(4 of 8)
With this assorted alliance. Premier de Gasperi won decisively last time because the issue was basic and clear: De Gasperi or Communism. In this election the Christian Democrats cannot count on the same urgent fear of the Red menace; Italians may have become choosier, and the alternatives are more numerous.
Wheat Turning Gold. Three weeks ago on May Day, De Gasperi stood in Turin to watch a three-hour parade of Italian workers buzzing past on Vespas. the sleek little 4½-h.p. motor scooters which are fast becoming for Italians what the model T was for American workers. "Just look," exclaimed the Premier. "And may the miserable government over which I preside also be blamed for this!"
In 1953's sunlit spring, Italy does indeed wear a sheen it did not have under the plumed bumblings of the Savoys or the sawdust imperialism of Mussolini.
Long-barbed durum wheat—the kind that is good for pasta—is turning gold in Sicily and Calabria. Soon the harvest will begin, rolling up the toe and shin and length of the Italian boot—possibly a bumper crop like last year's. Meanwhile, there are almonds to be picked on the rolling plains of Puglia, forage grass to be cut in the lush Po Valley, cherries to be picked off the greyish flatlands around Naples. And a bumper crop of tourists—perhaps 6,000,000 —is descending on Italy, eager to be harvested. To the tourist's eye, the cities pulsate with prosperity. Next to the weathered greys, faded beiges and crumbling burnt oranges of past glories stand refurbished or new buildings glinting with fresh paint, new chrome and stucco. Cassino has risen from the bombers' rubble, a gleaming, modern town, with its famed monastery restored. In Eboli, where Christ stopped (in Carlo Levi's novel), six spanking new apartment houses were completed in the past few months.
Naples, though its slum alleys are still noisome and laundry festoons every tenement, no longer seems such a violent affront to its breathtaking setting. To the land of the Fra Angelicos and hand-painted Sicilian donkey carts has come the neon glare of modern living—billboards, Life Savers, Esso stations, Hopalong Cassidy, even a little TV. Venetian canals boast traffic lights, and only a lusty gondolier could raise his tenor above the gaseous snarl of motoscafi.
Chic & Ships. The signs of better economic conditions which the visitor sees are not illusions. Culturally and economically, Italy is enjoying something of a renaissance.
With a few old cameras, with war-battered city streets for sets and with amateurs for performers, directors like Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica have given the world some of the finest movies ever made. They gave Italy a major industry, and treated moviegoers everywhere to the likes and looks of fiery Anna Magnani and smoky Silvana Mangano. Italian painters and sculptors, artistically confined under the Fascists, have broken free. The earthy realism of such Italian novelists as Moravia, Berto and
Vittorini has won them acclaim in the U.S. Rome, not Paris, is the capital of a new generation of postwar U.S. expatriates, who this time celebrate not what they have lost but what they have found.