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At the seaside restaurants of Ostia near Rome, fashionably clothed signori and signorine sneer at Americans in their slacks, sweaters and tennis sneakers. The publishing industry is booming, and Italy's 60 movie sound stages steadily employ 27,000 workers, while Hollywood is on the ropes. Apart from sex and spectacles, the theme of Italian movies is changing: man's fight to make a living is increasingly replaced by the effort to understand himself in a complex, prosperous society.
In the city streets, motor scooters, yesterday's symbol of prosperity, have almost vanished, replaced by masses of automobiles—although to own a car, many Italians must still make sacrifices. Says one Milanese waiter, explaining why he is single: "O macchina, o moglie" (Either a car or a wife).
Neo-Tolstoyan. The Italian constitution regards the President as the living symbol of the nation, and for Italy's paradoxical mood of economic prosperity and intellectual concern, the election of Segni was remarkably appropriate. A wealthy gentleman farmer from Sardinia,* Segni has given away 250 acres of his own rich olive groves to landless peasants; in 1950, as Agriculture Minister, he sponsored a far-reaching system of national land reform. Politically, Segni is a moderate conservative who is not likely to stand in the way of reforms planned under Fanfani's opening to the left.
A lawyer by training, Segni is also an experienced politician (twice Premier: 1955-57; 1959-60) and a thoughtful statesman who describes his outlook on history as Tolstoyan. "Men in government," he has written, "really have only an enormous capacity for doing harm. Their chances for doing good are very few and hard to come by." As Italy's President for the next seven years, Segni has a rare opportunity for doing good.
*Below a flaming cross that appeared in the noonday sky above Rome, Constantine saw the motto, In hoc signo vinces (By this sign conquer), which eventually led to his conversion to Christianity.
*In all of Italy's long history, Sardinia has produced hardly any notable figures. Until Segni reached a political eminence, the island's most famed citizen was Grazia Deledda, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1926 for a novel, Flight into Egypt. Before she died in 1936 she had written 28 novels about life on the "forgotten island."