Word: roccamena
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...dirt-poor western Sicily, few peasants can read, even fewer can afford to buy a book. So what was anyone talking about in Roccamena last week? Shakespeare, Brecht, Dante, Aeschylus, to name a few of the poets and playwrights whose works were featured in the town's first informal festival of the performing arts. Star performer was Movie Idol Vittorio Gassman, who for two straight nights strode a sidewalk "stage" illumined by car headlights while declaiming passages from Julius Caesar, The Divine Comedy and other works. Whatever they made of it, the Roccamenensi were an appreciative audience...
...Roccamena's protest attracted major attention when it was joined by Danilo Dolci, a famed crusader and author who has staged five previous hunger strikes to prod the government into doing more to alleviate Sicily's poverty. Dolci's announcement that he would fast for ten days rallied support from leading Italian intellectuals, would-be intellectuals and influential admirers all over the world. After Dolci had gone nine days without food in a flyblown little room off the Piazza Matrice, the town square, a Christian Democrat bigwig from Palermo announced to the crowds that the government would...
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