Word: pantelleria
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...casual eye, the tiny (50-sq.-mi.) Italian island of Pantelleria has little to recommend it. Halfway between Sicily and North Africa, it has no beaches, no good harbors, no scenic little coves and no vegetation to speak of. Its one town looks like a slum-clearance project, and its 8,240 people are among the poorest in Italy. Volcanic springs, more like oversized tea kettles than proper Ve-suviuses, gurgle and smolder in the interior and, from shore to barren shore, there is not a drop of water fit to drink. Water, like almost all the island...
Vulgar Crowds. Despite its manifest disadvantages, Pantelleria has developed something of a tourist trade. Because it has been so ill-favored by nature, it has a tranquillity few other islands in the Mediterranean can boast. In the past several years, wealthy Italians eager to avoid the vulgar crowds at Capri or Amalfi have discovered it. So have moviemakers. Except for the untoward events of World War II, about the only thing of note that has happened in Pantelleria in the past 2,000 years or so was the shooting of a pornographic movie, Thank You, Mrs. P., two summers...
Instead, the next man to fall was Angelo Galatolo, a Mafia member whose brother was the first Mafia chieftain killed by Crime Inc. Twelve hours after Nino Cottone's death a police patrol near the village of Villa Pantelleria came upon a mule dragging an empty, bloodstained cart. Following a telltale trail of blood down the lonely road along which the mule had come, the police finally found the body of Angelo Galatolo, lying face down in the dust...
...Reds last week were engaged in limited violence. Near Milan, a Red "punitive expedition" went fascist-hunting, ran into a farmer with a gun who killed two of the Communists; at Savona, a shoeshine man tossed a hand grenade into a crowd of churchgoers, killed an old woman; on Pantelleria Island, when a Communist-led crowd stormed the tax collector's office, police killed three men in the melee. Police found numerous Communist arms caches...
...Sicilian needed to be told that his three-cornered Trinacria, 75 miles from Africa across the shallow Straits of Pantelleria, and two miles from Europe across the deep Straits of Messina, possessed strategic significance.* He remembered too well the prewar days when the French in Tunis, the British in nearby Malta and the Italians in Sicily had eyed each other warily while feverishly building forts and airfields. Too recently had he watched Sicily-based Stukas cut at will the lifeline of the British Empire as it curved past Sicily on its way to Suez. Control of Sicily, for a nation...