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josefavomjaaga · 3 years ago

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Helfert, Joachim Murat, Chapter 6, Part 5

Things are getting ugly now, brace yourselves.

Rarely has anyone been more fatally self-deceived than Joachim Murat, when he convinced himself that he need only present himself on the soil of his former kingdom and everything would fall to him. And for the full measure of his misfortune he had chosen the coast of Calabria, that stretch of land where the old dynasty had always found its enthusiastic followers willing to make sacrifices, while Murat's name, which was conflated with that of the madman Manhès, was virtually maligned and cursed there. But even elsewhere in the country, with the rapidly changing impressions of the southerners, his memory was not merely obliterated, as if a century had passed since then: everything connected with his actions, everything that reminded one of him, was as if it had been tainted. His officials, many of whom the new government had left in their positions, were looked upon with disdain and persecuted by the population; indeed, there were violent acts, bloody uprisings against them, so that the government had to intervene with all the severity of the law.

An example of this is given in the following footnote:

Jablonovski PS. ad numerum 12 of 21. September 2, mentions such an uprising in Salerno, in which several Murat officials were killed; a royal commission came from Naples and now eleven of the mutineers were sentenced to death: "il arrive à chaque instant de pareils événements; la présence de nos troupes les empêche dans la capitale, et si elles quittaient Naples aujourd'hui, demain tous ceux qui avaient été employés par Murat seraient égorgés". See also n. 13 on 3 October: "Dans les provinces qui étaient oprimées sous le gouvernement de Murat les passions haineuses de cette nation agissent avec plus de force".

Apparently, some people were disappointed that they were not allowed any excesses after the change of government. Helfert continues:

At the Court of Naples in the first days of October, nothing was known about Murat's departure from Ajaccio, nor was it possible to know anything about it: on the other hand, other news had arrived which upset the King in the extreme. Jablonovski, towards whom the monarch was always of the most winning friendliness, noticed a change in the monarch's behaviour at the cercle on October 4, the name day of Emperor Francis, which was always festively celebrated at Ferdinand's court. None of the ministers was able to tell our envoy what the king had against him until Princess Partanna, whom Ferdinand alone had taken into his confidence, told him: it was a coded dispatch from Prince Castelcicala which had arrived from Paris and informed the monarch that Austria had offered Murat an asylum within her borders. Jablonovski seized the first opportunity to confront Circello on the matter. "Shouldn't your King prefer," he said, "that Murat should stay 200 miles from Naples, under the eyes and supervision of a powerful ally of His Majesty, rather than having to constantly fear that the adventurer might land at a point on the coast which, because of its great extent, can never be properly guarded, and disturb the peace of the kingdom? Of course he won't succeed, that's what our troops are for. But he can cause enough unrest and disorder, especially if, as is not at all improbable, he joins forces with the Barbaresques and sets out to do mischief".

The argument was plausible and had all the greater effect because just in the last few days, October 4 and 5, reports had been received that put our envoy's ideas in a peculiar light. Murat's squadron had not gone entirely unnoticed on the Neapolitan coast: on the 4th a vessel had been observed near Sorrento which was thought to be a pirate ship and which seemed to be waiting for others like it; on the 5th a similar signal had arrived in the port of Salerno. The two pieces of news caused all the more concern in government circles because at the same time Baron Lebzeltern sent a message from Rome to the commandant of Gaëta, who reported to the capital without delay that Murat had left the port of Ajaccio with several ships.

All these facts also came to the knowledge of the diplomats of the friendly powers, at least to that of Jablonovski, who reported on them to his Cabinet on 6 and 7 October. On the other hand, what was decided at court remained a secret for the time being. They could only conclude from all sorts of signs and hints that the King's Council had agreed on a drastic measure. Our envoy and the British one thought that orders had been issued to all coastal points to treat Joachim Murat with martial law if he were seized with arms in his hand. Medici had also given orders to all commanders of the troops posted along the coasts from Salerno to Calabria to take the severest measures against those citizens who would join the ex-king. A Captain Spadea, who had returned from Sicily and was therefore undoubtedly familiar in court circles, informed Guglielmo Pepe privately "that much blood would flow in the kingdom in a short time".

Pizzo is, or was at that time, a town of about 8000 inhabitants situated on a height close to the sea, on the shore of which, where one used to land, there were individual houses and magazines. From the coast, at that time rather bumpy and uncomfortable, a path wound up to the town, which led to the main square and continued over the latter in the somewhat steeply rising road leading to Monteleone. On a hill overlooking the town on the left, in the direction in which we enter the town in our minds, there was a castle dominating the Rhine and the town.

Murat's small band, not counting himself, consisted of 29 heads, 26 of them militairs. He wore a uniform of sky-blue cloth, colonel's epaulettes, a tricorn on his head, but no medal or decoration of any kind on his chest. Some people who were on the beach during the disembarkation ran to watch the unusual spectacle and, while the Muratists kept shouting "Evviva il Re Gioacchino!", returned the greeting forced upon them. The same was the case with individuals who came to meet them as the group marched up the mountain path. Thus they arrived at the main square, where a lot of people had gathered, attracted both by the festival day and by the strange procession. The people's expressions reflected curiosity, astonishment, surprise, but not joy. On the contrary, when Murat addressed them, talking about redemption, about liberation, a woman from the people shouted at him: "You talk to us about the freedom you want to give us and you had three of my sons shot"!

This anecdote apparently goes back to Ferdinand of Naples personally, at least Helfert says in a footnote: "Tu parli di libertà e mi hai fatto fucilare tre figli! This turn the king told Prince Jablonovski, No. 15 to the 15th of October 2."

That was a wicked interjection! From their barracks appeared the coastguard, 15 men of artillery under Lieutenant Barba, armed and in their old uniform. "Behold my soldiers!" exclaimed Murat, turning to them: "Do you recognise your king? Shout: Long live King Joachim!" An official of the Duke of Infantado named Alcalà and others ran up to them and exhorted: "Shout: Long live Ferdinand!" They did neither, which Murat interpreted as a good sign that the old soldier's spirit would persuade them in his favour. But it was only amazement, or if you will, a kind of enchantment, which the unexpected appearance of the former king with his commanding and winning appearance exercised on them, as well as on the majority of those gathered in general.

While this was going on, two or three young people had approached Murat's entourage and persuaded them that nothing could be done here in Pizzo, that the population was stubborn, but that in Monteleone the "king" would certainly find his party! So Murat ordered the departure for Monteleone and called on the gunners to join him. They did not do so, but they followed his march at some distance. Joachim could no longer rest; he was not prepared for such a cool, even ambiguous reception. He strode hastily up the mountain road, so that, out of practice from the long sea voyage and affected by the excessive excitement, he had to pause to catch his breath. The coastguard was a good distance behind, marching slowly, as if irresolute, while from the town a crowd of armed men was seen approaching, by whom the artillerymen were soon overtaken. The ex-king's leaders became suspicious and urged them to hurry: "see if we can reach Monteleone as soon as possible!" But they were already close at hand, preceded in passionate haste by a gendarmerie captain named Trentacapilli; he had formerly been a gang leader, General Manhès had had three of his brothers hanged. "The general and all of you will follow me to Pizzo!" he commanded. "It behoves you," Murat replied, "to obey your king and escort him to Monteleone!" Murat's officers wanted to pounce on the audacious man, but Joachim resisted them, and he was allowed to return to his troop, from which shots were now fired. The Murat's wanted to return fire, but their master would not allow it: I do not want even one of my subjects to lose his life for the sake of my landing!

But he realised that all was lost. He and his officers, while his few men were soon crushed and overcome by the superior force, sought to reach the shore of the sea quickly, not on the paved path, but down the slope over hill and dale, with their pursuers hard on their heels, with whom they fought on the way. A single boat was found on the shore, which the officers wanted to unhitch in a hurry to head for Barbara's Trabacolo, which, instead of waiting nearby as he had been ordered, was cruising far from the shore on the high seas. But in the agitated haste, the boat could not be disentangled, and already the few were surrounded on all sides, and fists armed with sabres, axes and picks were raised against them. At this Murat surrendered: "Here you have my sword, but spare the lives of these brave men who have followed me into my misfortune!"

These words were only like an invitation to the enraged to turn their threats into action. Captain Pernice and Sergeant Giovannini fell to their deaths at Murat's side, Franceschetti fell to the ground badly hit, Lieutenant Moltedo and three others were wounded. They were seized, led or rather dragged, some of them barely able to carry themselves, into the village, under constant threats, punches and blows that spared the ex-king as little as his fellow victims. More than once an axe was raised to split Murat's head, if others had not intervened and prevented it. At this, speeches were heard which struck Joachim more sensitively than their weapons: "Were there not enough of these unfortunates? Had you not drunk your fill of the blood of your victims? Did you again need scaffolds and gallows?" He was almost completely stripped of his clothes, everything he carried was taken from him, and Trentacapilli did not miss a single thing: his money and his diamonds, his bills of exchange, his passport, everything he had to hand over. To seal his misfortune, a copy of his manifesto and his decree were found in his wallet, the incontestable proof of his hostile intention, the clear refutation of his pretence that he had only wanted to land on the coast in order to obtain the means to continue his journey to Trieste!

#joachim murat #caroline murat #hundred days #napoleon #naples 1815 #helfert murat

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wisdomrays · 3 years ago

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TAFAKKUR: Part 428

AL-ANDALUS: THE LOST CIVILIZATION

How many people now know who Ibn Hazm, Al-Mu’tamid, Ibn Tufayl, Abu Ishaq al-Butruji were, or even where they came from? Most probably, not many. Yet these were among the most important scientists and thinkers of their age and lived in Al-Andalus.

The year 1492 has long been a historical landmark: the Americans recently celebrated the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of the new continent. But there was another 500th anniversary to be marked in 1992. Although this event was also of momentous importance for the history of mankind, it has attracted much less attention. The event we are referring to was the fall of the last Muslim city left in Spain: Granada. The date was the second day of 1492 when the Catholic king of Castile captured the city which had been governed for nearly eight centuries by Muslims.

The Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, which marked one of the most magnificent and glorious periods in Islamic history began with an invitation from one side of a civil war then raging in Visigothic Spain in 711. Musa Ibn Nusayr, the Umayyad governor of North Africa, was asked to help the rival of a Visigoth king. Thereupon, Nusayr ordered his general Tariq Ibn Ziyad to aid these people with an army of 7,000. In the following years he himself went to Spain. Within seven years the Muslims took control of the whole of the Peninsula, except for Galicia and Austuria. Muslim rule was accepted voluntarily by many Spaniards and over time some of them accepted Islam. The Andalusian Muslims did little to disturb the natives and allowed them to perform their religions and customs. After the dissolution of the central Umayyad government between 1009 and 1031 as a result of uprisings and a succession of weak rulers, a number of independent petty kingdoms (in Arabic mutluk al-tawaif and in Spanish taifa) became established. In spite of the fact that these little kingdoms were weaker than the former Umayyad state, an astonishing flowering of arts and learning took place during the taifa period. One reason for this outstanding development was that each ruler patronized artists, scholars and scientists to gain more prestige than the others. Eventually, the absence of a centrally organized state led to the end of Muslims’ power in the Peninsula. They lost considerable areas of territory to the Christian kingdoms that were reasserting themselves in the north. The petty kingdoms of Al-Andalus asked Yusuf Ibn Tashufin, the Almoravid (in Arabic al-Murabitun) ruler in Morocco, to intervene. They got the help they needed, but in 1090, the Almovarids left the country to its own destiny. This time the taifa kingdoms asked the Almohads (in Arabic al-Muwahhidun) for help. The Almohads willingly accepted and for a period of time they won some success in Spain. Nevertheless, in 1212 at the battle of al-Iqab they were defeated and within a few decades the Almohads were forced back across the Strait of Gibraltar. Muslim cities fell one after another until 1260, when only the kingdom of Granada remained. Granada survived for another two centuries. By the end of 1491, the armies of Ferdinand and Isabella were at the gates of the city. There remained only one final act to be played out on January 2nd, 1492 by which Muslim political sovereignty in Spain came to an end. In 1500, Spanish Muslims were presented with a terrible choice–either to convert to Catholicism or be expelled from Spain. Some did convert, others continued to practice their faith in secret and the rest chose exile.

It is a fact that the Andulusians developed a uniquely plural society whose main features were freedom, tolerance and lack of assimilation–Arabs, Christians, Jews and other immigrants lived side by side in peace for about eight centuries. Cordoba, the capital city of Al-Andalus, was the centre of a sophisticated and rich Islamic-Hispanic civilisation. In its heyday, Cordoba was famous for its intellectually advanced culture, its centres of learning and its great libraries. In those years, there were about one million people, 200,000 houses, 60 palaces, 600 mosques, 700 baths, 17 universities and 70 public libraries in the city. The biggest central library of Cordoba had 400,000 hand-written books and the catalogues which included only the names of the books consisted of 44 volumes. The famous orientalist, Dozy, stated that nearly all the people in Cordoba could read and write.

Gebert of Aurillac, the French monk, later to become Pope Sylvester II, was the first European scholar of importance to study Arabic sciences. He was also responsible for sending many teams of students into Al-Andalus during the closing years of the 10th century. By the end of that century, the various schools in Cordoba employed hundreds of students as translators and just as many copyists working closely to interpret and translate hundreds, perhaps thousands, of manuscripts from Baghdad and Cairo. Through these translations, philosophical and scientific thought from the Greek, Roman and Arab worlds, preserved and expanded upon by Muslim scholars, passed into European consciousness to fuel both the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment. Western Europe, in general, owes a great debt to this enormously long and rich intellectual flow from Al-Andalus.

Islamic Spain was an immensely fertile ground for learning, producing a long series of intellectual, aesthetic and scientific advances attributable to Muslim, Christian and Jewish thinkers and the ethos they created. This blossoming was due in part to the spirit of tolerance that prevailed for much of the history of Al-Andalus.

In literature, Ibn Hazm (died in 1013) expanded traditional romantic poetry with his Tawq al-Hamamah (Dove’s necklace). This form of poetry passed from Al-Andalus into North Africa. Islamic literature in Andalus, however, reached its peak during the taifa era when the poet-king of Seville, Al-Mutamid, established an academy of letters, and Ibn Darraj al-Qastalli wrote a series of qasaid (poems) of unequalled beauty.

By the end of 11th century, Al-Andalus was at the forefront of European sciences. The Andalusians excelled in astronomy, both theoretical and practical, perfecting their tables and the precision of their astronomical instruments. Toledo astronomer Al-Zargali, (d. 1087), simplified the Hellenic astrolabe; his version, known as the saphea azarchelis, remained in use until the 16th century. He also anticipated the 17th century German astronomer Johannes Kepler in suggesting that the orbits of the planets are not circular but elliptical.

In medicine, Al-Andalus produced scholars like Al-Zahrawi (d. 1013), who wrote extensively on surgery, pharmacology, medical ethics and the doctor-patient relationship. Ibn Zuhr (known in the west as Avenzoar), a century and a half later, was an advocate of clinical research and practical experimentation. The first medical school in Europe was built in Salerno by Andalusians.

Abdullah Ibn Abdulaziz was one of the best-known geographers and renowned for his great work Al-Masalik wa’l-Mamalik (Roads and Countries). Another important geographer was Al-Idrisi who was educated in Cordoba and wrote Kitab al-Rujari (Roger’s Book) under the patronage of the King of Sicily, Roger II. In this book he divided the world into seven different climatic regions and each region into ten parts. He illustrated his book with some outstanding maps remarkable (and unique) for their accuracy.

Andalusians were also very successful in mathematics, especially geometry. They used the number ‘0’ for the first time in Europe. Among the well-known philosophers who lived in Andalus were Ibn Bajja, Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Rushd all of whom influenced European thought very profoundly. Abu Bakr Ibn Umar, Abu Marwan, Ibn Fradi were particularly famous in historical studies.

Although, over the years, the lost splendour of Al-Andalus has been much idealized in the Islamic world, there remains an appreciation of the factors behind its downfall. Some of these were external, such as the unification and expansion of the Christian kingdoms of Spain and the geographic and political isolation of Al-Andalus from the rest of the Muslim world. There were also internal factors that contributed to the decline of Al-Andalus particularly the rivalries that weakened and divided Muslim Spain, the greed and self-indulgence that gripped its elites, and the loss of inner religious dynamic.

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sunny143sr · 4 years ago

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Top 10 places to visit in Italy

Italy is a lovely country, globally loved for providing an eclectic combination of visitor attractions. Vacationers, on one hand, love to enjoy the amazing Roman ruins of Pompeii, Rome, and Herculaneum, and on the other, can’t resist traveling to Venice and Tuscany for his or her romantic appeal.

The USA is likewise regarded for its natural sights and scenic landscapes that ship you to any other world. They are spellbinding, charming, and dumbfounding to mention the least. Virtually words don’t do justice at all. You obtain to see them trust us. However, we gained will let you get lost in the maps!

Right here are the pinnacle 10 cities, which might be additionally the pinnacle hubs of vacationer locations in Italy, which are sinfully excellent. You just can’t face up to their seduction!

Earlier than we go to the information, a quick look at the grandeur of top traveler locations in Italy!

1. Tuscany – You simply can’t leave out the greens here!

Tuscany has continually been the center of enterprise, art, and politics in Europe. The various maximum lovely locations to visit in Italy, the town also received a whole lot of prominence as a primary metropolis of the Renaissance length. Great work of artwork can be seen and loved via the art fans coming to this city. Tuscany is also famous for its notable crafts. Substances used to create awesome craft gadgets are timber, metallic, leather-based, marble, and more.

Key attractions: The Gallery of Uffizi acknowledged for its extremely good museums, treasures, palaces, and churches; excellent perspectives of Siena and the Palio; the famous Leaning Tower of Pisa and Piazza Dei Miracoli for his or her particular architecture; beautiful villages; and the scenic vineyards of Chianti.

Fine time to go to September – October, and April – June

Read More: American Airlines

3. Italian Lake District – The metropolis of lakes and fashionistas

Positioned in Italy’s Northern area, the Italian Lake District is known for its stunning lakes. This location has been one of the well-known Italian traveler places since the Roman instances. Each year, a large variety of tourists visit this stunning destination to admire and revel in its lovely scenic locales, Lake Garda and Lake Como. The destination is likewise recognized for its actual Italian cuisine and is frequented by fashionistas to explore the boutiques.

Key attractions: Lake Garda, Lake Como, Lake, Lake Lugano, Lake Maggiore, Lake Orta, Mediaeval castles, Renaissance Palazzi, fishing villages, and the craggy peaks of Dolomites

A pleasant time to go to September and May

4. Sicily – Wandering in the ruins is amusing too!

Sicily is the most popular tourist destination in Italy for its ancient Greek ruins. The vacation spot has been ruled by Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, and Ostrogoths. The glimpses in their rule can be still visible in the ruins. The stays of the Norman generation's notable architectural achievements additionally attract a wide variety of traffic. The duration architecture is the most important appeal inside the metropolis and is appreciated by site visitors who wish to know more about the bygone technology and its triumphs.

Key points of interest: the Aeolian Islands, Agrigento archaeological website online a.K.The Valley of Temples, the well-known cathedral Cefalu, the hilltop town Erice, Mount Etna, and the Nebrodi Mountains

5. Cinque Terre – Witness a few thoughts-blowing sunsets right here!

Referred to as “The 5 Lands”, Cinque Terre is one of the prettiest needs to see places in Italy. Beautiful vistas at the rugged coastline of Sicily are well worth admiring. The five fishing villages are related through taking walks trails and exploring them is a great concept. Furthermore, this entire region has been declared as a UNESCO international historical past website online.

Key sights: Vernazza fishing village for its cliff, twelfth Century Manarola fishing village for its Groppo and Ruins of Fortifications, Monterosso village for its church buildings and Monastery, Riomaggiore village for its craggy hills, Corniglia for its 382 stars, and The 12 km Blue course

Fine time to go to March – July

6. Amalfi Coast – A absolutely distinctive vacation spot

Amalfi Coast is one of the most exclusive European destinations, recognized for its ecstatic coasts bordering the Mediterranean Sea. It's miles perfect for exploring nature's marvels in Italy. Positano and Fiordo of Furore are places placed close by and call for quite a time to experience its wonderful sights.

Key sights: astonishing perspectives from Ravello, an implementing and attractive cathedral of Duomo, Spiaggia di Arechi, and the 8th century Salerno citadel

Best time to go to July and August

7. Milan – A spell-binding fashion hub

Italy’s most cosmopolitan city, Milan is famous for soccer and style. The destination is likewise regarded for its herbal points of interest and fashion shows that are prepared two times a yr. The city witnesses the influx of shoppers, designers, and supermodels from all around the world at some stage in the shows. An extremely good thought to the global fashion designers, Milan is absolutely some of the locations to see in Italy.

Key sights: The famous Basilica Sant’Ambrogio devoted to Milan’s client saint, the huge Cemetery of some of the tremendous celebrities of the place, Piazza Mercanti administrative center of Milan, pieces of artwork on the Pinacoteca di Brera, and the twelfth century Navigli Lombardi canal

Great time to go to: past due September – October, and March – might also

8. Pompeii – A walk down the lanes of records

Placed near the Mount Vesuvius foothills, Pompeii is a historical metropolis, and around 80 BC, the vacation spot became a prime port metropolis. Numerous websites offer glimpses of the Roman rule over the metropolis, that's a UNESCO World history website these days. Its discovery within the year 1748 supplied plenty of statistics about the erstwhile Roman Empire. Humans like to visit this city and explore the properly-preserved ruins to find out more about this city.

Key attractions: Antiquarium museum that gives a lot of information about this fabled metropolis, discussion board Roman metropolis square, Temple of Jupiter constructed on a raised 3-meter base, Teatro Grande, Teatro Piccolo, ancient Stabian Baths, and residence of Menander

best time to visit: April

9. Venice – The floating town

View of the Rio Marin Canal with boats and gondolas from the Ponte de la Bergami in Venice

Venice – the floating metropolis – draws a large number of travelers all-spherical the year. However, its splendor and romantic gondola rides make it the quality of most of the places to go to in Italy for a honeymoon. Many canals are crisscrossing thru the town. The time when the vacation spot witnesses a surge of travelers is throughout Carnevale. Humans sporting colorful costumes and masks are worth watching in their glory. The city is replete with loads of churches, cathedrals, theaters, and art galleries.

Key attractions: Piazza San Marco aka the Drawing Room of Europe using Napoleon, housing St Mark’s Basilica, Doge’s Palace, Torre dell Orologio clock tower, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, and the Grand Canal

Nice time to visit: late February – Early may additionally

10. Rome – The town of affection

Rome, with its stunning attractions and points of interest, is a far cherished destination amongst die-difficult romantics. It has loads of museums, artwork galleries, and theaters that provide perception into its wealthy culture and ancient past. A few of the pleasant locations to visit in Italy with your own family, Rome lets the site visitors understand more about the development of Western Civilization, the boom and progress of Christianity, and the deep-rooted history of the archeological websites.

Key sights: St Peter’s Basilica is known to be the largest and grandest church within the globe, Roman Empire’s famous Colosseum with an ability to accommodate 55,000 spectators, Piazza Navona fountains constructed inside the seventeenth century, Pantheon built using Emperor Hadrian in the memory of Pagan Gods, and Trevi Fountain

Nice time to go to October – April

#top 10 places to visit in italy #top places #italy #vacation #best place for vacation

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route22ny · 5 years ago

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ON 19 OCTOBER 2016, in the third and final presidential debate, Hillary Clinton opined that Vladimir Putin would “rather have a puppet as president of the United States,” meaning Donald John Trump, than a formidable adversary like her. As Trump short-circuited like a Star Wars droid on the fritz (“No puppet. No puppet. You're the puppet!”), she continued:

It’s pretty clear you won't admit that the Russians have engaged in cyberattacks against the United States of America, that you encouraged espionage against our people, that you are willing to spout the Putin line, sign up for his wish list, break up NATO, do whatever he wants to do, and that you continue to get help from him, because he has a very clear favorite in this race.

So I think that this is such an unprecedented situation. We've never had a foreign government trying to interfere in our election. We have 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin and they are designed to influence our election. I find that deeply disturbing.

As usual, HRC was right. But even the most cynical viewer could scarce have imagined, in the fall of 2016, just how on the nose she was.

Trump’s activities since taking office—the gutting of the State Department, the jackals in the Oval Office, Helsinki, Mueller obstruction, Ukraine skulduggery, and his willful non-response to the covid pandemic—make clear that the longtime mob money launderer has spent most of his presidency doing Putin’s bidding, just as Clinton predicted. Allow cyberattacks against the United States? Check. Encourage espionage against our people? Check. Spout the Putin line? Always. Sign up for his wish list? Like a porn addict on OnlyFans. Break up NATO? Western Europe is as divided now as it’s been since the forties. Continue to get help from him? Every fucking day.

Three years after that third debate, almost exactly to the day, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stormed out of a meeting with President Trump concerning his strategically obtuse decision to withdraw US troops from Syria—a move that was ore in Russia’s interests than ours. “Why,” she exasperatedly asked the press, “do all roads lead to Putin?”

It’s actually quite simple: Trump has been mob property his entire life. The difference is that now, in 2020, the mobster who owns him is not “Fat Tony” Salerno, or “Big” Paul Castellano, or Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, or even Semion “The Brainy Don” Mogilevich. The mobster who owns him is Vladimir Putin—which makes Trump, by extension, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Russian government.

Previously, I wrote about Trump’s longtime association with the mob, both Italian and Russian, and his almost certain career as a top echelon Confidential Informant for the Justice Department. He is, as I said, “second generation mobbed-up.” Although he is not, and never can be, an actual mobster—a front can never be a member of the family, for obvious reasons—the unscrupulous Trump is an extremely useful asset to his underworld associates, and has been for decades. Front men, after all, are a vital cog in the global crime syndicate machine. That dirty money’s not going to wash itself.

While the Trump Organization does deals overseas, for most of his career Donald Trump was a stateside operator. The bulk of his revenue is homegrown. As a business professional of my acquaintance who worked for years in Russia colorfully put it: “The thing to remember about Trump is that he’s a venal crook, not some international criminal mastermind. His primary source of wealth, such as it is, comes from a string of golf courses, hotels, and mixed-use office buildings spread around the world, but the corn nuggets in his crown of shit are in the New York metro area and spread across the beaches of Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Broward County, Florida.”

So how did a Queens-born front-man and mob money launderer, whose business was overwhelmingly domestic, wind up an asset of a hostile foreign government?

To understand this transformation, it is instructive to think of Trump not as a human being but as an asset, in the strict sense of the word—a piece of property, like a beach house, a private jet, or an HBO Go password. Just as two different families can share a beach house, and your buddy down the street can use your login to stream Succession, so Trump can be utilized by more than one entity at a time. He can also be sold outright—or rather transferred, like the deed to a house. None of this is up to him. At all. To paraphrase Elvis Presley: he’s caught in a trap, he can’t walk out, because the mobsters own him baby.

As for Vladimir Putin, while he may have started as an intelligence operative, and he may pretend to be a diplomat and statesman on the world stage, his true profession, at this stage of his career, is mob boss—probably the most powerful mob boss in the world, more powerful even than his longtime associate from back in his Dresden days, Semion Mogilevich. (There was, and is, a lot of blur between IC and OC in Russia.)

Putin and Mogilevich are two foci of the small circle of oligarchs—there are subtle distinctions, but for all intents and purposes, oligarch is basically just a euphemism for mobster—who own almost everything of value in Russia. In mafia states, the mob runs the show—charging protection for businesses, taking bribes, imposing restrictions on airports, seaports, etc. The Russian mafiya is closer to the East India Company administering the entire colony of British India than some Scorsese picture. It steals from the people, and manipulates the weak central government, to keep itself in power.

(Sidenote: per Robert I. Friedman’s Red Mafiya, Mogilevich has complete control of Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow. So if a self-styled NSA “whistleblower” contrives to spend 40 days there avoiding the media, coughEdSnowdencough, you can be damn sure the “Brainy Don” authorized it).

An ex-KGB chief, Putin succeeded Boris Yeltsin as president in 1999. He’s been in charge ever since. Under his reign, Russia has regressed from a burgeoning democracy to a veritable dictatorship. Putin consolidated power, destroying the independent judiciary, clamping down on press freedoms, using false-flag operations to win popular support, and exploiting his power for personal gain. He is more like a tsar than a president—although the Romanovs did not possess nuclear weapons, and their wealth, obscene as it was, paled in comparison to Putin’s own.

Bill Browder, the American-born British national who was an early investor in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and who left the country after the government became too corrupt to continue doing business there, tells a hair-raising story about Putin: After the rise of the oligarchs in the early 2000s, Putin had the richest, most powerful oligarch—Mikhail Khodorkovsky, head of the energy concern Yukos—arrested. At a humiliating show trial during which the accused oligarch was kept in a cage, Khodorkovsky was found guilty of fraud. He was sent to prison, and his sizable assets seized.

After this sobering display, the other oligarchs approached Putin and asked what they needed to give him to avoid the same fate as Khodorkovsky, whose fate none of them wanted to share. Putin replied: “Half.” Since then, ill-gotten gains have poured into his coffers. The oligarchs boast fabulous wealth, but by virtue of claiming half of their money, Putin bests them all. Browder has suggested that Putin may well be the world’s richest individual.

And if this all sounds like the world’s greatest mob boss making the world’s biggest mob-boss flex, well, you say “tomato,” I say whatever the Russian word for “tomato” is. Whatever he might have been before that series of power moves, Putin emerged afterward as a no-doubt-about-it mob boss. Khodorkovsky, the fallen oligarch, himself said as much, in a recent interview.

Whether Putin is more powerful than Mogilevich is anyone’s guess. But only one of them is concurrently the head of state of a G8 country, one of a handful of nations that has nuclear capability—and, despite what revisionist historians at Fox News would have us believe, America’s chief adversary since 1945.

Donald John Trump’s association with the Russian mafiya—as opposed to the homegrown Italian one—began, best as we can tell, in 1984, when the Soviet soldier-turned-mobster David Bogatin purchased five of his condos for $6 million. Trump Tower was one of just two buildings in all of New York City that allowed units to be purchased by shell companies. Fishy deals like this did not deter Trump, who had traveled in underworld circles all his life.

By ’84, as covered previously, Trump was already a Confidential Informant for the FBI. He’d been on the radar of the KGB since 1977, when he married the former Ivana Zelníčková, a Czechoslovakian national who someone managed to emigrate from that Eastern Bloc country to Canada. As Luke Harding writes in his masterful and must-read book, Collusion (excerpted here by Politico):

Zelníčková was born in Zlin, an aircraft manufacturing town in Moravia. Her first marriage was to an Austrian real estate agent. In the early 1970s she moved to Canada, first to Toronto and then to Montreal, to be with a ski instructor boyfriend. Exiting Czechoslovakia during this period was, the files said, “incredibly difficult.” Zelníčkováa moved to New York. In April 1977 she married Trump.

According to files in Prague, declassified in 2016, Czech spies kept a close eye on the couple in Manhattan.…There was periodic surveillance of the Trump family in the United States. And when Ivana and Donald Trump, Jr., visited [her father] in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, further spying, or “cover.”

Like with other Eastern Bloc agencies, the Czechs would have shared their intelligence product with their counterparts in Moscow, the KGB. Trump may have been of interest for several reasons. One, his wife came from Eastern Europe. Two—at a time after 1984 when the Kremlin was experimenting with perestroika, or Communist Party reform—Trump had a prominent profile as a real estate developer and tycoon. According to the Czech files, Ivana mentioned her husband’s growing interest in politics. Might Trump at some stage consider a political career?

The KGB was really, really good. Are we to believe that the Soviets would not at least try to use Ivana—and her father Milos, stuck behind the Iron Curtain in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic—to get to Trump? Would not some cooperation be expected as the price of her being allowed to emigrate in the first place?

The Russians began to actively cultivate Trump in 1986, soon after his landmark real estate deal with Bogatin. As Harding tells it, Trump was invited to Moscow by Natalia Dubinina, the daughter of the Soviet ambassador to the United States, whom he met at a luncheon in New York in ‘86. The following year, he took her up on the offer. “On July 4, 1987, Trump flew to Moscow for the first time, together with Ivana and Lisa Calandra, Ivana’s Italian-American assistant,” Harding writes. “Moscow was, Trump wrote, ‘an extraordinary experience.’ The Trumps stayed in Lenin’s suite at the National Hotel, at the bottom of Tverskaya Street, near Red Square….The hotel was linked to the glass-and-concrete Intourist complex next door and was—in effect—under KGB control. The Lenin suite would have been bugged.”

Donald John Trump was a textbook KGB mark. The agents must have been drooling. Harding cites an internal memo circulated by the agency at the time, advising how to spot potential recruits: “Are pride, arrogance, egoism, ambition or vanity among subject’s natural characteristics?” Like a great baseball prospect, Trump was a five-tool player. Harding continues, writing about the internal memo:

The most revealing section concerned kompromat. The document asked for: “Compromising information about subject, including illegal acts in financial and commercial affairs, intrigues, speculation, bribes, graft … and exploitation of his position to enrich himself.” Plus “any other information” that would compromise the subject before “the country’s authorities and the general public.” Naturally the KGB could exploit this by threatening “disclosure.”

Finally, “his attitude towards women is also of interest.” The document wanted to know: “Is he in the habit of having affairs with women on the side?”

We don’t know what, if any, kompromat was gathered on that first trip to Moscow. But we do know that Trump is a serial philanderer, with a taste for Eastern European women. This wasn’t exactly a state secret; by ‘87, he was already a tabloid legend. Are we really to believe that the KGB—arguably the best intelligence agency in the world at human intelligence gathering—would not have tried to honeypot him?

It was upon his return from that fateful Moscow trip that Trump began to branch out in his interests. “For the first time he gave serious indications that he was considering a career in politics,” Harding points out. “Not as mayor or governor or senator.

“Trump was thinking about running for president.”

And indeed, in 1988, Trump flirted with the idea of entering the presidential race, going so far as to deliver a speech in New Hampshire. He toyed with running again in 2000, on the Reform Party ticket, even hiring his old friend Roger Stone to run the exploratory committee before ultimately dropping out. Is it really a coincidence that his dormant political ambitions manifested themselves immediately after his Moscow trip, and never went away?

So, yes, the Soviets were absolutely, positively recruiting Trump on his 1987 visit to Moscow—which began, not coincidentally, on the Fourth of July (Russians love that kind of symbolism). But the KGB was not the only spy network interested in the real estate developer. The trip also attracted the attention of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency—the latter, by this time, becoming the bigger outfit, owing to the emphasis on signals intelligence collection that began in the late seventies.

As the pseudonymous mob expert known as Lincoln’s Bible put it, during our recent telephone conversation: “It’s 1987—the height of the Cold War. Ronald Reagan is president. The Russia desk is the largest, most important desk in the largest intelligence agency in the world (the NSA). And Trump was already a top echelon Confidential Informant for law enforcement. How could they not have known about that trip? It would have been gross negligence not to have known.”

And if our intelligence community knew, would they really not bother interviewing Trump upon his return from Moscow? He’d been wined and dined by the Party elite, after all, and they would have wanted to hear all about it. Beginning in 1987, then, Trump was not only a Confidential Informant for the FBI, but was also being utilized by the CIA.

Again: the two intelligence services were really fucking good. If the KGB was all over the guy, the CIA would have known, and thus taken some kind of action. “There is no universe in which he wasn’t being surveilled/tracked and used by our guys,” Lincoln’s Bible told me. “Not one that I can see.” If so, Trump’s counterintelligence file is over three decades old.

Moscow also marked a transition of sorts. Ownership of the mob asset known as Donald Trump began its gradual transfer from La Cosa Nostra to the Russian mafiya. Not long after the trip, Trump spent time aboard the Lady Ghislaine, the yacht owned by the British publishing magnate Robert Maxwell. That sounds perfectly above board, until you consider that Maxwell, born Jan Hoch in Czechoslovakia, was a seditious little fucker. His classified dossier at the British Foreign Office described him as “a thoroughly bad character and almost certainly financed by Russia.” He was affiliated with Israeli intelligence and the KGB. He was business partners with Semion Mogilevich, so he was mobbed up. And his daughter, Ghislaine Maxwell, would in 1991 begin a long and scandalous relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. For all we know, nothing untoward happened on that yacht. But given the nexus of key OC figures—Mogilevich, the two Maxwells, Epstein—it is hard to write it all off as mere coincidence.

Four-and-a-half years after Trump’s visit to Moscow, the USSR fell. Rapacious “oligarchs” raced to gobble up the country’s wealth and natural resources. Untold billions, maybe trillions, of dollars were removed from Russia, most to banks in quasi-Western places like Cyprus. This created unprecedentedly vast opportunities for willing money launderers in the West—and Donald John Trump was well positioned to benefit from the windfall.

Trump needed the help. By the early nineties, his casinos were going bust, US banks had stopped lending to him, and he desperately needed Russian capital to stay afloat. My business professional contact who lived in Russia explains what likely happened, incrementally, over the next two-and-a-half decades:

Take someone who cannot get credit from a bank headquartered in the English speaking world because he’s already burned every major US and UK bank in New York and London. Canadian banks don’t take American risk that American banks won’t take and Australian banks won’t touch him because their government blacklisted him from doing business in the country. But he has a massive cash need because if he does not have lines of credit to keep servicing his previous debts and his lifestyle and his next big thing, he can’t attract investors into his businesses to keep the ball rolling.

This is a critical point. Trump is not just greedy for his own sake. He has to keep earning, or he will have outlived his usefulness to his mafiya whoremasters. His very life depends on his ability to do deals.

The professional continues:

So Trump needs money that doesn’t ask a lot of questions. He’s happy to pay extra—and pay it he will—because in his mind interest comes without cost: he can write it off his taxes, or he can flush it in bankruptcy, or he can pass it on to his customers, or he can get his investors to give him enough to wash it all out, or he can refinance if and when the straight lending world comes back to him. He’s happy to take Russian money because in his mind, it’s an asset to him to have Russian lenders; it makes him more likely to play the real estate market in Russia.

But he knows that if his name and a Russian lender’s appear on the same finance document, that’s discoverable: by the IRS, by the agencies he probably reports to, by the gaming commissions, by the state regulators, by his ex-wives, by his last set of creditors, by the next bankruptcy trustee he has to deal with. So how does he get money from a Russian bank into his pocket, and how does he repay money to the Russian bank, without leaving that paper trail?

Simple. He does not borrow directly from the Russian bank. He borrows from a straw-man bank, like Deutsche, and has the Russian bank act as a silent guarantor.

The Mazars and Deutsche Bank documents almost certainly contain damning information that confirms all of this, and that will collapse his Trump Tower of Cards—which is why Trump has moved heaven and earth to keep them secret.

Whoever ultimately controlled the dirty rubles in the nineties, when Trump first opened his doors to the Russians, in the twenty-tens the kopek stops with Vladimir Putin. Would any Russian bank be able, in this day and age, to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to Deutsche Bank, or any other straw-man bank,” without Putin’s awareness, if not approval? If you borrow money from a loan shark, but the transaction is made through your local branch bank, guess what? You’re still borrowing money from a loan shark—and in that world, the penalties for nonpayment are brutal.

In the event, by the time Trump began his presidential run in 2015, the transition was complete. He was no longer a creature of the Italian mob. He was fully owned by the Russians—by Mogilevich and the mafiya, and ultimately by Vladimir Putin. The president really is Putin’s puppet, just as Hillary Clinton claimed.

What’s more, plenty of people in the intelligence community and the Justice Department know this is the case, because they have seen his counterintelligence file, or have worked with Trump in his capacity as CI. Robert Mueller must know. James Comey must know. Andrew McCabe must know. James Clapper and John O. Brennan must know. And while all of these individuals have dropped hints, none save Mueller have produced actual receipts—and a lot of his Report remains redacted. It’s no accident that Trump has done everything in his considerable power to impugn these people. He knows what they have on him, so he must attack their credibility.

To wit: When Lisa Page texted Peter Strzok that Trump is “not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” and Strzok replied, “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it,” they were discussing national security, not Democrat/Republican politics; two of the FBI’s best Russian mob experts were highly, and rightly, concerned that an asset of a hostile foreign power would win the White House. No wonder Trump wants us to believe their text exchanges were romantic in nature, and constantly frames Page and Strzok as lovers—the truth could end his presidency.

Alas, Page’s worst fears were realized. The President of the United States answers to the Kremlin. That sounds like something from a bad movie, but in the time of the worst pandemic in over a century, it has immediate, and grave, real-world consequences.

“We have been taken over,” Lincoln’s Bible said, “and a quarter of a million innocent civilians are going to die because of it.”

***

As with “Tinker, Tailor, Mobster, Spy,” this piece was written with a lot of help from Lincoln’s Bible.

Photo: President Ronald Reagan Shaking Hands with Donald Trump and Ivana Trump During The State Visit of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia at The State Dinner in The Blue Room, 2/11/1985. From the Reagan Presidential Archive.

#greg olear #putin's puppet #covid times #organized crime #america is broken #lincoln's bible #long reads

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napoleoninrags · 5 years ago

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President Barabbas

The mob chose a mobster. Elections have consequences.

by Greg Olear

"Easter is a very special day for me ... Easter Sunday, and you'll have packed churches all over our country.” —Donald John Trump, 24 March 2020

I WAS RAISED Catholic, which meant that every Sunday, come hell or high water, we went to church. The Catholic Mass is extremely rote. There’s a lot of call-and-response, a lot of standing up and sitting down, a lot of the same material, repeated over and over and over again. The Apostles’ Creed, for example, has been recited at Mass, in much the same way, since it was codified at the Council of Nicaea during the reign of Constantine the Great, a mere 17 centuries ago.

The best day of the liturgical year, in my recollection, was Palm Sunday. The priest always shared the same story: Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect, appeared before his subjects in Jerusalem on the occasion of Passover, and agreed to free a single Jewish prisoner. The mob had to choose: should Pilate free Jesus, the alleged “King of the Jews,” or Barabbas, a notorious criminal? Whereupon we, role-playing in the pews, would cry, WE WANT BARABBAS! My brother and I shouted with gusto, to my mother’s extreme annoyance: WE WANT BARABBAS! And so the killer was set free, and Christ condemned to die.

I didn’t know at the time that this passage, perpetuating as it does the “Jews killed Jesus” myth, was used for centuries by anti-Semites to justify their despicable deeds. I never interpreted it that way. To me, the story is about how mobs, led as they are by riled-up morons, can easily be fooled and manipulated into voting against their best interests.

The 2016 election is a recent example of how the angry masses, presented with a clear choice of good guy versus bad guy, chose unwisely. It’s not fair to either party to compare Hillary Clinton with Jesus Christ, and Pontius Pilate did not use the Electoral College system in determining whom to pardon, but notorious criminal Donald John Trump is absolutely President Barabbas. The mob went with the mobster.

Three years into the Trump Administration, and a shocking number of the president’s associates are either in prison, about to head to prison, under indictment, or under investigation. There is Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chair, currently incarcerated. There is Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime personal attorney, fixer, and bagman: ditto. There is the treacherous Michael Flynn, awaiting his sentence (or, perhaps, his pardon). There is Trump’s longtime buddy and shadow campaign advisor Roger Stone, soon to toddle off to the hoosegow. There’s also those who have not yet been indicted because of the nefarious machinations of the corrupt Attorney General, William Barr: Rudy Giuliani, Jared Kushner, Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence, Mick Mulvaney, Erik Prince, and Trump’s lousy kids Ivanka, Eric, and Don Junior.

What is remarkable here, aside from the obvious fact that Trump cavorts with an uncanny number of crooks, is that none of these people has flipped. Manafort pretended to, only to ratfuck the FBI. Flynn, too, lied to investigators. Only Cohen gave up some dirt—but how much did he really surrender? The thing is, the rest of these people aren’t nearly as hard. Trump wants to pardon Roger Stone because he knows him well enough to know that he will sing to stay out of the Big House. Jared Kushner, aka Boy Plunder, has done so many illicit things that he will keep FBI agents busy for years; is Mr. Ivanka really not going to flip to avoid prison? And I can’t imagine Don Junior exhibiting the same trollish swagger around Cellblock D.

Trump’s partners in crime are all selfish assholes. They have no real loyalty. Giuliani, for example, loathes Trump with every fiber of his noxious being. He’s only protecting him out of his own self-interest. At some point, to preserve themselves, these fuckers will all turn on each other, and it will be the end of Reservoir Dogs all up in here: a bunch of petty crooks threatening to take each other down.

So why haven’t they?

A big queen sits in the middle of the stalemated chessboard, preventing all movement. The queen’s name is William Barr. He is the titular Attorney General of the United States, but his actual function is to slow-roll the Department of Justice from its takedown of Trump and his co-conspirators. To that end, he holds up witnesses. He stymies evidence from being sent to prosecutors. He cock-blocks US Attorneys, sure as he cock-blocked Mueller. He kicks the can and kicks it again and again and again, hoping to run out the clock. Barr has been so successful that the GOP is not even remotely worried about the bad stuff coming out. He’s gummed up the works so badly that we couldn’t even get witnesses at the fucking impeachment trial.

With a big, fat cork in the bottle of evidence, Trump and his fellow criminals do not have to fear retribution from law enforcement for as long as he stays in office. The only danger now is if they turn on each other. If they respect omertà, they are golden. Thus it is in all of their interests—Trump’s, but also Pence’s, McConnell’s, Pompeo’s, Kushner’s, and so on—to stay the course. These people will do anything, including exacerbate a global health crisis, to not get caught. They don’t care if we die. Repeat: they don’t care if we die. As Mr. White says in Reservoir Dogs: “The choice between doing ten years and taking out some stupid motherfucker, ain’t no choice at all.”

What are they hiding?

In Trump’s case, generations of criminal involvement with the mob—first La Cosa Nostra, later the Russian mafiya. His grandfather was a minor pimp at the dawn of the organized crime era, but Donald’s father, Fred Trump, was, as Lincoln’s Bible tells us, “a businessman front for the Genovese crime family.”

To best understand Fred, just track his rise from single-family home construction to big residential developments. From Shore Haven (1947) to Beach Haven to Trump Village, all were done with known mafia partners, in Genovese-controlled territory, and eventually with a fully Genovese-owned construction company (HRH Construction).

When the Russian mafiya began rolling in, they landed in Fred’s properties and partnered with the Genovese on some big ticket scams. This was also during the time that Fred and his attorney Roy Cohn set up S&A concrete (via Nick Auletta)—a joint venture between Tony Salerno (Genovese boss) and Paul Castellano (Gambino boss), so that donald could build in Manhattan. Remember donald’s quote, “Even my father, he said, you don’t want to go to Manhattan. That’s not our territory?” That’s because Manhattan, for construction, was Gambino territory. They controlled the concrete and unions. And Fred was a very loyal, shrewd front for the Genovese. To get his idiot, greedy kid into Manhattan, Fred and Roy Cohn had to get those two mob bosses to agree on a joint venture.

When the Russian mafiya pushed out the Italian mob after the fall of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump began laundering money for unseemly Vor associates of Semion Mogilevich. The Russians extended him credit when no US bank would touch him, and he remains in their debt—a fact the Mazars and Deutsche Bank documents will reveal, which is why Trump has moved heaven and earth to keep said documents secret.

Because the Russian mafiya works hand in glove with the Russian government, Trump is also, as Hillary Clinton correctly told us four years ago, Putin’s puppet. His ties to Russian intelligence (Putin, remember, is ex-KGB) go back decades. Recruitment of Trump by the KGB began in the Reagan Administration; for all we know, his succession of ex-Soviet-bloc wives better reflect his allegiance to the Soviets than his taste in women. He is also connected to the Russian organized crime via his friend Jeffrey Epstein, a collector of kompromat and money launderer for arms dealers; Epstein’s longtime partner was Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of Robert Maxwell, the spy and former business partner of, yes, Semion Mogilevich.

Trump’s underworld ties were all there in 2016, barely below the surface, for all the world to see. Wayne Barrett wrote about them for the Village Voice. Robert Friedman alluded to them in Red Mafiya. Craig Unger covers them closely in House of Trump, House of Putin. The mainstream media knew damned well what the guy really was, but chose to equate Trump’s years of actual mobbed-up crimes with HRC’s email server. The result? Every half-wit Fox News watcher proclaims, with a straight face, that Hillary, not Donald, is the crook!

Truth: Trump is a notorious criminal, a serial rapist and sexual assailant, wholly owned by the mob, controlled by the underworld and the Kremlin. He is a latter-day Barabbas—and because of the whims of a riled-up mob, he’s now, somehow, the President of the United States. Make no mistake: If he thinks it will help him avoid prosecution, he will order the churches open for Easter without qualm or hesitation. In his calculus, Jesus gave up His life for us, so we should give up our lives for Trump. He will happily pervert the holiest of Christian holy days to get what he wants. To this monster, nothing is sacred..

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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https://medium.com/@CleverTitleTK/their-own-two-feet-8ddd1dbb1602

You have to read this article on the immigrant roots of Ken Cuccinelli and yes his public charge grandparents when they arrived in this country with no education or money. Jennifer has done a great job of documenting(See Website For Documents) his family's immigrant history. His hypocrisy is rich. PLEASE READ 📖 AND SHARE. TY 🤔

😂🤣😂🤣

Their Own Two Feet

Jennifer Mendelssohn | Published August 30, 2019 | Medium | Posted August 30, 2019 6:15 PM ET

As the new public face of the Trump administration’s draconian immigration policies, acting USCIS Director Ken Cuccinelli has wasted no time stirring up collective ire. Most notably, he set off a firestorm of criticism by rewriting the iconic Emma Lazarus poem that has long functioned as a kind of unofficial American immigration mantra. “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge,” he proudly told NPR’s Rachel Martin, who somehow resisted the urge to burst out laughing and/or slap him upside the head. (You can read several historians’ takes on the public charge rule here, but suffice it to say that the concept, which was meant to weed out only the very, very least desirable of immigrants, has never been enforced as rigorously as Cuccinelli is suggesting.)

Cuccinelli later elaborated thatLazarus’ poem was “referring back to people coming from Europe where they had class-based societies, where people were considered wretched if they weren’t in the right class.” Wink wink, nudge, nudge, we hear you! And if you had the word “Europe” in Bigotry Bingo, drink!

For the past two years, I’ve run a project called #resistancegenealogy, which looks at the family histories of public figures in order to show just how similar so many of our stories really are. Cuccinelli’s very public numbskullery definitely set a new record: never before I have I received so many texts, tweets, emails and Facebook messages from people so eager to learn about someone’s family tree. (Side note: Never before have I seen so many people who’ve never done genealogy try to do it themselves and get it so very very wrong. You realize more than one person in a town can have the same name, right? And that not all records are online? And that other people’s public family trees are very often…wrong? Here, read this.)

And never before has a family history — or at least the Italian half of that history that I’ll address here — been so utterly unsurprising. I mean, where did you all think the story of the Cuccinelli family of Hoboken, New Jersey was going to go, really? C’mon now.

And so, here I am, just a girl with some documents, standing in front of her country, asking it not to betray its immigrant past. Asking it to remember that welcoming the “wretched refuse of your teeming shore,” even when that “refuse” comes with little more than grit, determination and a desire to do better for their children, is a bedrock American value, a value that allowed many of you reading these words right now to be here. It’s a value that allowed Ken Cuccinelli — descended from Southern Italians of modest means and little education who would likely never pass muster under the proposed changes — to be here. I mean, hellooooo? Were you listening at allduring the 4th grade unit on immigration?

Cuccinelli called a New York Daily Newsarticle about his family history (albeit one that identifies the wrong ship’s manifest as his great-grandfather’s) “intellectually dishonest.” Any comparison to past immigrants, he maintained, was invalid because “the welfare state didn’t exist back then.”

Nativists love to fall back on this argument, but they also still love to contrast the behavior of current immigrants with what they believe to be their own ancestors’ spotless — and “legal!” — immigration and assimilation histories, despite the fact that comparisons to “legal” immigration at a time when there were almost no immigration laws for Europeans to break are inherently problematic. And despite the fact that the historical record is often at odds with their starry-eyed, mythologized understanding of their ancestors’ pasts.

“My great-grandfather knew upon arriving in the United States that he had to learn English and that he had to work hard to succeed in this country,” Cuccinelli told the Daily News.

“My family worked together to ensure that they could provide for their own needs, and they never expected the government to do it for them,” he said at a press briefing.

I’m so very very tired of telling you this very same story over and over again, but since so many of you asked — some less politely than others, btw, can we please work on that moving forward? — let’s go to the videotape and look at the Cuccinelli family story, shall we?

THE CUCCINELLIS

Ken Cuccinelli’s paternal grandfather, Dominick Luigi Cuccinelli, was born in Hoboken, New Jersey to — are you sitting down? — Italian immigrant parents who’d only been in the country for about ten years. Ken’s great-grandfather was Domenico Cuccinelli (né Cucciniello) born on the 6th of December, 1874 in Avellino, Italy. His 1897 marriage certificate identifies him and his wife, Fortuna Preziosi, as farmers.

In March of 1901, Domenico became part of the massive wave of Italians who lit out for greater opportunity and stability in America, sailing on the SS Patria from Naples. Identified as a “laborer,” he arrived at Ellis Island with $8.75, equivalent to about $260 today. His contact in the U.S.? An unnamed cousin already living on Adams Street in Hoboken.

Ancestry indexed this record under “Camiello.” Which may be why you couldn’t find it.

Domenico’s wife Fortuna would follow her husband to America the following year on the Algeria, arriving at Ellis Island with their two small children and $20.

It’s important to remember that for all our talk of welcoming the huddled masses with open arms, American immigration history also has a pronounced strain of ugly nativism, a rather ironic twist for a nation founded on stolen land. (And we’re talking here only about immigrants by choice.) Which means that Ken Cuccinelli’s immigrant family was subjected to the very same brand of bigoted suspicion that he is now trying to inflict on others. The Ken Cuccinellis of the early twentieth century — though they didn’t typically have last names like Cuccinelli — were just as insistent that people like the Cuccinellis didn’t have the right to become Americans. That they wouldn’t fit in. That they had nothing to offer and would only be a drain on “our” resources.

“[Italians] are coming in waves and think they have a right to come….There has been a surfeit of unskilled illiterates for years and the people do not want any more of them,” opined the Jersey (City) Journal on November 29, 1902, just a few months after Ken’s great-grandmother arrived there.

So what became of the Cuccinellis? Well, the first we see of the family in American records is in the 1905 New Jersey state census. Father Domenico is employed as a laborer, supporting a family of six. And though they’ve been in the U.S. for three and four years at this point, neither parent reported being able to speak English.

But as is so often the case, the Cuccinelli family moved up in the world. By the 1915 census, both Domenico and Fortuna are listed as literate and English speaking, despite his having never had a formal education and her having only completed eighth grade. In 1919, Domenico, still working as a laborer and now living in nearby Jersey City, declared his intention to become an American citizen, a process he completed three years later.

You’ll notice the family’s 1922 address: 401 Monroe Street in Hoboken, where they are also listed in the 1925 city directory. Just a few houses down on Monroe (the entire neighborhood has streets grandly named after American presidents, incidentally) was another family headed by Italian immigrants — a boilermaker and a midwife. They had a son named Frank just a few years younger than Ken’s grandfather Dominick. Perhaps you’ll recognize the last name and wonder what would have been lost had his immigrant parents been barred.

By 1930, Domenico Cuccinelli owned a home on Madison Street. And by 1940, he and his wife were comfortably retired, living in a house worth $5000, the very picture of the American dream.

THE POLICASTROS

Ken’s grandmother Josephine Policastro Cuccinelli was also the Jersey-born daughter of Italian immigrants: Gaetano Policastro and Maria Ronga (also spelled Rongo) from Monte San Giacomo in Salerno.

A teenaged Maria Ronga (her birth certificate indicates she was 17) arrived at Ellis Island in November of 1903 with her widowed 48-year-old mother, Giuseppa Romano, who has no listed occupation, and three younger siblings. Giuseppa’s husband Giuseppe Ronga, a tailor, had died in 1901 at the age of 44, which may have played a role in their decision to move. With all of $5 between the five of them, they were detained at Ellis Island — as indicated by the “S.I.” for “Special Inquiry” stamped by their names in the margin of the manifest. The “Record of Aliens Held For Special Inquiry” list indicates the reason they were held, abbreviated as “L.P.C.;” it stands for “Likely Public Charge.” So yes, the great-grandmother of the man now beating the drums to tighten the public charge rule was…labeled a likely public charge herself.

After a day’s detainment and a hearing — at which Maria’s older brother Vincenzo, who paid for their passage, would have likely been called to testify that he could support his mother and siblings — the family was allowed to enter the United States, as were more than 98% of those who came through Ellis Island.

But make no mistake: there were many who would have happily sent the Rongas packing. Witness this Judgemagazine cartoon from the very year they arrived, which depicts southern European immigrants as filthy rats, bringing crime and anarchy into the country. (Nice Mafia hats, right?) Doesn’t this sound… familiar?

The new arrivals moved in with Maria’s older brother Vincenzo, now going by the name James, in Hoboken. Ken’s great-grandmother Maria found work as a candy maker, as shown in the 1905 census.

Two and a half years after her arrival, though she is somehow still only 17, Maria “Ronca” (age and spelling are slippery concepts, genealogically speaking) married Gaetano “Thomas” Policastro, a recently widowed father of two with an eighth grade education. Gaetano was also born in Monte San Giacomo and appears to have immigrated as a child in the 1880s.

In 1908, Thomas and Maria had the first of their eight children together, Ken’s grandmother Josephine. The 1910 census shows them living with Maria’s family, including her mother Josephine Romano Ronga. Thomas is working as a salesman at a market. Both the 1910 and 1920 census indicated that Ken’s great-great-grandmother Josephine never learned English, even after being in the country for 17 years. And…so what? Immigrants often took their sweet time learning to speak English, if at all. Their children learned to speak English at school so that one day their great-great-grandsons could become the attorney general of Virginia and maybe one day feel the need to cover up the naked statute in the state symbol. Problem solved.

Though the 1930 census shows the Policastros owning a home worth $12,000, as the nation tumbled deeper into the grips of the Great Depression, like so many Americans, they appear to have fallen on hard times. A series of legal notices in the Jersey Journal(available on GenealogyBank) gesture to the outlines of the story: A lawsuit over non-payment on a $8150 bank note. A foreclosure on the Policastro home on Paterson Plank Road. A bankruptcy hearing. A District Court judgment against Thomas for $450, filed by James Ronga. Would the Policastros have met their own great-grandson’s requirement that immigrants always “carry their own weight?” (According to the Annual report of the Attorney General of the United States, about 1300 of New Jersey’s approximately four million residents voluntarily filed for personal bankruptcy in the fiscal year ended 1931.)

But by 1940, now nearing 60, Thomas Policastro had rebounded. The census shows him renting a home in nearby North Bergen. He is listed as the proprietor of a scrap metal business, and earning $1300 a year, right around the national average. Two of his American-born sons served during World War II. The Policastros proved that they deserved the chance they were given — the chance to have ups and downs and everything in between, the chance to pave the way for future generations to soar.

But one last point. Like the Cuccinellis, the Policastros also had neighbors of note, though they may not have been as well-known as the Sinatras. In 1920, the Policastros lived just a mile away from another Jersey City family headed by a Jewish immigrant who never completed high school and worked for decades at an overalls factory in nearby Paterson. This family was from the former Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia, and had arrived in 1896. Much like the Policastros, this family also eventually found themselves in the pages of the local newspaper. In 1940, the patriarch was arrested with his son-in-law and two other men on charges of stealing from that very same overalls factory; the charges were later dropped and the sentence suspended after they made restitution. But all of that Jewish immigrant’s grandsons would go on to college and upstanding careers. Two served in the military. One became a lawyer. One had a master’s degree. And in the fall of 1986, one of that immigrant’s great-granddaughters left Long Island to enroll at the University of Virginia, a venerable institution founded by an American president. Here she is in the First Year Faces Book, resplendent in a Benetton vest and pearls.

And one of her classmates at that venerable institution? Well, she knew him by his nickname: “Cooch.”

So yes, the scions of two Jersey City families headed by those uneducated and sometimes troubled immigrants seemed to have done alright for themselves. It’s a quintessentially American story, one I see day in and day out doing genealogical research: immigrant narratives are messy and imperfect and complicated but almost universally, they ultimately end with those families in a much better place than they would have been otherwise. That same great-grandfather’s sister, for instance, stayed behind in their ancestral town of Sniatyn and is presumed murdered during the Holocaust. So was my maternal grandfather’s brother, despite his writing a desperate letter to President “Rosiwelt” begging for refuge for his family in America.

How many future Ken Cuccinellis are the Trump administration’s increasingly restrictive immigration policies going to keep out? Who or what are those policies protecting, other than unfounded racist fears that follow in the very worst of American traditions?

Just about twenty years after Ken Cuccinelli’s family arrived from Italy and began their ascent up the ladder of the American dream, the ladder that lifted him to the grounds of Mr. Jefferson’s University and to law school at George Mason, to elected office in the state of Virginia and to a nomination to head a federal agency, Congress enacted the infamous Johnson-Reed Act, which set up quotas specifically designed to keep out people just like them. The number of Italians arriving in America dropped from 200,000 a year in the first decade of the twentieth century to under 4,000.

As Cuccinelli’s own career makes clear, the critics were dead wrong about the potential contributions of humble immigrants like his ancestors. And so is he.

CREDITS: I’m grateful to Megan Smolenyak, Michael Cassara, Rich Venezia and Tammy Hepps, who provided research, translation and editorial assistance.

#currently reading #trumpism #trump administration #president donald trump #trump scandals #melania trump #immigration #u.s. immigration and customs enforcement #immigrants #u.s. news #u.s. presidential elections #politics #us politics #politics and government #ken cuccinelli #u.s. politics

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ammusvlog · 6 years ago

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Top 10 most beautiful nature places in Europe

#1 : Plitvice Lakes National Park, Croatia

Plitvice Lakes National Park is a 295-sq.-km forest reserve in central Croatia. It's known for a chain of 16 terraced lakes, joined by waterfalls, that extend into a limestone canyon. Walkways and hiking trails wind around and across the water, and an electric boat links the 12 upper and 4 lower lakes. The latter are the site of Veliki Slap, a 78m-high waterfall. (Wiki)

Country : Croatia Area: 296.8 km² Elevation: 367 m (Korana bridge), 1279 m (Seliški vrh)

#2 : Cliffs of Moher, Ireland

The Cliffs of Moher are sea cliffs located at the southwestern edge of the Burren region in County Clare, Ireland. They run for about 14 kilometres. (Wiki)

Country : Ireland Elevation: 155 m (509 ft) Nearest city: Lahinch

#3 : Svalbard, Norway

Svalbard is a Norwegian archipelago between mainland Norway and the North Pole. One of the world’s northernmost inhabited areas, it's known for its rugged, remote terrain of glaciers and frozen tundra sheltering polar bears, Svalbard reindeer and Arctic foxes. The Northern Lights are visible during winter, and summer brings the “midnight sun”—sunlight 24 hours a day. (Wiki)

Country : Norway

#4 : Capri’s Blue Grotto, Italy

The Blue Grotto is a sea cave on the coast of the island of Capri, southern Italy. Sunlight, passing through an underwater cavity and shining through the seawater, creates a blue reflection that illuminates the cavern. (Wiki)

Country : Italy Location: Anacapri, (Campania ) Length: 54 m Geology: Sea cave

#5 : Swiss Alps, Switzerland

The Alpine region of Switzerland, conventionally referred to as the Swiss Alps, represents a major natural feature of the country and is, along with the Swiss Plateau and the Swiss portion of the Jura Mountains, one of its three main physiographic regions. (Wiki)

Country : Switzerland Highest point: Monte Rosa (Dufourspitze) Parent range: Alps

#6 : Santorini, Greece

Santorini is one of the Cyclades islands in the Aegean Sea. It was devastated by a volcanic eruption in the 16th century BC, forever shaping its rugged landscape. The whitewashed, cubiform houses of its 2 principal towns, Fira and Oia, cling to cliffs above an underwater caldera (crater). They overlook the sea, small islands to the west and beaches made up of black, red and white lava pebbles.

Country : Greece Area: 76.19 km² Max length: 18 km Destinations: Oia, Fira, Kamari, Imerovigli, Pyrgos Kallistis, Vourvoulos, Emporio, Akrotiri, Vothonas, messaria, foinikia

#7 : Amalfi Coast, Italy

The Amalfi Coast is a 50-kilometer stretch of coastline along the southern edge of Italy’s Sorrentine Peninsula, in the Campania region. It’s a popular holiday destination, with sheer cliffs and a rugged shoreline dotted with small beaches and pastel-colored fishing villages. The coastal road between the port city of Salerno and clifftop Sorrento winds past grand villas, terraced vineyards and cliffside lemon groves.

Country : Italy Province: Province of Salerno Region : Campania Area: 11,231 ha (43.36 sq mi)

#8 : Isle of Skye, Scotland

The Isle of Skye, connected to Scotland's northwest coast by bridge, is known for its rugged landscapes, picturesque fishing villages and medieval castles. The largest island in the Inner Hebrides archipelago, it has an indented coastline of peninsulas and narrow lochs, radiating out from a mountainous interior. The town of Portree, a base for exploring the island, features harbourside pubs and boutiques.

Country : Scotland

#9 : Black Forest, Germany

The Black Forest is a mountainous region in southwest Germany, bordering France. Known for its dense, evergreen forests and picturesque villages, it is often associated with the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. It's renowned for its spas and the cuckoo clocks produced in the region since the 1700s. The region’s largest town, Freiburg, is filled with Gothic buildings and surrounded by vineyards.

Country: Germany Area: 6,009 km² Elevation: 1,493 m Highest point: Feldberg

* The Black Forest is a mountainous terrain at about 200-1500 meters (650-4900 feet) above sea level.

#10 : Gorges du Verdon, France

Verdon Gorge is a river canyon in southeastern France. Carved by the Verdon River, it has white-water rapids and cliffs. Paths include the Blanc-Martel trail, ending at Point Sublime lookout. Within Verdon Natural Regional Park, the village of Moustiers-Sainte-Marie has 12th-century Notre Dame de Beauvoir Chapel and ceramics at the Musée de la Faïence. South, the Musée des Tourneurs sur Bois shows local woodwork.

Country : France

* The Verdon Gorge is narrow and deep, with depths of 250 to 700 metres and widths of 6 to 100 at the river level and 200 to 1500 metres from one side of the Gorge to the other at the summit.

#travel #tour #nature #euorpe #france #greece #italy #norway #ireland #germany #scotland #switzerland #croatia #places #visit #black forest #isle of sky #swiss alps

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brookstonalmanac · 4 months ago

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Events 9.9 (after 1940)

1940 – George Stibitz pioneers the first remote operation of a computer. 1940 – Treznea Massacre in Transylvania. 1942 – World War II: A Japanese floatplane drops incendiary bombs on Oregon. 1943 – World War II: The Allies land at Salerno and Taranto, Italy. 1944 – World War II: The Fatherland Front takes power in Bulgaria through a military coup in the capital and armed rebellion in the country. A new pro-Soviet government is established. 1945 – Second Sino-Japanese War: The Empire of Japan formally surrenders to China. 1947 – First case of a computer bug being found: A moth lodges in a relay of a Harvard Mark II computer at Harvard University. 1948 – Kim Il Sung declares the establishment of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea). 1954 – The 6.7 Mw  Chlef earthquake shakes northern Algeria with a maximum Mercalli intensity of XI (Extreme). At least 1,243 people were killed and 5,000 were injured. 1956 – Elvis Presley appears on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time. 1965 – The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development is established. 1965 – Hurricane Betsy makes its second landfall near New Orleans, leaving 76 dead and $1.42 billion ($10–12 billion in 2005 dollars) in damages, becoming the first hurricane to cause over $1 billion in unadjusted damage. 1966 – The National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act is signed into law by U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson. 1969 – In Canada, the Official Languages Act comes into force, making French equal to English throughout the Federal government. 1969 – Allegheny Airlines Flight 863 collides in mid-air with a Piper PA-28 Cherokee over Moral Township, Shelby County, Indiana, killing all 83 people on board both aircraft. 1970 – A British airliner is hijacked by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and flown to Dawson's Field in Jordan. 1971 – The four-day Attica Prison riot begins, eventually resulting in 39 dead, most killed by state troopers retaking the prison. 1972 – In Kentucky's Mammoth Cave National Park, a Cave Research Foundation exploration and mapping team discovers a link between the Mammoth and Flint Ridge cave systems, making it the longest known cave passageway in the world. 1976 – Two Aeroflot flights collide in mid-air over Anapa, Soviet Union, killing 70. 1988 – Vietnam Airlines Flight 831 crashes in Khu Khot, Thailand, while on approach to Don Muang International Airport, killing 76. 1990 – Batticaloa massacre: Massacre of 184 Tamil civilians by the Sri Lankan Army in Batticaloa District. 1991 – Tajikistan declares independence from the Soviet Union. 1993 – Israeli–Palestinian peace process: The Palestine Liberation Organization officially recognizes Israel as a legitimate state. 1994 – Space Shuttle program: Space Shuttle Discovery is launched on STS-64. 2001 – Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of the Northern Alliance, is assassinated in Afghanistan by two al-Qaeda assassins who claimed to be Arab journalists wanting an interview. 2006 – Space Shuttle Program: Space Shuttle Atlantis is launched on STS-115 to resume assembling the International Space Station. It is the first ISS assembly mission after the Columbia disaster back in 2003.[13] 2009 – The Dubai Metro, the first urban train network in the Arabian Peninsula, is ceremonially inaugurated. 2012 – The Indian space agency puts into orbit its heaviest foreign satellite yet, in a streak of 21 consecutive successful PSLV launches. 2012 – A wave of attacks kills more than 100 people and injure 350 others across Iraq. 2015 – Elizabeth II becomes the longest reigning monarch of the United Kingdom. 2016 – The government of North Korea conducts its fifth and reportedly biggest nuclear test. World leaders condemn the act, with South Korea calling it "maniacal recklessness".

#Events

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portalinowebblog · 7 years ago

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Country House Ristorante Agriturismo Sulle Onde dalla Collina Mainolfo Montecorice Salerno www.sulleondedellacollina.com Country House Ristorante Agriturismo Sulle Onde dalla Collina, Mainolfo Montecorice, Salerno. Inserita nella splendida macchia verde del Parco Nazionale del Cilento, questa piccola Country House, 6 camere doppie, una sala interna e un vasto spazio esterno per il ristorante, è l’ideale per chi vuole trascorrere brevi o lunghi soggiorni all’insegna del relax in un ambiente ricercato e confortevole.

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abubakarcasestudies · 6 years ago

Text

Case Studies

Wonder Woman 2017 (American Blockbuster)

Budget: $149 Million

Box Office: 821.9 Million

Genre: Action,war and fantasy

Directed by: Patty Jenkins

Producers:

Charles Roven

Debora Snyder

Richard Suckle

Dc Films

Rat-Pac Dune

Wanda pictures

Atlas entertainment

Cruel and unusual films

Cast:

Gal Gadot

Chris Pine

Robin Wright

Danny Huston

David Thewlis

Connie Nielsen

Elena Anaya

How it all happened

In 2015, Patty Jenkins accepted an offer to direct Wonder Woman, based on a screenplay by Allan Heinberg and a story co-written by Heinberg, Zack Snyder, Geoff Johns and Jason Fuchs. Of this version, Gadot stated that,

for a long time, people didn't know how to approach the story. When Patty and I had our creative conversations about the character, we realized that Diana can still be a normal woman, one with very high values, but still a woman. She can be sensitive. She is smart and independent and emotional. She can be confused. She can lose her confidence. She can have confidence. She is everything. She has a human heart.

This version was conceived of as a prequel to the first live-action, theatrical appearance of Wonder Woman, in the 2016 film, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, placing Wonder Woman in the 1910s and World War I (a decision which differs from her comic book origins as a supporter of the Allies during World War II). As for story development, Jenkins credits the stories by the character's creator William Moulton Marston in the 1940s and George Perez's seminal stories in the 1980s in which he modernized the character. In addition, it follows some aspects of DC Comics' origin changes in The New 52 reboot, where Diana is the daughter of Zeus. Jenkins cited Richard Donner's Superman as an inspiration.

Filming and Locations

Production began on November 21, 2015, under the working title Nightingale. Among the film sets were Lower Halstow, Kent, Australia House, and the Sassi di Matera, Castel del Monte and Camerota in Southern Italy. Matthew Jensen was the director of photography, filming in the United Kingdom, France and Italy. Production in London ended on March 13, 2016. On March 20, 2016, filming was underway in Italy. In late April, filming took place at a museum in France, where a Wayne Enterprises truck was spotted alongside Gadot. Production ended on May 9, 2016. Patty Jenkins and director of photography Matt Jensen revealed that the film's look was inspired by painter John Singer Sargent. Reshoots took place in November 2016, while Gadot was five months pregnant. A green cloth was placed over her stomach to edit out her pregnancy during post-production.

To find the perfect location to shoot the Amazon island of Themyscira, the birthplace of Wonder Woman herself, the film's producers searched all over the world, finally settling on the Amalfi Coast: a stretch of coastline on the Tyrrhenian Sea, located in the Province of Salerno in Southern Italy. It was chosen because most beaches in the world that sit below big cliffs disappear beneath the tide for part of every day. Production designer Aline Bonetto and her location manager Charles Somers considered 47 countries and visited several of them before they found what they were looking for. Bonetto explained that, "Italy had beautiful weather, a beautiful blue-green sea, not too much tide, not too much wave. Our effects team added some cliffs in post-production, and it was the perfect way to go".

Distribution

It was distributed by Warner Bros.Pictures

Wonder Woman had its world premiere on May 15, 2017 in Shanghai. It premiered on May 25, 2017 in Los Angeles. The film's London premiere, which was scheduled to take place on May 31 at the Odeon Leicester Square, was cancelled due to the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing. The film had its Latin America premiere in Mexico City on May 27. It was released in most of the world, including in IMAX, on June 2, 2017, after originally being scheduled for June 23. Belgium, Singapore and South Korea received the film first, with May 31 openings. On April 17, it was announced that Wonder Woman would be released in China on June 2, the same day as its North American release.

Lady Macbeth (British Independent Film)

PRODUCTION

Directed by William Oldryd

Written by Alice Birch

Produced by Fodhla Cronin

Production companies: Bbc films,sixty six pictures, British film institute,ifeatures,Protagonist Pictures.

Budget: $650,000

Box Office: $3.9 Million

Distributors

Altitude Film Distribution(UK)

Roadside Attractions (US)

CAST

Florence Pugh as Katherine Lester

Cosmo Jarvis as Sebastian

Naomi Ackie as Anna

Christopher Fairbank as Boris Lester

Paul Hilton as Alexander Lester

HOW IT ALL BEGAN

In September 2015, it was announced Florence Pugh, Cosmo Jarvis, Christopher Fairbank, Naomi Ackie and Paul Hilton had been cast in the film, with William Oldroyd directing from a screenplay by Alice Birch.

Filming and Locations

Lambton Castle, Chester-le-Street, County Durham, England, UK

(The Lesters' home)

Northumberland, England, UK

(shooting location)

Seaham Beach, County Durham, England, UK

Gibside, Near Rowlands Gill, Burnopfield, Gateshead, Tyne and Wear, England, UK

Cow Green Reservoir, County Durham, England, UK

Critical Response

On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 89% based on 135 reviews, with a weighted average of 7.7/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Lady Macbeth flashes some surprising toughness beneath its period exterior, bolstered by a mesmerizing – and unforgiving – central performance by Florence Pugh." On Metacritic, which assigns an average rating to reviews, the film has a weighted score of 76 out of 100, based on 37 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

Guy Lodge of Variety said "Florence Pugh announces herself as a major talent to watch in William Oldroyd's impressively tough-minded Victorian tragedy." Mick LaSalle of The San Francisco Chronicle writes "Oldroyd's approach to Lady Macbeth guarantees some longueurs as the film wears on. But the clarity with which Pugh and Oldroyd communicate Katherine's thoughts and motives maintains a solid interest throughout."

Release

The film had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on 10 September 2016. Shortly after, Roadside Attractions and Altitude Film Distribution acquired US and UK distribution rights to the film, respectively. It went onto screen at the BFI London Film Festival on 14 October 2016 and the Sundance Film Festival on 20 January 2017

The film was released in the United Kingdom on 28 April 2017 and in the United States on 14 July 2017.

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mykidsgay · 6 years ago

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Pride Tells the History of the Rainbow Flag, But Needs Some Other Books to Prop It Up

By Teresa Kane

Pride: The Story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag tells the story of the creation of the first Pride flag in 1978. It moves from the very beginning of Harvey Milk’s first political campaign, to the creation of the first rainbow flag, to our current times, with the flag being flown all over the world. It is rare for members of a marginalized community to see our history in books, and almost never in books for children. Pride: The Story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag is a step in the right direction, and I’m glad it was written—even if I don’t love everything about it.

The illustrations by Steven Salerno are gorgeous, mixing the bright and bold colors of the flag with more subdued background figures. Each page is a different color, with a purple sea of people on one page and a dark blue cityscape on the next. We see masses of humanity marching and protesting and fighting together, all with the rainbow flag weaving through the pages. The feeling of the 1970’s is captured perfectly in the pencil drawings of women in bell bottoms dipping fabric into vats of dye. There is a beautiful spread of the White House bathed in rainbow lights that gives me goosebumps.

While this book is full of life and hope and beauty, it is not perfect. For one, it’s not until page three of the book that gay people are explicitly mentioned. Instead, the story begins with Harvey Milk dreaming about equality for everyone, and about how he personally can make a difference.

As a teacher, I often think about how stories are best told to kids. I understand that not every kid comes with the same background knowledge, and that some may need a bit of a catch-up. Kids these days, especially our youngest kiddos, might not know that there was a time when queer folks were denied basic rights, access to jobs, or the freedom to marry who we loved. The wording in the story is vague, and a child who doesn’t already understand the struggle wouldn’t understand this book. A sentence or two explaining the situation for the queer community at the time would help kids understand why Harvey Milk was a visionary and why the flag is so important.

If this book was written to educate kids about the struggle our community went through and continues to go through, let’s not water down our struggle in such a way that everything is sanitized! For example, the illustration of the White House illuminated by colored light says nothing about how we won the right to marry that day. Even young kids can handle hard truths if told with age-appropriate language. I can understand wanting to make this book accessible to a broad audience, but the real story is lost by over-simplifying our issues.

I’d have liked to see more (well, any, really) racial diversity in the illustrations as well. The crowd scenes are overwhelmingly white. While I could pick out some disabled and gender variant folks, I saw perhaps two black people in the illustration of a protest that took place in California, the most racially diverse state in the country. Later, there is a two-page spread with 12 people—eight of whom are white, eight of whom are men. Four black people. No Asian or Latinx people at all, despite the fact that there were Latinx and Asian men working closely with Harvey Milk’s campaigns. White cisgender men are historically over-represented in LGBTQ media coverage, and I wish this book moved away from that.

Overall, I think this book would be a fantastic component to a longer lesson about the continuing fight for queer and trans rights, but it doesn’t work as a standalone. For the most part, the book provides biographical information on both Milk and Gilbert Baker (who created the first rainbow Pride flag) along with some resources for learning more. It is a great addition to anyone’s library, but it needs other books to prop it up.

This book has gotten rave reviews from nearly every major book website and literary organization in the country, including LGBTQ news outlets. They point out that it was a very long time coming and that our children will finally be introduced to an important part of our country’s history. They aren’t wrong in this; it is a beautiful, important book. I just wish it showed what our community really looks like.

***

Click through to read about our brilliant contributors!

#my kid is gay #pride #pride book #harvey milk #lgbt #lgbtq #book review

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creativinn · 3 years ago

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A library the internet can’t get enough of | Books and Literature News,The Indian Express

On the first Tuesday of the year, author and political activist Don Winslow tweeted a photograph of an avid reader’s dream library. Bathed in the buttery glow of three table lamps, almost every surface of the room is covered with books. There are books on the tables, books stacked on mahogany ladders, and books atop still more books lining the shelves of the room. “I hope you see the beauty in this that I do,” Winslow wrote in the tweet, which has been acknowledged with 32,800 hearts.

If you spend enough time in the literary corners of Twitter, this image may look familiar. It rises again just about annually, and the library has been attributed over the years to authors including Umberto Eco and buildings in Italy and Prague. As with other images featuring beautiful bookshelves, people go absolutely bananas for it. Winslow’s post received 1,700 comments, including one from a professor at Pace University who has been using the photo as his Zoom background.

“It’s clearly the home of a person who loves and collects books,” Winslow said in an email through his agent, Shane Salerno. “For me, I think that photo is as stunning as a sunset. I could spend days and days locked in that library examining each book.” He noted that there’s something comforting about the image, since “it’s a room you could happily get lost in.”

Winslow had no idea the origin of the photo. He had found it on Twitter, but didn’t remember the name or location of the library. (Though he believed it to be the personal library of a prominent author from another country.)

The library, it should be known, is not in Europe. It doesn’t even exist anymore. But when it did, it was the home library of Johns Hopkins professor Richard Macksey in Baltimore. (I was his student in 2015 and interviewed him for Literary Hub in 2018.) Macksey, who died in 2019, was a book collector, polyglot and scholar of comparative literature. At Hopkins, he founded one of the country’s first interdisciplinary academic departments and organized the 1966 conference “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” which included the first stateside lectures by French theorists Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and Paul de Man.

Macksey’s book collection clocked in at 51,000 titles, according to his son, Alan, excluding magazines and other ephemera. A decade ago, the most valuable pieces — including first editions of “Moby Dick,” T.S. Eliot’s “Prufrock and Other Observations,” and works by Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley — were moved to a “special collections” room on the Hopkins campus. After Macksey’s death, a SWAT team-like group of librarians and conservationists spent three weeks combing through his book-filled, 7,400-square-foot house to select 35,000 volumes to add to the university’s libraries.

In Premium Now |How a new book salutes the baddies who made the classic Hindi-film villain everlasting

Surprise discoveries included an 18th-century Rousseau text with charred covers (found in the kitchen), a “pristine” copy of a rare 1950s exhibition catalog showing Wassily Kandinsky’s paintings, posters from the May 1968 protests when students in Paris occupied the Sorbonne, a hand-drawn Christmas card from filmmaker John Waters, and the original recordings of the theorists at that 1966 structuralism conference.

“For years, everyone had said ‘there’s got to be recordings of those lectures.’ Well, we finally found the recordings of those lectures. They were hidden in a cabinet behind a bookshelf behind a couch,” said Liz Mengel, associate director of collections and academic services for the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins. Several first editions by 20th-century poets and novelists sat on a shelf in the laundry room.

After the librarians from Hopkins and nearby Loyola Notre Dame were finished selecting their donations, the remaining books were carted away by a dealer, so Macksey’s son could prepare the house to be sold.

The library image sidesteps all those details to evoke something more universal, said Ingrid Fetell Lee, the author of the Aesthetics of Joy, a blog about the relationship between decor and delight. “We’re attracted to the image, and we come up with all sorts of stories about who it might be and what it might be because we love to tell stories,” she said. “But what’s really driving the attraction is much more visceral.”

Fetell Lee pointed to the photo’s sense of abundance. “There’s something about the sensorial abundance of seeing lots of something that gives us a little thrill,” she said. Also relevant: the “satisfying” sense of organized chaos, and the awe inspired by the high ceilings.

Pictures of books and libraries are popular across social platforms. A representative from Instagram said that some of the top-liked posts on the platform that include the words “library” or “libraries” feature large quantities of books, a “cozy” aesthetic or a warmer color scheme.

What would Macksey think if he knew his library had taken on a life of its own? “My dad liked nothing better than sharing his love of books and literature with others,” Alan Macksey said. “He’d be delighted that his library lives on through this photo.”

(This article originally appeared in The New York Times.)

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This content was originally published here.

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canaryrecords · 7 years ago

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An unfinished obit for Leo Sarkisian (January 4, 1921 – June 8, 2018): Leo Sarkisian arrived home from World War II as a man in his mid-20s with nine battle stars including a bronze star “for meritorious service” and initiative, energy, and perseverance. He had volunteered straight out of art school in September, 1942 and for a year a half had been a topographical cartographer for the U.S., stationed in Algeria as part of Engineer Intelligence Services. Because he had been tasked with studying overhead photographs of German bases in Salerno, he was sent in with the Commandos in Italy because he knew the lay of the land. He walked in with the assault. A third of the U.S. force died. He had seen that – friends his age. The war over, Sarkisian lived first with his uncle, a dry cleaner, in New York City on 8th Avenue near 24th Street. His uncle got him a job as an illustrator – magazines and books – during the day. Lots of Armenians were engravers and illustrators. At night, he went out and listened to music and drank and blew his wages in jazz clubs in the Village listening to Artie Shaw, Lionel Hampton, and Vido Musso, Benny Goodman’s Italian tenor saxophonist. Leo had always been a clarinetist himself and played jazz. Then there were the “oriental” clubs up and down 8th Ave, where music in Turkish, Greek, and Armenian thrived among the immigrants - The Egyptian Gardens, The Brittania. The music there was close to the music from childhood in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where the older Armenian men played oud, violin, zurna, and dumbek and sang Ottoman folk songs in Turkish, listening to Marko Melkon and “Sugar Mary” Vartanian, and Louis Matalon, Sephardic Jew at whose side Leo often sat, watching him play the 72-string dulcimer, the kanun. That was when Leo wasn’t throwing money at the dancers or ordering another drink. And it was like the fleeting, fun nights in Rabat and Casablanca when Leo had heard Arabs playing the same instruments with bellydancers. There was one night when he had been chased off by the French police because the music “stirred up the locals.” There was another when he had a moment of stardom because he, an American G.I., had gotten up and played oud and rocked the house. A bellydancer had wrapped her arms around him because played a song he knew from back in Lawrence. The nightclubs in New York were for the weekends. Weeknights were all in the New York Public Library. Four nights a week, Leo read anything about music from Asia and Africa. There he saw patterns of expansion of instruments and ideas. The kanun and its scales travel from here to there. One instrument travels to another place. A local instrument replaces it, but the idea of how it’s played remains. There is a connection from the Ottoman Empire to the Arab world. Then, Africa to India and China… There is a deep musical connection among all of these people, including a boy from Lawrence, Massachusetts who feel compelled under the city’s lights to understand how his own feeling of music connects so many other people. “I don’t know why,” he told me in 2014, when he was 94 years old. “I’m reading, reading all this stuff. There was something in me that I had that feeling that whoever wrote those books didn’t really have that feeling… Even if someone does get a degree in music and stuff like that, there’s something between – under – inside of you. They can’t get that.” Leo’s father arrived through the port of Boston from Diyarbekir in present-day Turkey in 1901 with the great wave of Armenian immigration following the Hammidean massacres of 1891-96. A quarter of a million Armenians died in that wave of killings, twenty years before more than a million more Armenians were killed by Ottoman forces. That moment coincided with one of the largest waves of emigration to the United States that the country ever saw with Christians and Jews from Eastern and Southern Europe flowing in to just the port of New York, never mind Boston, San Francisco, or anywhere else, at a rate of 1,000 souls a day, week after week, year after year, decade after decade. Most of them came from Eastern and Southern Europe, meaning that most of them were not from the Northern European counties who were the culturally dominant ethnic stock of the U.S. That wave came only about forty years after the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the U.S. gave equal protection to all naturalized (male) citizens to the U.S., including the right to vote. The existing Protestant majority of the U.S. took such a dim view of idea that the Catholic and Jewish immigrants might vote that Congress had hearings in which mid-Western eugenicist authorities argued effectively that the breeding stock of the U.S. would be diluted if a serious change in immigration policy were not implemented. With the 1896 Chinese Exclusion Act as precedent, in 1924, three years after Leo Sarkisian was born and nine years after the genocide in the Ottoman Empire, the Reed-Johnson act set quotas for immigrants by country of origin, based on a complicated set of mathematics aimed at keeping the U.S. ethnically stable and exactly as White as it ever was. 51,227 Germans were allowed to emigrate each year. 54,009 from Great Britain and Northern Ireland. 5,982 from Poland. Only 120 Armenians a year were allowed. Zero from Africa or Asia. Living in a room over beer joint in the Village in 1952, Leo showed a friend of his some notes he’d made on Central Asian music at the library. He’d made some smart connections between the descriptions of one imperialist traveler and other, and when Leo’s friend showed them to Irving B. Fogel of Tempo Records, a friend of Walt Disney’s whom everyone called “Colonel,” Fogel knocked on Leo’s door and asked him to move to Hollywood to work for Tempo. “You’re who I’ve been looking for,” Fogel said. Leo said OK and took with him an Armenian girl who had gone to his same high school in Lawrence but whom he’d met when they were both in the military. Tempo was largely a specialty label offering among the first muzak-type sound programs. After a year of luxury in Hollywood and working with great sound engineers, he worked on the hit record “Sweet Georgia Brown” by Brother Bones and the soundtracks of African Queen, and six Tarzan movies. Fogel decided to send Leo and Mary to record music in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Burma for the label. So, in 1950, still in their late 20s, Leo and Mary went first to Karachi then in Lahore before pushing through the Khyber Pass in a jeep loaded with recording equipment, Budwiser and vodka to Kabul. They were treated as dignitaries, and Tempo released the 10” LP Drums Over Afghanistan from their efforts. That trip was Leo’s phD in listening to people – dignitaries and folks alike – hanging out with them, drinking, talking, digging music, and making friends. There were diplomatic problems with Russians, but nothing he couldn’t handle. On the way back across the subcontinent, he met and recorded Alludin Khan, Ali Akbar Khan, Bismillah Khan. There was a world of master musicians he had access to now for only the reason that he was American and had learned how to travel and to be good guest and cared deeply about music. Leo was learning to be a great ambassador for the U.S. At the same time, he was learning that wherever you go, you meet Armenians. Leo and Mary were greeted on New Year’s Day 1955 at the airport at Dacca, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) by a delegation of Armenians who took him to the Armenian church and the cemetery, where they saw graves of Armenians dating to the 15th century. “The big guy looks out for me,” he told laughingly. “Because God is Armenian!” In 1959, Tempo relocated Leo and Mary, then in their late 30s to Ghana and then, about a year later to Guinea with an eye to creating African recordings for the American market. A knock came at their door in 1963 in their home in Conakry, Guinea. Incredibly it was Edward R. Murrow, who had been appointed head of the United States Information Agency by President John F. Kennedy. Leo and Mary invited Murrow in to listen to some of Leo’s recordings, and Murrow offered Leo a job as the Voice of America’s broadcaster for Africa. They were allowed two years to travel the continent to learn before Leo first broadcast Music Time in Africa in 1965 from Liberia where they lived until 1969, when they moved close to Washington D.C. For more than forty years, Leo broadcast African music to Africa and made many trips. He claimed to have visited every country on the continent, and he drew hundreds of faces. The Leo Sarkisian Library at the Voice of America now houses not only his LPs and CDs but also 10,000 reel-to-reel tapes that he made on his travels, including early performances by musicians who later gained recognition, Fela Kuti among them. It is for Music Time in Africa that he will always be remembered, among the pioneers of Western recordists of African music including the Opika brothers, Hugh Tracey, and Willard Rhodes. There were fan clubs through the continent in the 70s and 80s. Bags of letters came thanking him for celebrating what was good about being African. His enthusiasm for the music was obvious. He never referred to anyone’s “band,” always an “orchestra.” In D.C., he continued to play kanun with Armenian bands, playing on a couple of LPs as a talented sideman. His Silver Spring, Maryland home was covered in his paintings of the faces of African women. When Mary’s vision failed, he said, “she took care of me for fifty years. Now, I have to take care of her for fifty years.” He donated his personal collection of instruments to the University of Michigan. The defunding of the VOA under the Obama administration such that he could not travel there as he liked troubled him deeply. He had served the United States under thirteen presidents, every one since Truman, and it pained him when at the age of 91, the oldest federal employee, he stepped down from Music Time in Africa, handing the reins to Heather Maxwell.

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englishitaliantranslations · 3 years ago

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Here are the best places to live in Italy for every budgetLast Updated: June 19, 2021 at 12:20 p.m. ETFirst Published: June 18, 2021 at 11:25 a.m. ETBy Valerie Fortney Schneider

Italy provides something for everyone — from a budget retirement to a full-on dolce vita in an art city or a country villa.

The beauty, attractions, and history of Italy are all so alluring that visitors quickly get seduced and start dreaming of living here. What many don’t realize on those initial travels is that Italy can be an affordable place to live, too. Of course, it all comes down to lifestyle and what your overseas dream is; Italy provides something for everyone—from a budget retirement to a full-on dolce vita in an art city or a country villa. Here are my picks for enjoying the alluring lifestyle of Italy—on every budget.

The overall costs for groceries, utilities, and daily services are similar everywhere. Phone plans cost $20, high-speed internet runs around $35 a month, and property taxes are so much lower here that you will be shocked.

From $1,700 Per monthNorthern Lazio

Rome is a spectacular world-class city, full of culture, history, and events. It’s also very pricey, like any major capital city. Luckily, the prices drop quickly when you venture outside Rome. Even just an hour distance opens up the door to bargain living in easy hitting distance of the city.

For the best bargains and lifestyle, head to the Viterbo province, where classic hill towns offer the Old World charm most expats crave, gorgeous landscapes, and low property prices. Viterbo itself is a provincial capital with a medieval old-town center that is spiked with towers, reminiscent of the more famous Tuscan town, San Gimignano, an opulent papal palace, cobbled lanes dotted with wine bars and eateries, and a lived-in feel. With a university, military base, and province offices, it’s an active place. There are also natural hot springs to soak in, Lake Bolsena nearby, and the Mediterranean Sea less than an hour away. The allures of Rome, Orvieto, and southern Tuscany are reached in an hour or less, too.

Rents start at $470 a month here. A beautifully renovated one-bedroom apartment in the center of Viterbo with designer and quality work is listed for $119,030. But there are also homes from $67,000 to $85,000 available, and they’re not tumbled-down wrecks, either.

Even lower prices are found in the lovely smaller towns scattered around the province. Caprarola, with the magnificent Palazzo Farnese crowning its summit, offers habitable houses for sale from $35,000. Sutri, Capranica, Vetralla, and Bagnoregio are other livable, affordable towns.

Basilicata

My own region in southern Italy is ranked as the most affordable in Italian cost of living surveys, and I can certainly agree. Housing is downright cheap, as long you look outside the region’s only two cities, and daily living expenses are low when we go to the mercato (market) for locally-grown produce and the supermarket. Dining out sets us back about $30 for heaping helpings of pasta, a side dish, and a good glass of vino. That’s for two. Granted, Rome isn’t in reach, but Salerno, Bari, and Naples are all within two hours. For those looking for a slow pace, a sense of community, an affordable lifestyle with the magnificent city of Matera as a cultural centerpiece, then you should look at this little-known southern region. They have a saying here that “hospitality is sacred” and they mean it—folks here are welcoming and embracing.

The landscapes are made up mostly of hills and mountains, with dramatic peaks, billowing wheat fields, and panoramas that should be rendered in paintings. Even our gorgeous seaside town, Maratea, called “the pearl of the Mediterranean” isn’t very expensive, with homes for sale starting at $180,000 for a renovated terrace home near the pretty port. The town exudes the atmosphere of the Amalfi Coast, but without the crowds (or prices) and the coastline is simply spectacular.

Go to the small towns around the region of Basilicata and home prices are downright bargains. Hill towns like Muro Lucano, Picerno, and Pisticci offer lovely old-world charm with habitable homes starting at $30,365. Pisticci also has a piece of sandy beachfront on the Ionian Sea, and even here you can snag a new two-bedroom condo just steps from the water for $133,605. It is in a complex with a garden and pool. The downside to village house hunting is most of the homes are for sale by owner and by word of mouth rather than listed with a realtor, so you’ll need to do some on-the-ground searching, but bargains can definitely be found for your efforts.

From $2,400 Per monthLe Marche

The central region of Marche dangles between mountains and the Adriatic Sea, offering the best of all worlds. In fact, it’s called “all of Italy in one region”—with rolling hills, wine country, soaring peaks, and miles of seacoast, it is definitely enticing. It is also often referred to as “the new Tuscany” and it does share some landscapes with that famous region. There just aren’t the high prices and influx of tourists to go with them.

Le Marche isn’t undiscovered—there are plenty of expats here—but it’s not overrun, either, so prices haven’t soared. In essence, there is a lot to love about the homey lifestyle and beautiful places, and it fits a mid-range budget easily.

The travertine-built art city of Ascoli Piceno is an elegant choice, with proud residents and plenty of activity going on. It’s in a valley so walking and biking is easy. Here, nice rentals can be found for $550 to $700 monthly. A two-bedroom, two-bathroom townhouse is for sale for 167,613 in the center near the river. Go up the road to the ochre-colored hill town of Osimo, close to the regional capital city of Ancona, and just a half-hour from the Adriatic Sea, where a newly-restored two-bedroom apartment is for sale in the center of town for 94,738. If a farmhouse in the hills is your dream, there are plenty of those to choose from, as well, prices start at around $280,000 for partially-renovated homes. A good example is a farmhouse in the central hills with a separate guesthouse, with five bedrooms, an orchard and olive grove, and privacy, for $302,433.

From $3,200 Per Month

Italy is a fabulous place to live it up, and live well, and if you can afford the villa in the country or the city penthouse, the comforts, culture, and lifestyle that attracted the likes of George Clooney and Sting can be yours to enjoy. If your budget is high, then consider these classic destinations for an enticing retirement.

The Coast or Capri

The glittery Italian Mediterranean coastline leaves many with indelible images of magical Italy at its coastal best. Pastel-painted seaside towns, green scrub-covered hills that tumble to the turquoise water, a color so deep and blue it seems impossible. Whether it’s the Riviera, the Amalfi Coast, or the set-apart isle of Capri that strikes a chord, they’re all gorgeous—and come at premium prices. But if you can afford it, the coastal life certainly has its beautiful rewards.

Rentals here are hard to come by, as most cater for tourists. Besides the daily cost of living being higher (those tourist prices certainly kick in around these areas), the price of real estate is at its premium. A restored 690-square foot apartment in the centro storico of Amalfi, near the Duomo, is on offer for $716,607. Need more space? A 2,200 square foot villa with four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a garden, and pool with sea views might fit your dream, for $1.82 million.

Across the bay on the island of Capri, prices are understandably even higher, but a dreamy destination to be sure. Here, an 807-square foot home looks at the evocative rocks at Marina Piccola, known as faraglioni, featured in postcards and films. The restored loft is beautiful, and comes with a community swimming pool. Price: $1.15 million. A condo in the town center near the shops and cafes is listed for $1.06 million for 968 square feet of renovated space that comes with two sunny terraces.

Rome

The center of western civilization for a few millennia, the Eternal City is at the center of the country and is certainly the beautiful centerpiece of Italy. Ancient and cosmopolitan at the same time, Rome has more sights than you can see in a lifetime. This is the place for those who love a daily-dose of art, culture, music, or shopping (or any combination of them), with tons of art exhibits at any one time, hundreds of churches packed with noteworthy masterpieces, museums aplenty, and music venues with concerts, operas and symphony notes to fit every taste.

This is also a place packed with cafes, wine bars, and restaurants that run from homey to uber-trendy, shopping districts that offer Italy’s top designers along with national (and international) brands, artisan boutiques, and open-air markets that bring in foods from all around the country (and beyond). In short, Rome is Italy’s sophisticated capital city.

It’s also one of the priciest places in the country, like any world city. Apartments in the city center average $835 per square foot for sales prices. Don’t expect to find a nice apartment in the centro storico for less than $2,000 a month. But what an exciting and culture-rich place to live if you can do it!

This story originally ran in International Living.

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