Word: neapolitan
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Chicago was strident, corrupt, lavish, fat from war contracts in 1919 when a young hoodlum from Brooklyn slipped into Diamond Jim Colosimo's South Side underworld and muttered his name. The hoodlum, branded on one swart cheek by the razor memento of the Neapolitan Camorra, was Al Capone...
Before the opening performance buxom Neapolitan Soprano Maria Caniglia was found crawling about the Met's splintery stage in search of bent nails. Reason: An old Neapolitan superstition that bent nails mean luck. She found a half dozen, toted them about with her while she sang the part of Desdemona in the season's opener, Otello. Thus equipped, Soprano Caniglia sang lustily, was lustily choked in the last act by Tenor Giovanni Martinelli (Otello) who finally covered her face with a pillow. The performance over, she had the ecstatic satisfaction (see cut) of being smothered again by flowers...
Proud of their aristocratic background, Artist Degas' family always spelled the name De Gas. His half-Italian father was a moderately rich banker who went to Paris about the year 1800 to open a branch of the family's Neapolitan banking house. His mother (Adele Musson) was born in the U. S.; her brother Michel ran a cotton brokerage business in New Orleans. Edgar Degas started as a well-intentioned student. Ingres was his life-long ideal, but lessons from a pupil of a pupil of Ingres was as close as he could come...
...Sanfelice" is a beautiful and thrilling book. The heroine, La Sanfelice herself, an impoverished nobelwoman whose sympathies in the Neapolitan Revolution are naturally aristocratic but who accidentally betrays a royalist counter-revolution and becomes the toast and symbol of the Jacobin cause, comes to life in these pages. Her dissolute husband, her lover Fernando, her nephew Lauriano, are specimens in the fine art of re-creating historical characters. The personal histories of this quartet, and that of Don Gerardo Baker, are fascinatingly unfolded against the grim pageant of Naples torn by civil strife...
...before. It was commonly believed that Lady Hamilton's influence over the Queen was the result of a perverse relationship. The court was one of the most corrupt in Europe. Yet revolutionists like Fernando did little more than repeat scandals about the nobles, fearing the wild, starving, superstitious Neapolitan mobs almost as much as did the aristocrats and the Queen...