Word: rome
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...Daughter Liza, a stops-out entertainer, and such gifted, welcome actors as Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. The material, adapted from a novel by Maurice Druon called Film of Memory, would seem suited to all: a sentimental, gilded fairy tale about a poor Italian provincial (Liza) who comes to Rome to work in a hotel. She buddies up with a batty, once regal contessa (Bergman), who urges her always to "be yourself-the world worships an original." The girl follows this advice and becomes a first-magnitude movie star...
...sexy Bitter Rice, starring Sylvana Mangano, who became his wife, that made Dino his first fortune. He used the money to build Dino Citta, his film studio in Rome. Thereafter he plunged big on spectacles like War and Peace and The Bible; tides of money ebbed and flowed. Four years ago, he moved his operations to the U.S. The reason: "I begin to sniff trouble in Italia. I no like what I smell in the politics or the economy." He now says that his only mistake was not moving a decade earlier. "No other country makes room for foreigners...
...forces are all reassembled-and hardly the worse for wear. Maggie Radcliffe, a fortyish American rich beyond telling, is trying to rid herself of an old hanger-on named Hubert Mallin-daine. He is stubbornly settled in one of Maggie's three houses at Nemi, south east of Rome, where votaries once worshiped at the temple of Diana. Hubert claims squatter's rights on the rather shaky grounds of his alleged descent from Diana and the Emperor Caligula...
...sequel to the story is not quite as enchanting. The hero left for Paris late that evening for his Rome debut sitting up in a third-class coach, recalling the audience's exuberance--while nibbling on a dry cheese sandwich that had taken his last cent...
...popular myth, Johnson points out that the great medieval cathedrals were generally not the work of inspired volunteer artisans but of skilled hired hands, who sometimes went on strike and had to be chided for goofing off. He clears Alaric and his Goths of the charge that they destroyed Rome. The great city was ravaged, he writes, not by the barbarians in A.D. 410, but through imperial plundering in the 6th and 7th centuries by Byzantine Emperors Justinian and Constans II. Johnson also challenges the once popular thesis-of Max Weber and R.H. Tawney among others-that Calvinism helped nurture...