Adam is a wooden-faced, milk-muscled youth, modestly girdled in verdure. Eve is a ravishing brunette, as thickly mantled in leaves as any maple tree. Above their heads, cast in modern Italian, drifts the story of Genesis.
This photographic and popularized version of the Scriptures, approved by the Vatican, is outselling in Italy the Holy Bible itself. It appears in La Bibbia (The Bible), a Milanese fumetto magazine, named for the fumetti, or "little puffs of smoke," in which, as in U.S. cartoon balloons, the dialogue drifts above the heads of the characters.
Fumetti magazines...