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When Togliatti had walked a few steps past him, the assassin whipped out his pistol and fired twice. Togliatti fell. Signorina lotti bent over him. Two chauffeurs tried to seize Pallante. He waved them back with his gun and calmly pumped two more bullets into Togliatti before police seized him. Blood soaked through Togliatti's grey double-breasted suit and made small, neat pools on the cobblestones. In the hot sun the blood soon dried. (The spot where he fell was only two blocks from where he had narrowly missed death 25 years ago, when Fascist police stood him against a wall to be executed; he escaped when the executioner lost his nerve.) Two bullets had pierced Togliatti's right lung, a third had struck him in the neck. He was able to mumble a question: he asked if his briefcase was safe. It was. He was taken to the Policlinico, Rome's largest hospital and the only one not affected by a slowdown strike of doctors, nurses and attendants which had begun that morning as a protest against low wages. One of Italy's most famous surgeons. Dr. Pietro Valdoni. worked over Togliatti for 2½ hours while Signorina Iotti and Togliatti's wife, white-haired Rita Montagna, stood in the doorway. Togliatti's Socialist ally, Pietro Nenni. wandered aimlessly about the corridors. Premier Alcide de Gasperi, his face greyer than usual, hurried to the Policlinico. "This," he said grimly as he left, "is the worst possible thing that could have happened."
"Considerable & Crushing." De Gasperi sensed the gathering storm. Since the crushing defeat in the April 18 elections. Italy's Communists had been restively quiet. The row between Yugoslavia's Tito and the Cominform had shaken the Italian Communist Party to the roots.
The Party still had its machinery of civil war, prepared long ago. Although the cogs were rusting, the Communist leaders shielded it against the day when they could use it. News of Togliatti's shooting reached the Italian Senate to interrupt a violent harangue by Communist Umberto ("The Brain") Terracini against a government plan to speed up the collection of arms from private organizations, including the Communists.
Within two hours after Togliatti was shot, the machinery of insurrection clanked and rumbled into action as if the control lever had been accidentally jarred. The Red press screamed "Murderers!" at the government. In Rome a mob of sweating, cursing workers hurled cobblestones at grey-clad mobile police, who fired into the air and swung their clubs in earnest. The mobs that poured into the streets frightened the elegant aristocracy and the free-spending tourists in the Via Vittorio Veneto; these gentry, knowing they might be targets for Communist vengeance, retreated to their select caverns of safety, the cool bars of the Excelsior and Ambasciatori Hotels. There waiters whisked tables and chairs from the sidewalk cafés and clanged down the corrugated iron shutters, which did not come up again for two days. In the Excelsior bar an American matron twittered: "Oh, I saw it all—rocks flying and sticks coming down on heads, bang—bang—bang. It was so exciting!" A spade-bearded Italian gentleman, ordering another vermouth and ice, said: "This would never have happened in the old days."