Word: sicilianism
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...grand ball in Palermo, Tancredi's fiancée is introduced to Sicilian society. As the Prince waltzes with her, he smiles wistfully. He has done his duty, he has built a bridge to the future. His children will cross it, he will not. He will stay in the past, bound there by affection, by habit, by sloth, by congenital dislike of tomorrow, by the siren lure of a torrid, torpid land that makes its children long "voluptuously for death." As the film ends he kneels and, yearning upward to the morning star, prays passionately for death: "O faithful...
...What's more, the camera is pointed at something fiercely beautiful: Sicily. Yellow palazzi peep through dark-green foliage like colossal lemons; vast rococo ball rooms drown the mind in a delirium of pink cherubs and gilt-plaster scrolls; and out of the dark-blue sea the big Sicilian mountains leap like orange flames...
Frederick's grandfather was the great conqueror Frederick Barbarossa; his father was Heinrich VI of Germany, the man who captured Richard the Lion-hearted and whom the Italians accurately called Heinrich the Cruel. His mother Costanza brought the Sicilian crown in her dowry, but Heinrich had to subdue Sicily before he could wear it. This done, he burned alive all of Costanza's relations to ensure that he could wear it in peace. It seems certain that Costanza struck back by conspiring with Celestine III (who, like all Popes of the period, worked to undermine a strong king...
...when La Scala paid Di Stefano his regular $10,000 fee despite the fact that he was not going to perform. Giuseppi simmered down. But not his friends. "Don't let yourself be insulted by a foreigner," they cautioned him. Quickly working himself back into a proper Sicilian rage, Di Stefano turned his $10,000 over to the Italian Opera Singers Association "to start a fighting fund to battle for the dignity and honor of Italian opera singers, who are continually pushed around...
...Stories and a Memory, by Giuseppe di Lampedusa. Excellent minor pieces by the Sicilian prince whose elegiac novel of nobility's erosion, The Leopard, was a bestseller two years ago. The author's memoir of the great houses he lived in as a child is particularly good...