Where Christ Stopped

This week, political observers the world over would be watching the elections in Rome, Naples and some 2,400 municipalities in southern Italy, to see how well the Reds fare. But the conflicts and labels that agitate the rest of the world did not stir towns like Eboli and Anticoli.

Eboli, wrote Novelist Carlo Levi, was where Christ stopped. He meant that beyond this dusty, windswept southern Italy city of 22,000, men lived without hope.

Eboli needs housing; 85% of its houses were destroyed in battle. The average occupancy is more than three people to every room; in some there are nine and ten. Some 2,000 of its 8,000 workers are unemployed; the rest work only at harvest time. From month to month, Ebolitani rarely see a piece of meat. They have no plumbing; typhus is a periodic visitor.

In their six years in office in Eboli, the Demo-Christians had done nothing to meet their pledges of new housing and land to the peasants. At a big pre-election rally one night last week, Communist Leader Antonio Cassese, the local dentist, cried: "There will be no peace in Eboli until they give us the land, until they give us houses, until they give us schools for our children! . . ." Townspeople nodded agreement. The Ebolitani say: "Christ may have stopped at Eboli, but the money stopped at Salerno."

Beans & Bread. Anticoli is a medieval town of 2,000, perched prettily on a hillside 40 miles east of Rome. It has a fine breeze, a good view, a Communist regime, and fresh-skinned girls whom Rome artists favor as models. But it has little work; the local wage is 65-c- a day. The main diet is beans and bread.

The Red mayor, who goes to church regularly, made a big stir one Sunday by getting to his feet as the priest was reading a pastoral letter to the congregation, and crying out: "Enough! Get on with the Mass. We are getting cold." That made him unpopular; besides, the Communists did not build the aqueduct they promised. Chances are, Anticolani will vote Demo-Christian--but not because they support the Atlantic pact or concern themselves with the East-West struggle. A reporter who talked to Anticolani last week found only one who had heard of the pact. He was a Red.

. . .

The Reds' strategy seemed to be to sneak into power. In Rome, clad in his very best grey flannels as he received Western foreign correspondents for the first time since 1948, Communist Boss Palmiro Togliatti was at his most disingenuous. Genially he told reporters that all Communists want is peace and work, land and bread. In the southern provinces the Reds, to conceal themselves, were designating their party tickets with such symbols as a resurrected Christ, a St. Anthony.

But as the week ended, Boss Togliatti, on his home grounds in Rome, tore off the mask for a few moments and before a rally of 150,000 Reds preached the old-time doctrine, according to St. Stalin. His voice shrill, he shouted: "The Catholic Church . . . has always made mistakes when national honor, progress and social justice were at stake . . . and now [it is] plotting with reactionary and Fascist elements; of the worst type! . . ." The crowd, which had listened apathetically as he began his speech with conciliatory platitudes, cheered wildly at his sudden change of manner.

Premier de Gasperi's Demo-Christians, fighting back hot & heavy in the closing days, were given a better-than-even chance of standing off the two-faced Red attack. But coming up to the right of the Demo-Christians was a new threat: the resurgent neoFascists, who drew 75,000 Romans to a rally this week.

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