The West read the results of Italy's spring municipal elections with vague uneasiness. Although the Communists had lost most of the towns & cities they had dominated, they had made disturbing gains in popular vote: Red ballots were up to 37.2%, v. 30.3% in 1948; in the same period, the Demo-Christian vote had dropped from 47.3% to 35.5%.
Yet the Communists lost 1,042 of the 1,959 communities which they had controlled, among them some of Italy's most important cities—Florence, Turin, Pisa, Genoa, Venice. Still in Communist hands: Bologna, Siena, Modena, Parma. Chiefly...
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