Word: olimpio
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Test Pilot. In Sao Paulo, Brazil, finally gratifying his long-felt urge to fly, ex-Aircraft Mechanic Olimpio Martines Neto, 27, hopped in a twin-engine DC-3 at the city airport, kept it aloft for three minutes, crash-landed in a crowded suburb, walked from the wreck with nothing more serious than a rip in the seat of his pants...
...century families, had just taken her first lover. The scene: a heap of empty sacks in the wine cellar. The man: her father's steward. "Time passed. She heard the drops clicking rhythmically from a spigot. The smell of wine, the scent of burlap, the pungent scent of Olimpio-they wove a dark separate world, safe, secret, profound." How profound or how secret Beatrice's new world really was is something for historians to argue about. But safe it clearly was not. Less than two years later, while a great crowd of Romans looked on, she laid...
Beatrice was not beheaded for her affair with Olimpio, but for the murder of her wealthy father, Francesco. Just before, her stepmother's head had tumbled from the same block. And just after, her brother Giacomo, already tortured with red-hot pincers, had his head smashed with an iron hammer, his throat slit, and his body quartered. Lover Olimpio, who had actually polished off Francesco with the help of a hired assassin, was not there that day. He had been murdered not long before...
Revealing Rack. Lucrezia, his second wife, was running to fat, dull and fearful, a natural target for his abuse. Not Beatrice. As the papal prosecutor pieced it together, she decided to kill her father and persuaded mother Lucrezia and brother Giacomo to cooperate. Big, powerful Olimpio agreed to do the killing for his mistress and a messy job it was. The family explanation that Cenci had fallen to his death through a rickety balcony was too easily disproved, and even Pope Clement VIII refused to temper justice with mercy. Beatrice, Lucrezia and Giacomo all confessed, though modern justice might question...
Novelist Prokosch takes no sides, is almost astringent in telling the historic tale. His Beatrice is a cool customer, victimized by her father but with a calculating streak that makes her something less than lovable. Her affair with Olimpio is described not as a great love but as a product of tawdry circumstance that came in handy when she decided on murder. Most historical novelists would wallow in the Cenci story. Prokosch moves around it with the kind of detachment that makes it as believable as it is readable...