1. Pinocchio is the subject of the bronze statue in Collodi, Italy, the village where the writer, Carlo Lorenzini, lived as a child. Lorenzini actually adopted the pseudonym Collodi when he first wrote the story.
2. Kismet, starring Alfred Drake and Joan Diener, was the 1944 film which later became a Broadway musical. It was remade with Howard Keel and Dolores Gray.
3. The Shah of Persia had three wives, the last of which is Farah Diba. She now divides her time between Washington, DC, and Paris.
4. Santiago Calatrava is the architect who designed the arcade at BCE Place in Toronto and the Peace Bridge in Calgary.
5. Peggy Guggenheim, the art patron, and founder of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, an art museum on Venice’s Grand Canal, was the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim (brother of Solomon), who went down with the Titanic. Guggenheim was once married to the artist Max Ernst, and had an intense affair with, among several other men, Samuel Beckett.
