Word: silvio
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...When Silvio came back to Contrada in 1933, he was 40 years old, a man of substance, with a real pearl stickpin in his cravat. He built a luxurious villa outside the village, and proceeded to show his contempt for the Contradese in a perverse display of ostentation and charity. He refused to enter the village but gave generously to the local church, and twice each year he would drive his blooded Arab horse around the outskirts to the back door of a house in which some Contradese girl cried her heart out because her family lacked money...
Wealth v. Brains. At home, Silvio amused himself by decorating the gardens of his villa with a weird menagerie of statuary whose faces bore a startling resemblance to the stuffier citizens of Contrada. Nevertheless, most of the villagers were content to accept Don Silvio as a wealthy, if eccentric, benefactor...
...exception was Carmine Guarino, nicknamed "the Toad." Like Silvio, Carmine had been born to poverty, but he had found escape along another road, by burying his nose in books until his eyes dimmed and his skin grew waxen with the pallor of lamplight. Carmine's studies brought him no money, but they helped make him a schoolmaster and a politician, full of respect for the ordered and privileged past and contempt for illiterate successes such as that of Silvio...
...president of Contrada's town council, Carmine, a dedicated Monarchist, set himself to bait the sulky showoff, Silvio, an ardent Demo-Christian, at every turn. When Silvio planted cherry trees on the borders of his property, Carmine made him cut them down because they overhung the village highway. When Silvio built himself a tomb in the local churchyard, Carmine complained that its steps were on public property. "Material wealth can never replace brains," he gloated when the steps were ordered removed...
Faction v. Faction. Soon afterward, a new statue appeared on Don Silvio's lawn -a large toad with a human head. Carmine Guarino saw it and made the mistake of complaining in public. Soon all of Contrada was flocking to the Capuana estate to look at the new portrait and laugh at its subject. Professor Guarino writhed in an agony of shame. Silvio broke precedent by driving into the village to write, "Life can be beautiful," in bold, black letters on the side of his desecrated tomb. Carmine promptly brought suit for defamation of character...