Word: siena
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Tyrrhenian coast the shallow port of Piombino was taken; less than a week later Cecina, 25 miles farther north, was captured. Leghorn was only 17 miles beyond. Siena, a medieval jewel, which had been carefully spared Allied artillery fire, fell virtually unharmed to French and Americans...
Recently he approached a tunnel near Siena at treetop level, released his delayed-action bombs just short of the mouth, pulled away in a vertical bank. The bombs popped into the tunnel like peanuts into the mouth of an urchin, and when they exploded they left the south end of the tunnel an impassable mess of rubble...
...destruction not only possesses an aesthetic peculiar to itself, it contrives its effects out of its own range of raw materials. Among the most familiar are the scarified surface of blasted walls, the chalky substance of calcined masonry, the surprising sagging contours of once rigid girders and the clear siena colouring of burnt-out brick buildings, their rugged cross-walls receding plane by plane, on sunny mornings in the City...
...group called themselves the Suquet Sporting & Debating Society (after a deteriorated onetime brothel that preceded Siena), spent their time visiting museums, churches, antiquarian stores, local bars. Though forbidden to go beyond the city limits, Timesman Herbert Matthews and A.P.'s Dick Massock sometimes bicycled as far as 15 miles outside town. "In Italy," says Matthews, "no laws are obeyed, least of all by the Italians." Soberest of the lot, Correspondent Matthews read Gibbons Decline & Fall, worked on a book on Italian Fascism...
Several times Italian authorities complained that the correspondents were too gay, made too much noise, stayed up too late, bought too much liquor. When they left Siena the Excelsior Hotel management presented them with six bottles of champagne...