Neither Italy's own political convulsions nor Berlin's Four-Power Conference made the splashiest headlines in Rome last week. Everyone from right to left and from high to low was far more interested in a burning local question: How did Wilma Montesi die? At first glance, it seemed she must have drowned. An attractive, 21-year-old girl, Wilma Montesi was found dead on the beach at Ostia, Rome's somewhat more elegant version of Coney Island, more than a year ago. The young brickworker who found her skirtless body was momentarily fascinated by the Teddy bears embroidered on her panties, but neither he nor anyone else at the time saw reason to question the official verdict: "Death by accidental drowning." Wilma, the police reasoned, had gone to Ostia in the gloomy April off-season to bathe her eczema-infected foot in salt water; she had then been caught in a treacherous undertow and carried beyond her depth. Her family buried her—a service with banks of flowers, the clop-clop of horses pulling the black hearse, the family following on foot, weeping. Then her death was forgotten by all but family and friends.
The Editor Talks. Seven months later, Attualita, a sensational new Italian picture magazine, hit the stands with Wilma's face on the cover under a broad band which said: "The Truth Behind the Death of Wilma Montesi." She had not drowned, said Attualita; she had died of overindulgence in opium taken at one of Roman society's most exclusive hunting clubs. Last week Attualita's editor, mustached, 24-year-old Silvano Muto, was haled into court and ordered to explain his charges. Threatened with a jail sentence unless he talked, Muto let go with an explosion of names from every level of Roman society.
His two principal informants, said Muto, were the daughter of a famed Milanese attorney and a onetime artist's model who had seen Wilma at orgiastic parties at the St. Hubert Club, an aristocratic shooting lodge located on a game preserve formerly belonging to the royal family. The lodge is 15 miles from the beach at Ostia.
The membership list of St. Hubert's alone was enough to send the court reporters dashing for the telephones; it includes high lay officials of the Vatican, the son of Italy's Foreign Minister, the head of a great chemical trust, and many other big names. Muto named one prominent Roman, the wealthy, white-haired Marchese Ugo Montagna di San Bartolomeo, as the leader of an international dope-smuggling ring who lured young girls to opium-drenched downfalls. When reporters reached the Milanese attorney's daughter, she calmly admitted that she had indeed once been the marchese's mistress.
The Scandal. Montagna promptly instituted slander proceedings against Editor Muto, who also awaits trial under a 1931 Fascist law for "having published false and adulterated news." The press of all parties, and in particular the Communist L'Unità, made the most of the scandal. It had everything: decadent aristocracy, orgies, playgirls, dope, and even a mystery—the still unsolved story of what happened to poor Wilma Montesi.