Word: italian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ordinary Italian worker, whose weekly salary all goes for rent and pasta, the only hope for retirement is a pension -meager at best and by no means automatic. If he is privately employed, his fate is in the hands of a monstrous, Kafkaesque government bureau whose paper-shuffling overhead is so high that a man whose employer has paid in $15,000 on his behalf over a 30-year period will receive only $3,000 of it when he retires. The one Italian worker in eight who is a government employee fares somewhat better: provided he works nearly 20 years...
Later, in Rome's Queen of Heaven jail, Lepori told his story: a onetime member of Italy's proud carabinieri, he had been released from a mental hospital during World War II to fight in the Italian army. After the war, the Defense Ministry gave him a job chopping wood and raking leaves in his native Sardinia. Last year, still suffering from his old mental illness, Lepori decided to retire-only to discover that he had not been on the ministry's permanent rolls and, after 15 years as a "temporary laborer," was not entitled...
...Anatomy of Love (Lux Film Cines; Kassler), an Italian film that tells five short stories, is at its best in the two that star Vittorio De Sica: as a count who has lost everything but his nobility ("I'd decided not to outlive my youth no matter how rich I was"), and as a Naples bus driver, a laughing hedonist who has developed a talent for catching and lifting girls' skirts in the bus's snapping-jaw folding doors. Since it is the bus driver's conviction that the routes of heaven...
...climb a tree-every child knows that. Seen from a stout limb and framed in shade, the world seems a safer and more interesting place. But sooner or later the child must come down to earth. In this novel, the hero never comes down, and neither does Italian Author Italo Calvino. He seems to have had great fun dreaming up his fantasy; all he asks of the reader is a suspended intelligence and a taste for the bizarre...
...When young Cosimo, an alarmingly imaginative twelve-year-old, has a run-in with his stuffy father, he climbs a big tree and vows, "I'll never come down again!" And he doesn't-for more than half a century. The area around the little north Italian town of Ombrosa is so heavily forested that he can travel for miles swinging from tree to tree like an 18th century Tarzan. He builds tree houses and shoots game. He climbs down to a low branch to milk a complacent goat, trains a hen to lay in a convenient place...