Downfall
Milazzo was under constant pressure from the Vatican and the Christian Democratic national government led by Antonio Segni, and spent most of his time trying to defend his two-vote majority in Sicily's regional Assembly. In February 1960, Milazzo resigned, after a regional deputy revealed that he was approached to change allegiance for a substantial amount of money by one of Milazzo's top aides, the Communist Ludovico Corrao.
The nation's anti-Communist press and politicians seized the occasion to remove the Italian Communists from their one real foothold in Italy. "An unheard-of attempt at corruption," Milan's Corriere della Sera headlined. The Communist maintained a bewildered silence. Rome's pro-Communist newspaper Paese Sera claimed that Milazzo was the victim of a Mafia plot.
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Famous quotes containing the word downfall:
“Children demand that their heroes should be fleckless, and easily believe them so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and not ended badly. The proudest palpitations are engulfed in a sewer, where they cease throbbing, as though having reached their natural term: this downfall constitutes the heart’s drama and the negative meaning of history.”
—E.M. Cioran (b. 1911)