As Orson Welles famously remarked, playing the unscrupulous Harry Lime in the film The Third Man: "In Italy for thirty years, under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock." Lime’s history was more than a little vague and self–serving (Welles himself seems to have been titillated…
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