Word: mussolinis
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...young, hot-eyed Benito Mussolini stared out of U.S. TV screens this week and spoke in accented English: "I salute the great American people." CBS conjured up the Duce's shade in Mussolini, a fast-moving half hour on Twentieth Century galvanized by rare images of the living past. Viewers caught glimpses they had half forgotten or never seen before: newborn Fascist babies squirming wholesale on a nursery table; the bare-chested dictator on a ski slope; his mistress, Claretta Petacci, in a silken boudoir; an anonymous GI mugging in victory from the famous balcony of the Palazzo Venezia...
...LIGHT FOR FOOLS, by Natalia Ginzburg. A brief, near-poetic story of ordinary lives mired in the despair of Mussolini's Italy. Conceived in sympathy and written at the level of simple truth, it is one of the best Italian novels in years...
...League of Nations imposed its sanctions against Italy, but, thanks to Costantini, the Italian dictator knew that they were largely a bluff. When the British home fleet came steaming into the Mediterranean, set on frightening the Duce, Mussolini's fear was considerably abated by the fact that he knew from Admiralty orders that the fleet had every intention of going peaceably home again...
...greatest coup was brought off in 1936, when he copped a copy of a highly confidential report of the British government, which declared that "no vital British interests exist in Ethiopia which would impose on His Majesty's government the necessity to resist by force the Italian occupation." Mussolini ordered the report printed in his official Giornale d'ltalia. There was consternation in Whitehall. But Whitehall's new vigilance did not uncover Costantini himself, who stayed on in the embassy, unsuspected, performing his tasks for another year before retiring to the lumber business...
...took over Caruso's roles at the Metropolitan Opera in 1920, sang and acted with a peasant's gusto ("as naturally as a gamecock fights"); of pneumonia; in Rome. Refusing to take a salary cut during the Depression (other Met stars did), Gigli huffed off to Mussolini's Italy, predicted "something like a civil war" for the U.S. (he later denied it all), sang for top Germans during the war ("What would you have done?"). In a triumphant 1955 return to the U.S. (at Carnegie Hall), he flashed moments of his oldtime operatic color, but more often...