Word: sicilian
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Giuseppe Scaffidi was a man of simple tastes. A stubby, barrel-chested farm worker, he lived happily with his wife Concetta and their four children in a shabby house in the Sicilian countryside near Messina. One day five years ago, when Giuseppe was 28, he met a young neighbor named Mariannina at a festival. Mariannina was very unhappy. Her husband was old and blind, and her family was forced to live on the husband's pension of $160 a month. "No problem," said Giuseppe generously. "Move in with us." So Mariannina, her husband and their three children settled...
...thrilled," is really a stage set. The Piazza d'ltalia fountain in New Orleans was commissioned as a celebratory space for the local Italian community. Moore dismissed all thought of "unitary" Tuscan directness and produced a razzmatazz design, a caprice resembling the gaudy, papier-mâché fair sets of Sicilian festa decor: fragments of Roman and Renaissance buildings around an 80-ft.-long stone map of Italy, like the masterpiece of a megalomaniac pastry cook. A fountain spurts out of Moore's Sicily, and its water runs down in rivulets representing the Po, the Arno and the Tiber...
...stage of De Chirico's early paintings, two cultures met. One was the "classical" Mediterranean culture that dominated his boyhood memories. Born in Greece, the son of a peripatetic Sicilian railroad engineer, De Chirico knew it well: the ocher walls of provincial towns, the neglected public gardens, the statuary and antique rubble. On the other hand, modernity was constantly thrusting its emblems into this dream: trains, clocks, surveyors' instruments, rulers, protractors. From this collision between mythic time and measured time, an extraordinary poignancy arose; and the best of these early De Chiricos have not dated...
SALVATORE PAPPALARDO, Archbishop of Palermo, 60. Regional jealousies are strong in Italy, even among Christian bishops. There has not been a Sicilian Pope in twelve centuries. But Salvatore Pappalardo could surmount that prejudice. A keen-minded Vatican diplomat who entered the Secretariat of State along with Giovanni Benelli, Pappalardo served early on as a secretary to Monsignor Montini, later Pope Paul VI. Eventually he became Paul's pronuncio to Indonesia, where the tropical climate sapped his health. Forced to return to Italy, he headed the school that trains Vatican diplomats. (His health is now fine.) In 1970 Paul named...
Salvatore Cardinal Pappalardo, 59, Archbishop of Palermo, might be a more conciliatory choice. A longtime teacher of Vatican diplomacy who was pro-nuncio to Indonesia during the anti-Communist bloodbath of 1965, Pappalardo capably moved into his faction-ridden Sicilian diocese as a unifying leader. A fellow southern Italian with an outside chance is Corrado Cardinal Ursi, 70, Archbishop of Naples. A widely admired pastor of the poor, Ursi travels from parish to parish to be sure all his people are cared for. His serious drawback is his parochialism: he speaks only Italian and has never served outside the country...