Word: otranto
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...began turning up in southern Italy's fishing villages aboard commandeered vessels ranging from tugboats to freighters. In the space of six days last week, 20,000 Albanians fled worsening shortages of food and other essentials in their impoverished homeland and sought asylum across the Adriatic's Strait of Otranto. Startled local authorities in Italy did their | best to provide temporary accommodations in schools and army barracks, but thousands of the Albanians were soon forced to camp out on town docks, wrapping themselves in plastic sheets for warmth...
Right next door to Pottle is the office devoted to Horace Walpole-son of British Prime Minister Robert Walpole, author of the classic gothic, Castle of Otranto, and foremost letter writer of his time (1717-97). For 44 years, the Walpole factory has churned out 39 of a prospective 48 fat volumes of Walpole's correspondence. A massive index, now under way, may alone fill six more volumes. The whole set is, in Librarian Martz's words, "the ultimate in annotation, excellence and accuracy...
...describes divide fairly neatly into two species-Things Seen and Things Unseen-and each has inspired its own tradition. The tradition of Things Unseen dates from Horace Walpole, a wealthy English dilettante who built his own medieval castle and in 1764 published the first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto. Madness and murder stalk Otranto's parapets, but violence is held to an artful minimum: Walpole's readers wanted to nibble at forbidden fruits-but not to find worms...
...blunting Germany's final assault on France in World War I. Practically the entire Royal Navy was kept in port for twelve days nursing more than 10,000 cases, including the Commander in Chief, His Royal Highness King George V. The flu-ridden crew of the American transport Otranto was too weak to abandon ship after colliding with another vessel during an Atlantic storm. It sank with a loss of 431 lives. Aboard the troop ship Leviathan, a young Assistant Secretary of the Navy named Franklin Roosevelt suddenly keeled over. From an overcrowded Chicago hospital ward a deathly feverish...
...Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole and a Member of Parliament himself for 26 years, Horace was in a position to observe the haul monde of his time. Though he also wrote political diaries, art books and fiction (his The Castle of Otranto is the prototype of the gothic novel), Walpole wielded his pen effectively and entertainingly in writing letters to such friends as Poet Thomas Gray and Diplomat Sir Horace Mann. Sensing his correspondence's value to posterity, the bachelor author once said: "Nothing gives so just an idea of an age as genuine letters. History waits...