Word: nero
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...Fascists did their best to make a great musician of Pietro Mascagni, and he cooperated. In 1926, he was appointed Arturo Toscanini's successor as director of Milan's La Scala. He obliged by composing a Hymn of Labor. The obedient Fascist press hailed his 1935 opera Nero, a musical tribute to Mussolini's Italy, but it flopped anyway...
...modernization" has been clumsy. Opening with a few scenes of padres flying over the Eternal City of Rome and making appropriate expressions of awe while propaganda leaflets flutter down from bombers, the picture flashes back to the Rome of Nero's day, where Christians were feared and hated as Europe's underground is by the Nazis...
Fortnight ago Cantachiaro dug its spurs into a Benito Mussolini speech, delivered in Milan. Headlines and acetous comments derided the ex-Duce as "delirious ... a Nero who fiddled all Italy into ashes," and his followers as "scum in an advanced state of decay." Explained Editor Monicelli: "We offer the complete text [of Mussolini's speech] to our readers with the wish that . . . the last remains of this tragic buffoonery . . . should be swept away...
Even his best friends disagreed about the Town Crier's real nature. Acid Poetess Dorothy Parker believed he had "done more kindness than anyone I have ever known." Novelist Edna Ferber called him a "New Jersey Nero who mistook his pinafore for a toga." Sometimes his most devoted admirers found his cantankerousness hard to bear. "I find you are beginning to disgust me, puss," he once snarled at a guest. "How about getting the hell out of here...
...Sign of the Cross, Cecil De Mille's 1932 religiopus, is being recut and updated with a new prologue for release in early summer. It deals with the persecution of the Christians under Nero, the burning of Rome. The prologue: a U.S. bomber is on its way to Rome; the rest of the film, in flashback, offers historical vindication...