Word: titta
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...people go to see fix the period in the middle to late 1930s, although a casual remark or reference can alter the time abruptly 20 years into the past or future. There are no fixed boundaries here, just as there is no firm central character. A young man called Titta appears frequently and serves as a kind of unifying autobiographical surrogate for the director. But Amarcord is not about him really, any more than a fresco is about any one person or object...
There are recollections of adolescence: scatological pranks in a schoolroom, masturbation contests in a car, an encounter with a fat, aging woman with enormous breasts. There are asides (Titta's grandfather lost in the fog and thinking himself dead), bits of local color (practically the whole town moving out of the harbor in small boats to cheer a new ocean liner). Under all, there is a steady stream of events that do not change: a family death, a wedding...
Papal Mercy. Barely a century ago, thieves would have been none too happy to find themselves subject to the Vatican's often draconian justice. It was said of the Papal States' public executioner, Mastro Titta, that he could crush bones with his bare hands. Today, however, the defendants are probably lucky that they were not turned over to Roman civil authorities. They were released on bail, which is rarely allowed by Italian courts. Also, they are getting a speedy trial, which is even more unusual in the litigation-swamped Italian system. On top of that, the Vatican...
...streetcar conductor because he could not pronounce the street names. He began going to concerts there, and liked them so much that when he moved to Brooklyn he decided to stage a few of his own. By 1915 he was regularly presenting such performers as Mischa Elman, Titta Ruffo and Alma Gluck in low-priced concerts at the old New York Hippodrome...
Dinosaur's Ear. The first network broadcast was delivered through a microphone that looked like a dinosaur's hearing aid, but the talent added up to a four-hour 1926 spectacular: Dr. Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony, Weber and Fields, the Met's Titta Ruffo, and the dance bands of Ben Bernie, George Olsen and Vincent Lopez. In the following years, while the unseen U.S. audience grew from 5 million radio sets to 127 million radios and 38 million TV sets, NBC kept the air buzzing with such big names and pioneering feats...