year that was Mussolini's twelfth in power and Hitler's first. On the boat from Naples to the island, the young anti-Fascist asks himself: "Is it possible to live in despair and not wish for death?" At that moment his eyes lock with those of a German tourist, a teen-age girl who transfixes him with a pleading, desperate look. Lightning strikes. The girl, Beate, is accompanied by a husband as wickedly...
...coincidence, the century's second great publishing forgery was concocted by another mother-daughter team. In 1957 Rosa Panvini, then 75, and her daughter Amalia, 43, both of whom lived in Vercelli, in northern Italy, offered diaries they said had been written by Benito Mussolini to the Rome office of LIFE magazine and to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. The daughter contended that one of Mussolini's ministers had handed her father a package one day with the admonition, "For the love of God, Panvini, hide them in a safe
...Vittorio Mussolini examined the writing and said it was his father's. An expert from Switzerland's Lausanne University conducted chemical tests, compared the diaries with Mussolini's known handwriting and found the discovery authentic. "Thirty volumes of manuscript cannot be the work of a forger, but of a genius," he said. "You can falsify a few lines or even pages, but not a series of diaries...
They would have made good reading. Written in school exercise books, they contained such sensational Mussolini observations as "Hitler is mad! Our ideas are diametrically opposed." Before anyone bought the diaries, however, Italian police raided the Panvini home, found and seized all except four of them, and charged the two women with forgery and fraud. Rosa admitted that she had spent years perfecting her imitation of Mussolini's handwriting and used her skill to produce the diaries. Both women were given suspended sentences...
...colorful trait: a passion for Nazi memorabilia. He sold his house in Hamburg a decade ago to buy a yacht that formerly belonged to Luftwaffe Chief Hermann Göring, then used it for entertaining aging former Nazi officials. Several years ago Heidemann bought letters purportedly exchanged between Mussolini and Churchill, but he withdrew them from planned publication when told that they were forgeries...