Word: panvini
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Dates: during 1983-1983
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...coincidence, the century's second great publishing forgery was concocted by another mother-daughter team. In 1957 Rosa Panvini, then 75, and her daughter Amalia, 43, both of whom lived in Vercelli, in northern Italy, offered diaries they said had been written by Benito Mussolini to the Rome office of LIFE magazine and to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. The daughter contended that one of Mussolini's ministers had handed her father a package one day with the admonition, "For the love of God, Panvini, hide them in a safe
They would have made good reading. Written in school exercise books, they contained such sensational Mussolini observations as "Hitler is mad! Our ideas are diametrically opposed." Before anyone bought the diaries, however, Italian police raided the Panvini home, found and seized all except four of them, and charged the two women with forgery and fraud. Rosa admitted that she had spent years perfecting her imitation of Mussolini's handwriting and used her skill to produce the diaries. Both women were given suspended sentences...
...Rosa Panvini died in 1968. Last week Daughter Amalia, now 69, who lives alone with a score of cats, contended that she had confessed only to avoid going to prison. Neither she nor her mother had forged the diaries, she now insisted. Who had? she was asked. "Who knows?" she replied...
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