ITALY: Intimate Episodes

In Rome, where housing is just as scarce as in New York, London, Paris,* Moscow, Cape Town or Shanghai, one Carlo Levi, an Italian writer, painter and sculptor, was in a universal predicament. His landlord wanted to throw him out of his studio in the venerable Palazzo Altieri, so the place could be remodeled into smaller apartments. Levi, of course, had nowhere else to go.

The landlord decorated the studio’s marble staircase with ripe garbage, cut off water and telephone service, and finally tried to budge Levi by painting insulting inscriptions on the studio walls. Samples: “Carlo Levi is a bandit and a rascal. . . . Since Carlo Levi refuses to make way for the worthy and the homeless, can’t he have the decency to instruct his girl friends not to slam the door when they leave him at 4 a.m.?”

Artist Levi fought back the only way he knew how. He began painting in the halls a series of frescoes depicting intimate episodes in the life of his landlord.

* The Georges Bidaults, who since 1944 ‘have lived in a comfortable apartment in the French Foreign Office, were embarrassed last fortnight when Bidault ceased to be Premier-President and Foreign Minister and thus lost his home. The Bidaults could find no place to go. But his successor Léon Blum told the flustered Bidaults that there was no hurry about moving out.