Word: spadolini
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Dates: during 1975-1975
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...morning of Feb. 6, Giovanni Spadolini walked into a committee room in Rome's Chamber of Deputies and got ready to debate. Three months earlier, Aldo Moro's center-left government had given him the newly invented and resonant-sounding portfolio of Ministro dei Beni Culturali e Ambientali (Minister of Cultural and Environmental Resources). Since then, Spadolini had been striving to get more money and protection for Italy's impoverished and vulnerable museums. Two new bills were ready to be argued. "Just as the debate was beginning," Spadolini recalls, "a colleague in the chamber came...
...worth of paintings left to the museum in 1956 by Sicilian Industrialist Carlo Grassi. The haul included a Cezanne, a Bonnard, a Renoir, a Vuillard, a Van Gogh, a Gauguin, a Millet and a brace of Corots. The thieves, said Director Mercedes Garberi, "displayed a very refined taste." Giovanni Spadolini, Italy's Minister of the Cultural Patrimony, was already in shock from the theft of two Piero della Francescas and a Raphael from Urbino twelve days before. Said he: "This theft sounds an ultimate alarm against the state of neglect and abandon in which both the national and local...