Word: rome
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Moving on to Rome, De Gaulle, a devout Catholic, met his old friend, onetime papal nuncio in Paris, now Pope John XXIII, who bestowed upon him the diamond-studded collar of the Supreme Order of Christ, the highest Vatican order, which only a dozen people have received since John XXII gave out the first one in 1319. "To find such a figure," glowed the Vatican's Osservatore Romano about De Gaulle, "one would have to go back to Charlemagne...
...When Rome was little more than a cluster of hill villages and the Forum a swampy marketplace, the proud and pleasure-loving Etruscans ruled Italy from the Tiber to the Po. In the end, the Roman legions crushed the loose confederation of Etruscan city-states and razed their walls. Etruria's bizarre hobgoblin world of superstition, ritual and magic provided the folk mythology from which poets from Virgil to Dante evoked their images of Hades and Hell; its art was buried in underground tombs to await latter-day grave robbers...
Even today, Romans prefer to dwell on the grandeur of classic Rome rather than recall the Etruscan kings, who, as Livy reminded them, could once make the Roman Senate tremble. But tucked away in a corner of Rome's Villa Borghese park is one of the world's richest collections of Etruscan art, which each year is drawing increasing numbers of visitors. Housed in the massive Villa Giulia, built in 1555 as a papal summer resort, the collection today numbers bronzes, terra-cotta sculptures and artifacts in the tens of thousands, displays its choicest treasures in two floors...
...Villa Giulia's unquestioned Etruscan masterpieces is the Sarcophagus of the Spouses (above-), found in the ancient Etruscan city of Caere (now the small town of Cerveteri, some 25 miles outside Rome) and recently reassembled. Molded from terra cotta in the 6th century B.C., it is a key to the culture of the Etruscans, who, haunted in life by a host of demons and ogres, prepared optimistically for a life after death that would be an unending feast. Their vision of paradise is vividly shown on the walls of the underground tombs-a world in which dancers, lute players...
...Roof (Italian). The housing shortage may sound like a trivial subject, but in Rome it can be heartbreaking, as this excellent neorealist film demonstrates with both humor and pathos...