Word: rome
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...expect a certain tense solemnity when an Academy Award--winning director is shooting a film on the life and death of Jesus Christ. On the sound stage of The Passion in Rome's Cinecitta studio, the famed auteur prepares a scene for Maia Morgenstern, the Romanian actress playing the Virgin Mary. She is to enter the abandoned temple where her son has just been removed in chains on his way to Calvary. The director needs an enshrouding silence, so he shouts down some workmen's chatter. Then he coaxes the actress into a long, slow walk that hits the perfect...
...office the day after a Juve loss. But by the 1990s, the carmaking world faced a transformed playing field. Always an advocate of a united Europe, Agnelli eventually fell victim to the European Union's new requirements for open competition. After enjoying decades of protectionist policy from Rome, Fiat was not competitive. Its share of the Italian auto market fall from 60% to 39% in the late 1990s. This, says Dallocchio, is the Agnelli he wants his students to ignore: "Fiat always had an important shield from any competition. Agnelli always made sure he had the support of government forces...
Long before Russell Crowe helped reignite filmgoers' enthusiasm for Roman epics, Sir Peter Ustinov, now 81, was king of the genre. He fiddled as Nero while Rome burned in Quo Vadis? (1951) and won the first of his two Academy Awards in 1960 for a supporting role in Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus. "When I was in Rome for the 50th anniversary of Quo Vadis?, the mayor asked me to say a few words in Italian," Ustinov recalls. "I reminded him I was Nero, who only spoke Latin." The story captures the wit and erudition for which Ustinov - who was knighted...
...These days Nero can't help but reflect on the similarities between ancient Rome and modern America. "We had Pax Romana, now there's Pax Americana," Ustinov says. "The empires are very close to each other - the eagle, the legions, the respect for the flag. That's why Americans make the best Roman films." American hegemony is just one of a multitude of topics on which Ustinov is happy to expound. The British-born son of a French mother and a half-German, half-Russian father (who had an Ethiopian grandmother to boot), his cosmopolitan origins and a lifetime...
...means politically motivated prosecutors may be using the courts to attack democratically elected leaders. Giuffrè's testimony was blunt. He said that after the decline in the early 1990s of the ruling Christian Democrats - who had leaders in Sicily who looked out for the Mafia's interests in Rome - top bosses turned to Berlusconi's Forza Italia party to do the Mafia's bidding. The Sicilian-born Dell'Utri, the witness said, was the go-to man on a range of legislative efforts to ease pressure on mobsters in exchange for electoral support. Giuffrè said that current...