Man from the Mountains

(See Cover) Across the ancient reaches of Italy--a sunny, beautiful and melancholy land--the clamor spread.

DE GASPERI is A LIAR! screamed a black headline in Rome's L'Unita, the Communist daily.

"Our nationalism," boasted the boss of resurgent Italian Fascism, "is not like the nationalism of De Gasperi." He spat the Premier's name as if it were uncapsuled quinine. "The enemy," added another Fascist, "is the Christian Democratic Party." To 62,000 intent Neapolitans a Communist speaker shouted: "How can De Gasperi talk of security when there are 2,500,000 unemployed?" And a few blocks away, the 'leader of the Monarchists cajoled. "The King-- is waiting to come back" he said. "He waits in the sadness and the silence of exile." From both sides--the totalitarian left and the totalitarian right--came the attack on the young Republic of Italy. A national election, the third since war's end, was only a fortnight away. If the wolves could strike down Premier Alcide de Gasperi and his Christian Democratic Party, they could then get at the shaky-legged colt of Italian democracy.

Democracy and De Gasperi had taken on the Communists--the biggest, toughest Red party this side of the Iron Curtain-and roundly trounced them in the 1948 elections. But this time the Premier and his coalition must overcome the combined assault of:

The Communists. Still apparently at least as strong as they were in 1948, when they won 8 million of 26 million votes, captured 183 of the 574 seats in the Chamber of Deputies.

The Neo-Fascists. The Movimento Sociale Italiano, or M.S.I., which would like to put another dictator in power in Rome. M.S.I, leaders are true-blue survivors of Mussolini's coterie, members of the band who collaborated with the Germans to the bitter end. They have not yet found their Mussolini (nearest thing to one: Prince Valerio Borghese), but they have swelled their 525,000 votes (2.1%) of 1948 into considerably more. Bitter enemies of the Communists, they are willing to collaborate with them in mischief as Adolf Hitler did--to make stable democratic government impossible. They hope that in the resulting chaos they, not the Reds, will capture Rome.

The Monarchists, Led by Croesus-rich Mayor Achille Lauro of Naples, who campaigns with free spaghetti and royally vague promises, the right-wing Monarchists expect to do better than 1948's 730,000 (2.8%) of the vote--enough better, they hope, to force De Gasperi to bring them into the government. One difficulty: the exiled King refuses to endorse them.

Italy, a unified nation for only a century and a republic for only seven years, is free to choose. That fact in itself is a monument to Alcide de Gasperi, 72, the worn-looking but knife-sharp statesman who has brought a sense of unity and democratic faith to a people who still, in the tradition of centuries, are apt to consider themselves not so much Italians as Florentines or Romans or Neapolitans or Sicilians. ("You know." a Roman is apt to say, "I don't like the Florentines. They think they're better than anyone else.") De Gasperi's work is only partly done, and his dream of a united, stable and democratic Italy is only partly made real.

Over the few brief years of democracy his coalition government has wobbled and slimmed away under the pressures from the totalitarian extremes and the attrition of responsibility.

Over the Chasm. It is not at all certain that the 26 million Italians who vote next fortnight will give Alcide de Gasperi a chance to continue his job. Since 1948 the De Gasperi alliance has held 63% of the seats in Italy's lower house. But in municipal and other contests since, it has showed considerable losses of strength.

Last week the magazine. II Tempo forecast that the coming election will be very close: about 13,500,000 votes for the Christian Democratic coalition, and 12,500,000 for the totalitarian extremes.

De Gasperi's coalition needs better than 50% of the vote to win enough parliamentary seats to govern Italy effectively. The betting is that he will narrowly make it.

Alcide de Gasperi has been in tight spots before. For a good part of his life he was, by hobby, a mountain climber. Once, many years ago, he slipped from a ledge in the Dolomites and twirled for 20 minutes at the end of a rope before he pulled himself to safety.

De Gasperi has crossed a lot of political chasms since then. Somehow, with undramatic surefootedness. he has always got past danger--often with results that have been far more spectacular than the events themselves made them seem.

For seven years Premier de Gasperi has been playing the deadly game of cold-war politics with an unspectacular competence that obscures both the man and his achievements. Italians (according to the popular U.S. stereotype) are enthusiastic and impulsive; De Gasperi is withdrawn, often icily aloof. The language of Dante is a melting, musical tongue, and Italians traditionally make colorful orators, but De Gasperi is a rambling, unmusical speaker who can stretch a few scribbled notes into a 90-minute discourse. Italians are accustomed to the spectacular in politics --Garibaldi and his red-shirted 1,000; the Blackshirts marching on Rome; Palmiro Togliatti's Reds tearing up piazzas. Alcide de Gasperi disdains the theatrical and the violent, speaks softly, listens forbearingly, sits out crises patiently, and acts unhurriedly with an extraordinary instinct for timing.

Italy gave the world Pagliacci, the story of a man who laughs even in the face of tragedy. But the sharp, austere features of De Gasperi (cartoonists like to depict him as a wise, great-beaked black crow with lively eyes behind huge spectacles) remain glum even in moments of pleasure, and only his intense eyes glow. He has no notable administrative talent, and economists have been heard to mutter that he sometimes seems to be "an economic illiterate." He wears his imperfections humbly, like a suit of well-worn clothing, as if to suggest that attempting to discard them would be indecent.

Most observers of the European scene class De Gasperi--along with such men as Germany's Adenauer, France's Schuman and Belgium's Spaak--as a topflight and selfless statesman-politician. Few would call him a "great man." But time & again he has been paid a handsome tribute in a land where the simple goodness of a Francis of Assisi, the Italians' patron saint, is more admired than the brilliance of a Thomas Aquinas."He is a good man," explains one Italian. "He means what he says.""De Gasperi," said a top U.S. diplomat who has long worked with the Premier, "has done more to advance democratic government than any other statesman in Europe today. To take a country which has undergone 20 years of Fascist rule, and just come through a devastating war, and build it up as he has. is nothing short of political genius.""It Looks Easy." Always slashing and ripping at his flanks were Togliatti's Communists and the fellow-traveling Socialists of Pietro Nenni. First they were in De Gasperi's coalition, infiltrating, sabotaging, preparing to take over a la Prague.

De Gasperi threw them out (1947) in one of the boldest, most important decisions of the cold war. A few months later he met them over the ballot boxes--an enemy more ruthless, more disciplined, better organized than his own wobbly coalition. While many Italians with faint hearts and fat pocketbooks began planning flight from the country, De Gasperi and his allies licked the enemy--fair, square and decisively. "He has done this thing," the U.S. diplomat says, "and because he has done it successfully, it looks easy. But if he hadn't done it, Italy would have gone Communist." For his past victories (and also for many of his current handicaps), De Gasperi is indebted to probably the queerest political alliance in Italian history, a restless, unstable mixture of most of the colors on the political palette. His own Christian Democrats include monarchists and republicans, rebels and traditionalists, free enterprisers and welfare staters, clericals and anticlericals. It is, in every respect, a "center party," basted together by an abhorrence of extremes and a belief in moderation. It is a Catholic party, approved by the Vatican, largely dependent in the election campaign on the vigorous, vote-harvesting activities of the Catholic Action movement. Yet Christian Democracy's three allies in the campaign all have their roots in Italy's long and emphatic anticlerical past: The Republicans, the party born of Garibaldi and Mazzini. One of its chief figures, Randolfo Pacciardi, fought in the Spanish Civil War against Franco and Mussolini's volunteers, is now De Gasperi's devoted Defense Minister.

The Liberals, the party of Cavour, who sealed Garibaldi's military successes with the political coup that united Italian provinces and kingdoms into one nation. The Liberals, still anticlerical, supported the House of Savoy against the Pope (and the Republicans). Their appeal now is mostly to intellectuals.

The Social Democrats, headed by Giuseppe Saragat, who chose democracy when Pietro Nenni led the rest of the Socialists into alliance with the Communists. Saragat has some 2,000,000 followers, mostly in the industrial north.

With this assorted alliance. Premier de Gasperi won decisively last time because the issue was basic and clear: De Gasperi or Communism. In this election the Christian Democrats cannot count on the same urgent fear of the Red menace; Italians may have become choosier, and the alternatives are more numerous.

Wheat Turning Gold. Three weeks ago on May Day, De Gasperi stood in Turin to watch a three-hour parade of Italian workers buzzing past on Vespas. the sleek little 4 1/2-h.p. motor scooters which are fast becoming for Italians what the model T was for American workers. "Just look," exclaimed the Premier. "And may the miserable government over which I preside also be blamed for this!"

In 1953's sunlit spring, Italy does indeed wear a sheen it did not have under the plumed bumblings of the Savoys or the sawdust imperialism of Mussolini.

Long-barbed durum wheat--the kind that is good for pasta--is turning gold in Sicily and Calabria. Soon the harvest will begin, rolling up the toe and shin and length of the Italian boot--possibly a bumper crop like last year's. Meanwhile, there are almonds to be picked on the rolling plains of Puglia, forage grass to be cut in the lush Po Valley, cherries to be picked off the greyish flatlands around Naples. And a bumper crop of tourists--perhaps 6,000,000 --is descending on Italy, eager to be harvested. To the tourist's eye, the cities pulsate with prosperity. Next to the weathered greys, faded beiges and crumbling burnt oranges of past glories stand refurbished or new buildings glinting with fresh paint, new chrome and stucco. Cassino has risen from the bombers' rubble, a gleaming, modern town, with its famed monastery restored. In Eboli, where Christ stopped (in Carlo Levi's novel), six spanking new apartment houses were completed in the past few months.

Naples, though its slum alleys are still noisome and laundry festoons every tenement, no longer seems such a violent affront to its breathtaking setting. To the land of the Fra Angelicos and hand-painted Sicilian donkey carts has come the neon glare of modern living--billboards, Life Savers, Esso stations, Hopalong Cassidy, even a little TV. Venetian canals boast traffic lights, and only a lusty gondolier could raise his tenor above the gaseous snarl of motoscafi.

Chic & Ships. The signs of better economic conditions which the visitor sees are not illusions. Culturally and economically, Italy is enjoying something of a renaissance.

With a few old cameras, with war-battered city streets for sets and with amateurs for performers, directors like Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica have given the world some of the finest movies ever made. They gave Italy a major industry, and treated moviegoers everywhere to the likes and looks of fiery Anna Magnani and smoky Silvana Mangano. Italian painters and sculptors, artistically confined under the Fascists, have broken free. The earthy realism of such Italian novelists as Moravia, Berto and

Vittorini has won them acclaim in the U.S. Rome, not Paris, is the capital of a new generation of postwar U.S. expatriates, who this time celebrate not what they have lost but what they have found.

Italian fashions are no longer a mere copy of Paris, but a style-setting world of their own. In straw, leather, ceramics, in automobile design (but not production), in shipbuilding (the new Andrea Doria and the Cristoforo Colombo), the fine Italian hand and the fertile Italian mind are making money and fame.

Italy's national income is at an alltime high ($16 billion) and going up. The lira is close to being hard money now (stabilized at 625 to the dollar), and De Gasperi's finance experts proudly point out that "not one single lira" has been printed since 1948. A new government department has been set up to treat the economic ills of Italy's shamefully impoverished south. Altogether, 1,600,000 acres of land owned by absentee landlords (including such aristocratic names as the Torlonia, the Orsini, the Boncompagni) is being purchased by the government at a fair price and distributed among the landless peasants on easy terms. So far, only 400,000 acres have reached the peasantry.

Hopelessness in Caves. Close to Parioli, Rome's most fashionable residential district, families still live in hillside caves or shacks. In the Palermo slums, within shouting distance of a luxurious, modern, maternity clinic, seven or eight people crowd into a single, unlighted room. The antique debtors' law is charitable to such families: whatever else officers of the law may impound for payment of a debt, they may not touch a bed in which a woman has just given birth to a child, or is about to do so. Population (47 million) is now growing by 400,000 a year, in a country where overpopulation is a long-endured complaint (and the chief pragmatic excuse for Mussolini's conquests in Africa).

Manpower is Italy's only surplus--and it is no longer very exportable. In 1949 there were 1,700,000 unemployed; today there are more than 2,000,000, and every year another 130,000 young people join the ranks of the jobless.

Italy, for all its beauty, is a hard land --deficient in food, fuel and minerals.

The gap grows between what it must buy and what it can sell to pay for these things, and is papered over only by U.S.

aid (about $3 billion since war's end).

Discontent & Promises. The Italian in Milan who desperately needs an apartment he cannot afford, the Calabrian family burying a one-year-old for lack of a doctor, the frayed-white-collar worker who remembers how many government sinecures were available under the Fascists, the landowner who savors the old monarchical days when a conte was a conte and his land his own--these by the thousands lend an ear to the bombast and promises of De Gasperi's political enemies on left & right.

Their discontent is magnified by some of the things they see and hear in the government offices and town halls. Not all Christian Democrats are as patient as Alcide de Gasperi. Too many are neither so good nor so honest. In most parts of Italy, there are cases of favoritism, nepotism, buying of special privileges.

(As a galling contrast, local Communist administrators have proved by & large incorruptible.) And there is the church. It is the supreme anomaly in a land of anomalies that 99.6% Catholic Italy is bitterly anticlerical in politics. The war between church and state has never truly ended.

"The place of the priest," a churchgoing Italian is likely to grumble, "is in the sacristy, not the public square." In the 92 years since Italy became united, it has had for Premiers one Protestant, one Jew, several agnostics and many Freemasons, but never a practicing Catholic until Alcide de Gasperi took office.

Catholicism was the state religion under the kings, but few in the royal house were steady communicants. Italians recall that the late Queen Elena enjoyed telling ribald stories about priests, and some even insist that Victor Emmanuel III, on one of the infrequent occasions when he attended Mass, got mixed up at the holy water font and seemed to think he must wash his hands there. To be a Communist is, by decree of the Vatican, a mortal sin, but in some Italian towns the best place to find the leading Communists together is at Sunday Mass. And Catholics in politics sometimes sound like old Senator Tom Heflin lobbing one of his Confederate cannonballs at "the Pope of Rome" Not until the birth (in 1910) of the political party now led by Alcide de Gasperi were Catholics of modern Italy free to participate in politics. Under Pius IX's 1868 Non Expedit decree (it is not expedient), a Catholic could "neither elector nor elected" be; Pius deemed it a surrender for Catholics to join in the affairs of the determinedly anti-church regime, which had shorn, the Vatican of property and political authority in Italy. But as the political peril to religion developed on the left, the ban slowly relaxed. At the end of World War I, a scholarly Sicilian priest named Luigi Sturzo persuaded Pope Benedict XV to let him form a political party of Catholic laymen. Don Luigi promised that he would resolutely avoid church control, and he kept his promise.

Don Luigi Sturzo's creation, the Popular Party, set out to bring Christian morality and principles into distinctly non-Christian Italian politics--"a center party of Christian inspiration and oriented toward the left," he called it.

Among his early and most promising recruits was a somber, mustached man named Alcide de Gasperi. Of pure Italian blood, De Gasperi had been an Italian citizen only since the end of World War I.

The small Alpine town near Trent where he was born, the son of a minor tax official, was part of Franz Josef's Austro-Hungarian empire. A passionate Italian Irridentist at 17 and a political prisoner before he got out of school, De Gasperi got his first legislative experience in the Austrian Parliament (he still speaks excellent German, as well as good French, hesitant but serviceable English).

Riots & Parades. In an Italy tossed between Marxist riots and Blackshirt parades, Don Luigi and De Gasperi tried desperately to head off Fascism by proposing a coalition with the Socialists, but their efforts failed. After Mussolini took over, Sturzo fled into exile in 1924, and De Gasperi became leader of the party.

But he quickly got on Mussolini's black list--he dared to condemn the Fascist murder of Socialist Giacomo Matteotti and to ask the King to dismiss // Duce.

Within two years he was in jail.

A year and a half in prison almost broke De Gasperi's health. The Vatican finally negotiated his release. Through the long Fascist night, he worked on the Vatican library card-index system for $80 a month, eked out enough to support Signora de Gasperi and four daughters by ghostwriting and translating. Out of this experience came a patient, frugal, unobtrusively devout man who had suffered less than some under totalitarianism, but enough to want to spend the rest of his life fighting it. He bought a sorely needed dark blue suit and went out to revive the Popular Party. This time, De Gasperi called it the Christian Democratic Party, and by 1944 had built it strong enough to make him a minister without portfolio in the provisional postwar regime. Soon he became Foreign Minister, in 1945 Prime Minister. In 1946 Italy voted itself a republic and made the Democristiani the biggest political party.

Don Luigi Sturzo has returned to Rome, but not to the party. In a small convent run by the Canossian Daughters of Charity on Mondovi Street, just off Rome's New Appian Way, 81-year-old Don Luigi sits in his study amid untidy stacks of books, pamphlets and newspapers. Easily tired, susceptible to colds, he rarely emerges from his simple, two-room apartment. The last time he visited the Vatican, only 15 minutes away, was during the Holy Year of 1950. The old priest complains that Layman de Gasperi has tied Christian Democracy too closely to the church. "I criticize them from time to time," he explains, "but that is because it is my vocation to be a political critic.

It does not mean I disown them." The creed of Christian Democracy is in the party's 1946 manifesto: "While Communism strives for the supremacy of society, and liberalism for the supremacy of the individual, democracy aims at realizing the synthesis of individual rights and social duties . . . and consequently wants to create a state in which all classes cooperate . . . We did not fight against the barrack-state in order to substitute for it the executioner-state. We are aiming at the school-state, capable of re-educating character." A schoolmasterly solicitude that demands the best instead of appealing to the worst is not the cheapest way to win popularity. A philosophy of cooperation has sometimes meant walking when running was called for. Sometimes the struggle has involved forcing through Parliament--always with respect for the rules, and usually against the bloodthirsty assaults of the Reds and the Blacks--changes about which many people had misgivings. Biggest example: the new electoral reform law under which any coalition of parties getting more than 50% of the vote will get 64% of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies. De Gasperi has lived long enough in tyranny's shadow to respect the rights of minorities; he is convinced, however, that democracy must be made strong enough to survive the parliamentary assaults of those who oppose parliamentary government.

"Viva! Viva!" It has been about 15 years since De Gasperi dug his climbing boots and pickax into an Alp, but he still suffers the mountaineer's fever--the looking for other peaks to climb while still chivvying and picking his way up the peak beneath his feet. "He always sees the next summit," explained a friend. Last week in Genoa, where bombed-out ruins of the past are still visible behind the shiny new fagades of the present, he stood before a mass of dockworkers and shipworkers.

"My opponents say that I wish to remain in power," said he. "I would be very happy to step down, not only from the government but also from the political scene. But I have a profound conviction that I should stay.

"When men like Terracini refuse to obey further orders of the Cominform, when the Socialists find the courage to liberate themselves from Communism . . .

when the conception of liberty completely penetrates into the Italian soul, when democracy is here to stay, when we recognize only one law, one pledge and one flag, when violence is no longer exalted or revenge invoked--on that day, and only on that day, will I lay these old bones of mine down and be at peace." From thousands of pockets, Genoans grabbed handkerchiefs to wave. "Viva! Viva!" rose their cry, like Alpine thunder.

The old man of the mountains took out his own handkerchief and waved back.

* Meaning Umberto II. In 1946 Victor Emmanual III abdicated the throne to Crown Prince Umberto. But Umberto went into exile near Lisbon only a month later, after Italians voted (6 to 5) to abolish the monarchy.

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