The young prince, whose ancestor thwarted great Hannibal, tossed in a canopied bed and decided to become a Saragat Socialist. The young peasant, who had turned Communist, sweated in a stiff black city suit and cursed his mother because she had borne a clever son. The priest twisted this way and that. Lovers quarreled. Children conspired against the priest in the night. A Fascist banged the table with a return of bygone bravado. And an old woman with a spade stood spraddle-legged in a potato field and cursed them all with a dry, screaming passion.
These things all happened recently at Arsoli, a village 30 miles from Rome. They are part of the great 20th Century drama. Not only Arsoli is locked in dubious battle between simple present needs and distant complexities. Seldom, however, is the 20th Century story stripped bare of the fat political phrases, the dusty economic phrases, the soft ideological phrases. Last week TIME Correspondent William Rospigliosi cabled Arsoli's story:
Arsoli huddles against a mountainside looking westward over the Roman plain. Alternately, the sun bakes it and torrential rains lash it to pour down the barren hillside. In the flat valley lie 479 hectares (1,184 acres) of Arsoli land, once famously fertile. Now 435 hectares of the valley are as sterile as the grey boulders above. From the other 44 hectares poplars raise their heads, shining like a mirage in a desert. Here are the Arsoli springs, the most abundant in all Latium. On these 44 hectares no Arsolian can set foot. The clear, sweet water goes to Rome. It has gone there since 600 B.C., when King Ancus Marcius built an aqueduct.
Thus the people of Arsoli have had 2,500 years to get used to the diversion of their water. In a way, they are proud of the deprivation. When they visit Rome they see sparkling jets gushing from the distended cheeks of gargoyles. "That's Arsoli water," they say. They see it running out of the nostrils of Bernini's marble horses in the Piazza Navona. "That's Arsoli water," they say. Not even 2,500 years, however, can get men used to starvation. As the land about Arsoli dried up, they began begging Rome for a little of their water. They noted that the new pipes installed in 1930 leaked. The 44 hectares had become a bog in which toads and snakes and things lived. Arsoli wanted to revive its dead fields by draining off some of the wasted water.
Search for Words & Work. The state-regulated company that owned the water works said no to the Arsolians. Rome was still growing (as Arsoli died), and some day Rome would need every drop of Arsoli's water. "You know how it is," Arsolians say. "Townsmen's tongues are glib. We have to look for words."
However, as the grey desert grew, so did unemployment. Young and old, with no brown earth to dig, spent whole days dejectedly in the village square. Requests that Rome should allow Arsoli people to work in the capital were left unanswered or denied. The villagers then begged that public works be started in Arsoli. Housing was still medieval—half the village had no drains (chamberpots are emptied out of windows in the early dawn). No housing projects came to Arsoli.