It has been a long-standing custom here at TIME for our overseas correspondents, most of whom are American-trained journalists, to return to their native U.S. at frequent intervals for firsthand conversations with TIME'S editors and a reacquaintance with the changing American scene and idiom. Seldom, however, do we have a chance to greet a correspondent who is visiting the U.S. for the first time.

One such arrived last week. He is William Rospigliosi, of TIME Inc.'s Rome bureau, and you may recall some of his by-lined stories in TIME: A Clock For Fiumicino (Sept. 1, 1947), The Pope's Day (May 5, 1947), or the controversy over The Water of Arsoli (Sept. 13, 1948).

The author of these, and other, first-rate accounts of the current struggle that has divided all Italy begged off making any quick judgments of the U.S. at first sight and relapsed into the kind of tourism that is apparently inevitable with first visitors to New York. "No matter how many times you have seen it in pictures," he said, "nothing can prepare you for the sudden sight of the skyscrapers as the ship moves up the harbor. Its impact is terrific and unique." So saying, he was off to see the town--especially Wall Street, which reminded him of London's Lombard Street. He returned with cheering news for New Yorkers, saying he had found them "unusually smiling and helpful in a jolly way."

In his native Italy, Rospigliosi is the kind of correspondent TIME likes to have to round out any well-organized news bureau. His father was Italian, his mother American; he was educated in Florence and was graduated from Cambridge University in 1929. He speaks Italian, German, French and English fluently, and knows Italy like the back of his hand. He was working for International News Service in Rome when America went to war, and was promptly arrested by the police and interned as an "antinational" at Perugia. Later, he escaped, spent a winter in the hills outside Rome, made it through to the Allied lines and, in 1945, went to work for TIME.

Covering the news in postwar Italy, according to Rospigliosi, is complicated by 1) red tape (e.g., it took five months to get a much-needed new car uncrated and "naturalized"), 2) the deplorable telephone service ("It is better to walk to your party than try to phone him"), 3) Rome's three-hour afternoon siestas, 4) the departmentalization of Italian news.

Concerning the last, Rospigliosi says that Rome, unlike Paris or London, is not a funnel for the country's news. This is partly due to the thinness of the file carriedby Italian news agencies, and the paper shortage which has reduced Rome's 32 newspapers (of all political complexions) to one or two pages -- barely enough for the ads and the long, polemic editorials attacking the views of other editors, government officials, etc. that are a part of the journalistic character of Italy. For TIME'S purposes, therefore, much traveling and digging are necessary to find out what really happened.

As to the way the news looks to a TIME editor in New York as compared to a correspondent in the field, Rospigliosi has this to say: "Here the size of things changes, and the importance of detail increases. In New York a particular story is viewed as a fraction of a whole, while in the field a correspondent has no real way of telling where the particular story he is working on stands in the whole category of the week's news being assembled at TIME. Therefore, the more details, the more accurately, the better."

Cordially yours,

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