Good Ship Lollipasta

Inside every blue-jeaned, knap-sacked youth who tours Europe on the cheap there lurks the spirit of the sybarite. At least that is the hope of officials of the Italian Line, which has a fleet of four luxury ships plying the Atlantic. The line is putting all its European sailings on sale for the sandaled student set.

For $150, compared with the regular tourist-class minimum fare of $282, a student aged 16 to 24 can buy one-way passage to or from a dozen European ports. The line's four floating palazzi stop at some out-of-the-way places, including Tenerife, Palermo, Palma de Majorca and Algeciras, as well as at Lisbon, Cannes, Naples and Genoa. Student-fare travelers will enjoy the same accommodations (two, three or four to a cabin) as regular tourist-class passengers. They will also have the same amenities: swimming pool, 2 a.m. pizza parties and three other meals a day, with up to 450 kinds of pasta and plenty of free wine. The baggage allowance is nearly unlimited, and for $ 10 extra a student voyager can bring along a bicycle. The line is also adding rock bands, volleyball courts and lectures on what to do in Europe.

The airlines, of course, have been packing them in with student fares, which come to about $100 to $125 each way. The seaborne-student fare is actually lower, considering that the ship tourist gets room and board for a voyage of up to eleven days. The government-owned Italian Line has little to lose from this bargain-price experiment because the 500 tourist-class cabins in its four ships--the Michelangelo, Raffaello, Leonardo da Vinci and Cristoforo Colombo--have been sailing at only 20% occupancy. Italian Line officials figure that they may not make money on the students--food alone will cost up to $100 a head on each sailing --but that once introduced to the indulgent joys of sailing, young travelers will continue to choose nautical over aeronautical transport when they are older.

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