Word: orlandos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Stumpy and stubborn, with a pompadour of snowy hair and the operatic manner of a political Toscanini, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, Prime Minister of Italy (1917-19), stamped out of the Versailles Conference because the "other three" would not give him the port of Fiume. Clemenceau dubbed him "The Weeper," and Orlando himself recalled proudly: "When ... I knew they would not give us what we were entitled to ... I writhed on the floor. I knocked my head against the wall. I cried. I wanted...
Premier of Victory. Orlando was born in Sicily a year before the U.S. Civil War began. His father, a landed gentleman of Palermo, delayed venturing out to register his son's birth on May 19, 1860, for fear of Garibaldi's 1,000 patriots who had just stormed into Sicily on the first leg of their march to build an Italian nation. All his life Orlando lived and labored as an Italian Nationalist, long after his kind of nationalism-and Orlando himself-had become an anachronism. He took over as Premier on that bleak October...
When Mussolini seized power in 1922, Orlando supported him, but broke with Il Duce over the Matteotti murder in 1924. After that he abandoned politics, until in 1935 Mussolini's march into Ethiopia stirred Orlando's nationalism. He reappeared briefly in the political spotlight when he wrote Mussolini a fan letter. Otherwise, as he explained grandly: "The profound oblivion . . . descended on my name [is] the rational necessity of a historical situation imposed by destiny." In 1943, in his eighties, he presented himself to war-battered Sicily as a "heroic symbol" of Italian patriotism...
Little Tricks. A paunchy, sarcastic bon vivant, Orlando outlived his wife by about 20 years, but his mistress, a Sicilian princess, grew old with him and died only last year at 85. His hearty enjoyment of life showed through even in his speeches. "Oratory," he once explained, "is just like prostitution: you must have little tricks. One of my favorite tricks is to start a sentence and leave it unfinished. Everyone racks his brains and wonders what I was going...
...year ago, aged 91, the old man retired from politics for the second time to his lovely villa near Rome. There last week, his daughter and four sons heard his lifelong friend, Right-Wing Socialist Senator Giuseppe Romita, announce with elaborate simplicity: "The Honorable Orlando has just died...