Word: rome
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Italian Communist Party, still the world's largest nonruling Communist Party, has watched its membership slide from a high of 2 million in the mid-1970s to 1.65 million. . More telling, Bologna is the only large city that still has a Communist mayor. In 1976 there were five, including Rome and Naples. The chances of a party resurgence seem slim under the current leadership of Alessandro Natta, who is bland and unforceful...
...final days of Rome, the historian Ammianus Marcellinus noted, "The modern nobles measure their rank and consequence according to the loftiness of their chariots." If old Marcellinus were around today he might be fretting about the future of the U.S., because we are about to put the President in the loftiest chariot that man has yet devised...
...Space" has some painstaking reconstructions of spatial illusion in Renaissance and baroque art; its best moment (which will be the envy of all red-blooded interior decorators) is a full-size wooden replica of Borromini's false-perspective colonnade, made in the 17th century for the Palazzo Spada in Rome. The second exhibition, "Wunderkammer," is a delight. Wunderkammern--literally, chambers of astonishment--were an embellishment of European collections from the 16th century onward. They were anthologies of real and artificial oddities, things astonishing by their exoticism or the intricacy of their making--or outright fakes, like a dead mermaid fashioned...
...Origen's histories, crucified upside down on a hillside. Then came St. Linus, St. Anacletus and St. Clement I, who may or may not have been drowned off Crimea with an anchor around his neck. These were the first of the heirs of St. Peter, the Popes of Rome, some of them loved, some feared, some venerated, some murdered. One of the proudest and most powerful, Innocent III (1198-1216), started calling himself the Vicar of Christ because he said he was "set midway between God and man" and given "the whole world to govern...
...even then the seeds of renewal were sprouting. The great reformer Odo of Cluny went to Rome on a diplomatic mission, and there soon began the line of Cluniac Popes who rebuilt the entire church. They reached their apogee of power when Gregory VII marched northward in 1077 to depose the disobedient German King Henry IV by sheer willpower. His march was halted only when the humbled King knelt for three days in the snow at Canossa to plead for the Pope's forgiveness...