Word: vittorio
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...Vittorio Abbati, a perfume salesman, had always wanted to lead a symphony orchestra. He spent nearly all he could save on phonograph records. At 52, he owned 1,500. For 15 years, standing on a leopard skin in front of his gramophone, he would wave a baton at an orchestra that wasn't there. Eyes closed, jaws set, he would signal with palm upraised to the imaginary brasses, pout at the piccolos, bend to the cellos. He knew the scores of several symphonies by heart...
Last week in Rome, the cellos that Vittorio Abbati bent to were no longer imaginary. He had spent 200,000 lire (about $560) to hire a hall and the Rome Opera House Orchestra to play in it. The orchestra management, touched by Abbati's earnestness, even knocked down the price. Included in his program: Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Rossini's L'ltaliana in Algeri, the overture to Wagner's Die Meistersinger. Said he: "I closed my eyes and there was my orchestra, the same one as at home. The music just flowed. Then I opened...
...American standards, Shoeshine was made on a shoestring: 31 million lire ($138,000). (Open City cost only $100,000.) But it was a long, hard scrimmage in the making. Neither Producer Paolo W. Tamburella (who thought up the idea), nor Director Vittorio De Sica, nor Sergio Amidei (who wrote Open City) and his three fellow writers are exactly yes-men. Finding the right actors and getting fine performances out of young amateurs-they were all shoeshine boys-was no small job in itself. And there were plenty of subsidiary difficulties. (When Allied authorities forbade G.I.s to act in the film...
...Here, I command!) were his favorite words as he pounded a wobbly table. When he decided to dismiss lower officials like the village doctor, he wrote simply: "Dear Dr. Pirro, I have the honor to inform you you have been fired, (signed) Eugeni." He also fined Village Priest Don Vittorio for collecting money for the harvest festival without his authorization...
Then two weeks ago came the electrifying news that the Communists in Rome had voted for the Lateran Pact. In Anticoli, Eugeni crowed cruelly, guffawed to speechless Don Vittorio: "Ha! Now you've got to work with me, just the way Togliatti has made De Gasperi work with him! Qui comando io!" In Roviano, wise old Scacchi said to his village priest, Don Mario Sargenti: "Now we must work together-I like all workers of the spade, you like all workers of the robe." This week in both towns another political party seems to be following the Socialists into...