"They keep talking about the iron curtain," complained a Rome cab driver last week, "but it's not the iron curtain that worries me. It's the green curtain that comes down every morning between me and my cabbage." In the argot of workaday Rome, the green curtain is the term used to describe the veil of mystery behind which the shrewd middlemen in the city's huge wholesale vegetable market operate to send the prices of simple foodstuffs soaring.
Only a handful of insiders know precisely what happens between the first wisp of dawn, when 500...
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