L'Italo-Americano

L'Italo-Americano THURSDAY, JULY 10, 2014 www.italoamericano.com 10 Dear Readers, A July assortment of Italian connections: "Attenzione" dear Readers, if your are planning to rent a car while visiting Italy. Pay "atten- zione" to the road rules, or you will be stopped by the "Polizia Stradale" and risk a fine if you have violated the rules. The moment you get a copy of the fine receipt, you are given an option: pay the fine right on the spot, or when notified by a Court's officer. A new Bill intro- duced in the lower House of the Italian Parliament calls for an alternative: if you pay on the spot you now have the option to pay the assessed amount of vio- lation discounted 20%. However, a new amendment added to the Bill entices the vio- lators to save 30% from the amount, which could be quite high in the case of serious viola- tion. This money, from the fines, can now provide immediate financial resources to the public treasury. The new law would also eliminate waste of time. *** Boston's "Tea Party" protest- ed King George's Tea Tax. A large party of colonists made up as Indians boarded English ships in 1773, with tomahawks wav- ing, dumped 342 chests of "Royal Tea" into the bay. *** Bari was the scene of a "flour rebellion" in July 1647. The men of Bari (in the Puglia regione of Italy) rebelled against their Spanish rulers when they decided to tax flour. The local men of Bari put up with the tax until theSpanish soldiers went into kitchens to check how much flour the women were using to make pasta. The dash- ing Spaniards looked at the women much more than the flour. Fighting broke out and after a week the tax was abol- ished. Were the Pugliese men protecting their pasta or their women? *** Crackdowns on tax evaders, by Italy's "Guardia di Finanza" in recent years have discovered that some of the VIP evaders are "super rich". The evaders who hold an "Oscar" for real crooks have been heavily fined. They mostly reside in: Lombardia (103), in Lazio (50), and in Campania (8). The fiscal inspectors made the discovery after cross-checking the tax returns and found that a lot of people had not paid their taxes. Of course, the inspectors found that these particular individuals had received millions but had not mentioned anything in their tax returns. Retrieved rev- enue, has been, so far, in excess of 241.1 billion euro (nearly $300 billion). *** Children's classic travel books (This is Rome, London, Paris, New York, San Francisco) authored and illustrated by M. Sasek, and first published in the 1960's were updated and recent- ly published by Universe Publishing (a Division of Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 300 Park Ave. South, New York, N . Y . 10010) so that a whole new generation of readers can be introduced to the late M. Sasek's whimsical illustra- tions and imaginative and enchanting cities of the world. Revisiting New York via "This is New York", first published in 1960, I came upon the "update" page, This is New York...today: Today only baseball is played at Yankee Stadium; the Giants played their last game here in 1973. Old timers may recall that on July 2, 1941 at Yankee Stadium, Joe DiMaggio hit a a homerun into the the left- field stands that broke a baseball American League record set in 1897. The New York Yankees, an American League baseball team still plays at Yankee Stadium. The N.Y. Giants foot- ball team plays at Meadowlands in New Jersey. *** In 1960 the biggest port in the world was in New York. Today it is in Singapore. In 1960 the tallest build- ing in the w o r l d was the E m p i r e State Building. Today they are Twin Petronas Towers in Malaysia and more recently the Kingdom Tower in Saudi Arabia. The New York based firm of Thornton Tomasetti (Robert DeScenza- president, Michael Squarzini and Gary Panariello - managing principals, and Thomas Scarangello - chairman and CEO) handled the King-dom Tower project in Saudi Arabia, now the world's tallest building. The Thornton Tomasetti Company employs more than 800 engineers, archi- tects and other professionals and handles projects of all sizes worldwide. The company began using the name Thornton Tomasetti in 1975 when Charlie Thornton and Richard Tomasetti purchased the Lev Zetlin & Associates, a company which pioneered the use of the now common composite steel structural system. This involved the integration of a reinforced concrete core wall, to resist lat- eral loads, with a light steel floor framing. The development of 50 to 60-story buildings became more feasible and efficient because the lighter framing reduced construction time and expense, and allowed for large, column-free spans, giving archi- tects greater freedom in exterior expression. They also pioneered the use of the double layer bicy- cle wheel roof system used in the Utica Civic Auditorium (also known as the Utica Memorial Auditorium), as well as the hyperbolic (hypar) roofs utilized in American Airlines 747 super- hangars at airports in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Thornton Tomasetti has also col- laborated with several architects including Cesar Pelli, Santiago Calatrava and Renzo Piano. *** Andrew Mark Cuomo was 53 when he was sworn in as the 56th governor of New York, back in 2011. His father, Mario Cuomo, was the 52nd governor of New York and headed that state for three consecutive terms from 1983 to 1994. ***

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