One down, two to go. Before the war TIME was usually banned in Italy, Germany, Japan. Now we're back in Italy.

For while the first issue of our Manila Edition was being printed under fire for our troops in the Philippines (TIME, March 5), a 23rd TIME Edition was getting started half the world away.

TIME is now the first and only civilian magazine published in Europe for American soldiers there. It is being printed by TIME in Rome each week to reach our troops all over the Mediterranean theater almost as fast as TIME reaches readers here at home.

"No doubt about it--our debut was great," Correspondent Tom Durrance cabled.

"Next morning early we were swamped with telephone calls. The British Embassy wanted copies--the Psychological Warfare Branch asked for copies to be distributed to its operators throughout the Balkans--the Yugoslav Legation placed a sizable order for Tito and his staff. Rest camps and hospitals were quick to ask for more, and all hotels in Rome frequented by Fifth Army men on leave sold out in a few hours.

"Everyone in this theater--from the frontline fighting men down through the ranks of Army officers, American civilians, Italian civilians and even correspondents--has been starved for news and now they've got it in fast, concentrated form."

The same weekend TIME comes out here at home 40,000 copies of our Mediterranean Edition are run off the fabulous Tumminelli Press in Rome--and very handsome copies they are, well printed by the gravure process. (The Tumminelli Press prints in 29 languages--produces almost all the learned books for the University of Rome. Its owner and manager, Calogero Tumminelli, is himself the author of an encyclopedia in 38 volumes.)

As fast as TIME comes off the press Army trucks and planes rush copies north to our troops at the front (22,000 copies go this way, and 13,000 of these are given away). Other copies are loaded into ATC planes bound for Corsica and Sardinia, and still others travel south to Naples and Capri and on to Taranto. Bundles of several hundred copies each are flown by air courier to MTOUSA (Mediterranean Theater of Operations, U.S. Army) and MAAF (Mediterranean Army Air Forces) and 15th Army Group Headquarters, while still other copies are delivered to Army Post Exchanges, Red Cross clubs and restcamps throughout the area. And then the last remaining copies go to Rome kiosks where English-reading Italians snap them up quickly.

TIME-in-Rome brings to nine the number of TIME-editions printed especially for our servicemen across the oceans -- for TIME was the first magazine to invent a "Pony" Edition for fast overseas delivery, and the first magazine to print a special edition for our troops in Australia, first in Hawaii, first on the Persian Gulf, in the Middle East, in India, in the Philippines.

Like the armed forces editions we print in Honolulu and Manila, this new Mediterranean printing is a miniature edition of TIME -- a little less than two-thirds the size of the regular issue. But TIME'S news is there unchanged -- and it reaches our men at the front while you are still reading that same issue here at home!

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