Word: segni
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Italy's wispy President Antonio Segni had just arrived for the grand opening of the Venice Biennale when a scruffy little man with a ragged little beard rushed up to him and dramatically emptied the contents of a briefcase at his feet. The President's guard, ever on the alert, quickly drew his sword, but all that he saw was a half-dozen grey mice scampering for safety. It turned out that the intruder was a Venezuelan artist who has a passion for mice, paints pictures of them again and again, and thinks that the Biennale neglects them...
Vanishing Vespa. Segni becomes President of a country that is more prosperous than ever-and less vulnerable than ever to the Communists. In the poverty-stricken south, income levels are still only half as high as in the industrial north, but Communist strength south of Naples is slipping. More than $2 billion in new industrial and agricultural developments in the south has created more jobs, raised the productivity of long-arid farmland. Foreign investors continue to treat Italy as a good risk; U.S. Steel is building a $16 million plant in partnership with the Italians. The unemployment rate...
...Tolstoyan. The Italian constitution regards the President as the living symbol of the nation, and for Italy's paradoxical mood of economic prosperity and intellectual concern, the election of Segni was remarkably appropriate. A wealthy gentleman farmer from Sardinia,* Segni has given away 250 acres of his own rich olive groves to landless peasants; in 1950, as Agriculture Minister, he sponsored a far-reaching system of national land reform. Politically, Segni is a moderate conservative who is not likely to stand in the way of reforms planned under Fanfani's opening to the left...
...lawyer by training, Segni is also an experienced politician (twice Premier: 1955-57; 1959-60) and a thoughtful statesman who describes his outlook on history as Tolstoyan. "Men in government," he has written, "really have only an enormous capacity for doing harm. Their chances for doing good are very few and hard to come by." As Italy's President for the next seven years, Segni has a rare opportunity for doing good...
...Italy's long history, Sardinia has produced hardly any notable figures. Until Segni reached a political eminence, the island's most famed citizen was Grazia Deledda, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1926 for a novel, Flight into Egypt. Before she died in 1936 she had written 28 novels about life on the "forgotten island...