Word: romanizing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Besides making the trains run on time, Mussolini also made Rome's turbulent traffic run smoothly. He prohibited the Roman pedestrian's custom of reading newspapers in the middle of the street. Once, interrupted in his meditations by a horn insistently honking in the Piazza Venezia below, Mussolini shouted an order that all "acoustic signaling" be forthwith prohibited in Rome. Romans whispered sadly that their "city of noise" had become the città del silenzio...
...Roman cops, their topees set at a jaunty angle, intercepted all traffic offenders and on the spot collected sizable fines. To increase their civic zeal, the policemen were allowed to keep half of the fines. In vain the press cried out against this "unheard-of form of taxation...
Largely to appease the cops, hard-pressed Romans revived the prewar custom of handing out gifts to the police on Feast of the Epiphany-Jan. 6, the day on which Italian children get their Christmas presents. (The gifts are brought by Befana, a green-shawled lady who travels on a broomstick and wears dark spectacles to protect her eyes when she dives down chimneys.) Last week, Roman drivers halted their cars to hand over their presents to "off-duty" policemen who were especially stationed for this purpose next to the regular ones...
...every main intersection, the cops were knee-high in mounds of cheese, nuts, cake, fruit, beer, wine, liquors, and an occasional mug of shaving cream. One Roman police sergeant estimated that before Befana was done, each member of the 130-man traffic police force took home an average of four bottles of wine plus a pound of pasta...
...German conquest. She was young, attractive, divorced, and she found it all too easy to have a good time. An ex-captain of the Polish army got her into the Réseau Interallié, an important network of the Franco-British underground. This Pole, a handsome man named Roman Czerniawsky, had been an intelligence officer. With Mathilde's brilliant help, he was soon feeding the British war office valuable information on the German order of battle. Mathilde was the network's cryptographer. Her fervently admiring comrades called her La Chatte (The Cat), because she moved so noiselessly...