Word: romes
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...well-organized news bureau. His father was Italian, his mother American; he was educated in Florence and was graduated from Cambridge University in 1929. He speaks Italian, German, French and English fluently, and knows Italy like the back of his hand. He was working for International News Service in Rome when America went to war, and was promptly arrested by the police and interned as an "antinational" at Perugia. Later, he escaped, spent a winter in the hills outside Rome, made it through to the Allied lines and, in 1945, went to work for TIME...
Covering the news in postwar Italy, according to Rospigliosi, is complicated by 1) red tape (e.g., it took five months to get a much-needed new car uncrated and "naturalized"), 2) the deplorable telephone service ("It is better to walk to your party than try to phone him"), 3) Rome's three-hour afternoon siestas, 4) the departmentalization of Italian news...
Concerning the last, Rospigliosi says that Rome, unlike Paris or London, is not a funnel for the country's news. This is partly due to the thinness of the file carriedby Italian news agencies, and the paper shortage which has reduced Rome's 32 newspapers (of all political complexions) to one or two pages - barely enough for the ads and the long, polemic editorials attacking the views of other editors, government officials, etc. that are a part of the journalistic character of Italy. For TIME'S purposes, therefore, much traveling and digging are necessary to find...
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...
Everybody hoped that such generosity would make Rome's cops a little more lenient with individualism-either the jaywalking or the horn-blowing variety...