Word: rome
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Rome Opera, scene of Soprano Callas' celebrated walkout due to "lowering of the voice" (TIME, Jan. 13), the boards again groaned under the strain of artistic temperament. During a rehearsal of Verdi's Don Carlos, famed Bulgarian Basso Boris Christoff and Italian Tenor Franco Corelli craftily maneuvered to gain the coveted stage-center spot. By the time Act II's libretto called for Corelli to draw his sword in defiance of Christoff (who played Philip II, Don Carlos' father), both singers were ready to fight. They drew, and Verdi was forgotten as the prop swords swished...
...partnership with a go-ahead drayman. Even then, Vaselli had one overriding maxim: "Never spend in a month more than you make in a week." By this Spartan pecuniary principle, Vaselli waxed rich before World War I, contracting to haul away the garbage that householders had been tossing into Rome's fly-fouled streets...
...same rule fed his fortune as he drained the city's malaria-breeding lowlands and on them built whole new developments such as Prati, where Rome's wealthy now dwell. It fortified him through the galling years when he repaired and built streets in Rome, ports in Sicily and roads of African conquest at Mussolini's whim. One day Mussolini called him to his Palazzo Venezia, said: "I can't see the Colosseum from my window." Replied Vaselli: "There's a hill in the way. Give me an order and I'll remove...
Vaselli built the Way of Empire and much more. Like Crassus of old (who introduced the first fire-fighting service to Caesar's Rome but always bought up threatened nearby properties dirt-cheap before dousing the flames), he picked up many a real-estate bargain from cash-short owners in the course of cutting through the Duce's grandiose streets and squares. By 1937 Vaselli was known as the "garbage baron" and "asphalt king." And when typhus broke out again in Rome, Mussolini blamed him. After a vast check, Vaselli took Mussolini early one morning to a Roman...
...from Fascism to freedom-though one Communist leader proclaimed, when the Reds briefly gained a place in the government: "The state and the party need Vaselli's hundreds of millions. With our fine Communist surgical knife we must cut out this sore from the body politic." "I built Rome; with Rome I stand or fall," Vaselli growled, and refused to leave his 250-room Piazza del Popolo palace (a floor apiece for his three sons, the ground floor thriftily let to a popular café, where the intelligentsia met to debate socializing wealth). Instead, he used his depreciating lire...