After Two Months

Before leaving for a visit to his home town in Sicily last week, Italy's Premier Mario Scelba sent strict word ahead that no fuss was to be made over him. But the folks back home in Caltagirone, where Scelba's aged mother still lives, paid no attention. They greeted their fellow townsman outside the town with a triumphal fanfare of trumpets and drew him through the streets in a ceremonial coach, bright with caparisoned horses and liveried postillions. As the Premier stood on a balcony to address his old neighbors, a blaze of electric lights spelled out the message: "Viva Scelba!"

Such a greeting was a welcome change for sober-sided Mario Scelba, whose public appearances in the recent past--and his face on newsreel screens--have more often been greeted by Communist-led hisses than by cheers. At the end of his first two months in office, Italy was beginning to feel different about the quiet but resolute onetime Interior Minister now its Prime Minister. The nation as a whole showed no likelihood as yet of echoing the enthusiasm of Caltagirone, but it was beginning to nod in pleased approval at the vigor and efficiency he has injected into its government.

Decisions for Dodgers. Mario Scelba's four-party coalition has dared to make decisions which no previous Italian government had thought it nice to face up to. It has stopped dodging around the corners of the Communist problem and has faced the issue squarely by spotlighting the Communist conspiracy as an alien program, directed and abetted from abroad. When the Ministry of Defense recently caught seven spies in Foggia. the government saw to it that the newspapers got the full story of how they were trained in a Russian spy school in Prague.

Scelba's practical moves against the Communists entrenched in Italy's own economy have been equally telling. He decreed that some 300 state-paid employees now on loan to predominantly Communist unions of government workers must go back to work for the government itself. He threatened to remove state backing from the Red-ridden Italian film industry. When Scelba set out to reclaim some 1,300 pieces of confiscated Fascist property now occupied by the Communists, he effectively quashed Red objections by urging that the reclaimed properties be turned into badly needed schools. Last week the new Premier made plain his identity with the West by urging Italians to ratify EDC without waiting for a settlement on Trieste.

Jail for Dodgers. Economically, Premier Scelba has also given Italians new heart and new hope. Previous administrations had compiled vast reports on poverty and the unemployed, one 13 volumes thick, the other, twelve. Scelba put the authors of these works on the job, one as Minister of Finance, the other as Minister of Labor. Upcoming as a result is a whole program of new legislation: a self-liquidating housing scheme larger than anything previously planned in postwar Italy; a vigorous new set of tax laws, which for the first time will provide jail sentences for such blatant tax dodgers as those who shocked all Italy during the unfolding of the Montesi scandal (TIME, March 22-29).

Scelba still sits on the narrow perch of a 16-seat majority. But, said one of his increasingly confident aides last week: "We're proceeding on the idea that if the government does a good job, it will gain strength as it goes along." It could already claim a good start.

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