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"What Do You Hear?" Last week what had been a sordid tale of stolen treasure changed to something more tragic. One after another, a series of sad-voiced peasant women, somber in mourning black, told of the disappearance of their sons or husbands, all of whom had known Gorreri—and too much about the Gold of Dongo. Among them was the 63-year-old mother of Luigi Canali, alias "Neri," an idealistic Communist who was murdered a week or so after he signed the original partisan inventory of the treasure. "I remember," said she, "when my son told me, 'Mama, those thieves are ruining everything. I have seen such things!' ' When her son disappeared, Mama Canali looked up his old associate Dante Gorreri seeking information, but all she got was an embrace and the bland question: "What do you hear of Neri?"
Then, struggling to control her voice, Mama Canali introduced a bigger name into the trial, that of the pudgy, would-be respectable leader of Italian Communism himself. Said she: "When Palmiro Togliatti came to Como, I saw him in the Piazza del Popolo. 'I am Neri's mother,' I said to him. 'My son worked hard for the party. What became of him?' 'Be calm,' answered Togliatti. 'Your son will be rehabilitated.' "
Something of Value. The Padua trial will probably not be completed for months; no one held out much hope that the bigwigs of Italy's Communist Party could ever be brought to book, much less forced to restore the Gold of Dongo. Nonetheless, in the process, Italian Communism stood to lose something of infinite value—the carefully fostered myth that no members of the Italian resistance fought the Nazis and Fascists quite so heroically and unselfishly as the Communists. Said Rome's II Messaggero: "This trial is for history."