167 Forty-four million two hundred thousand annually: About $23,000.
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N O T E S
179 Didio . . . “The Wrath of God”: Di Dio means “of God” in Italian.
191 Toto and Peppino: Toto, born Antonio de Curtis to a princely family, was one of the greatest comic actors of twentieth-century Italy. He made many famous films with Peppino, born Peppino De Filippo, another great comic and, like Toto, from Naples.
192 Wasn’t that title abolished half a century ago?: Much used and abused during the Fascist era, the title “Your Excellency” was finally banned after World War II, though many government digni-taries still defy the ban.
223 “Two hundred million lire!”: About $110,000.
225 “Guarda come dondolo . . . col twist”: “See how I sway, see how I sway, doing the twist.” Lines from a popular song written and performed by Edoardo Vianello.
241 “Montanelli”: Indro Montanelli (1909– 2001) was a famous journalist who began his long career during the time of the Fascists, whom he initially supported. He continued to work as a columnist and social critic until his death.
244 to compensate . . . for his . . . surname: Pera means “pear” in Italian.
263 “Celeste Aida”: A famous aria from Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Aida.
269 “the miracle of the blood of San Gennaro”: San Gennaro (St.
Januarius) is the patron saint of Naples. Though little is known about him, his celebrity lies in the alleged miracle of the “liquefac-tion” of his blood, which is kept in a small glass vial in the epony-mous cathedral of that city. The miracle is believed to occur some eighteen times a year, but the main event is on September 19, the saint’s feast day, when large crowds always gather to witness it. Failure to liquefy is believed to be a dire portent.
283 a certain Libyan airplane . . . from the impact: On June 27, 1980, an Italian airliner crashed into the sea near the Sicilian island of Ustica. All eighty-one people on board died, and the incident has remained shrouded in mystery. The most prevalent theory is that the plane was shot down by a missile during a NATO exercise, but NATO has always denied this. The radar data, meanwhile, have disappeared. Many rumors (never confirmed) have since surfaced saying that an aerial battle had taken place during an attempt by NATO to shoot down the plane in which Colonel Ghaddafi was traveling. Whatever the case, shortly after the incident a fallen Libyan warplane was recovered in the Calabrian mountains, which the Italian secret service said had crashed the same day as the airliner. The only problem was that the pilot would have to have been dead while flying the airplane, since a verifiable autopsy (after an earlier one had been proven false) showed that he’d died twelve days before the crash.
Notes compiled by Stephen Sartarelli.
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