All Italy was taking a new look at Amintore Fanfani, who had just stepped forward to be his country's new Premier.
What they saw was a brisk, 5 ft. 3 in. economics professor with a politician's flair. Now only 45, he was the second of ten children of a Tuscan republican who named his children after the heroes of Italy's risorgimento. Amintore was named after the man who wrote Hymn of the Workers, a labor union song which the Communists have since stolen. Amintore was still a bright young student, a particular whiz at math and physics, when Mussolini kicked his father out of Parliament for his liberalism.
At Milan's Catholic University, where he studied, Amintore at 24 was hired to teach economics. He wrote 16 books on economics and politics, and with some other faculty colleagues formed a semi-monastic political group which came to be known as "the little professors." Intense in their Catholicism and militant in their reformism, "the little professors" grew into what is now called the "Democratic Initiative." the anti-Communist left of the Christian Democratic Party. Another of "the little professors": Giorgio La Pira, the ascetic and popular mayor of Florence, who is godfather to the last of the Premier-designate's six children.
Apples on the Desk. In World War II, Fanfani escaped Mussolini's draft by fleeing to Switzerland, where (together with Italian President Luigi Einaudi) he taught Italian students in internment camps. Ambitious, aggressive and a disciplinarian (he says he believes in authority, efficiency, and the Sermon on the Mount), Fanfani after the war, took on a succession of ministries under Premier Alcide de Gasperi. As Minister of Labor, he developed the "Fanfani house" program which so far has produced more than 7,700 government-built workers' homes; he put 200,000 of Italy's many unemployed to work on a reforestation program. As Minister of Agriculture, he set in motion much of the Christian Democrats' land reform program. He can keep going for 36 hours on catnaps, apples and a few sips of water. He keeps a big bowl of apples on his desk, offers them to visitors.
Once, when someone proposed Fanfani for still another ministry, De Gasperi refused. "If I keep on appointing Fanfani to various ministries." he said. "I am sure that one of these days I will open the door to my study and find Fanfani sitting at my desk."
In Giuseppe Pella's Cabinet. Fanfani was Minister of Interior, and there got firsthand experience in policing Italy's rambunctious Communists. When Pella fell out with his party, it was Fanfani who pushed for the showdown, and was ready to step in (TIME, Jan. 18).