Avanti!

Avanti! is a 1972 American/Italian comedy film produced and directed by Billy Wilder. The film stars Jack Lemmon and Juliet Mills. The screenplay by Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond is based on the play of the same title by Samuel Taylor, which had a short run on Broadway in 1968.

Plot

For the past ten years, Baltimore industrialist Wendell Armbruster, Sr. has been spending a month at the Grand Hotel Excelsior in the Island of Ischia on the Bay of Naples, in Italy allegedly to soak in the therapeutic mud baths for which the resort island is known. When he is killed in an automobile accident, his straitlaced son Wendell Armbruster, Jr. journeys to taly to claim his father's body. Upon arrival he discovers his father was not alone in the Fiat he was driving; with him was his British mistress, whose daughter, free-spirited London shop girl Pamela Piggott, also is on the scene, though she clearly knew of their parents' clandestine romance beforehand. Hotel manager Carlo Carlucci attempts to smooth things over, taking on all the arrangements for the body to be taken back to Baltimore in time for burial in just three days time.

Avanti

Avanti (in Italian, meaning ahead, forward, or before; in Sanskrit, the city of Avantī in India, now known as Ujjain) may refer to:

Education

Avanti! (Italian newspaper)

Avanti! (meaning "Forward!" in English) is an Italian daily newspaper, born as the official voice of the Italian Socialist Party, published since 25 December 1896. It took its name from its German counterpart Vorwärts, the party-newspaper of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

History

First housed in Rome, Avanti! moved to Milan in 1911. While the paper advocated neutrality on the wake of World War I (which it viewed as an imperialist conflict), it was becoming infused with the militarist and irredentist attitudes of its editor at the time, future Fascist leader Benito Mussolini (who had risen to prominence as an opponent of Filippo Turati during the Italo-Turkish War). Mussolini's dissent caused his ousting from the party, Avanti!'s direction being taken over by Giacinto Menotti Serrati, Mussolini then started his own paper Il Popolo d'Italia with Syndicalist and Republican dissidents from the Socialist Party.

The paper's headquarters were set on fire by Mussolini's Blackshirts on 15 April 1919, and it was banned by the government in 1926. From that point on, Avanti! was issued as a weekly, and was edited in exile – first in Paris and then in Zürich, at the Ristorante Cooperativo.