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Naples: Mayor Achille Lauro, onetime fisherman turned Monarchist and shipping tycoon, has governed Naples like a genial Midas, spent more than $4,000,000 of his own money in largesse ranging from free spaghetti to the purchase of star players for the city soccer team. He has twice torn up the city's central square because he did not like the looks of it, recently ordered all traffic lights abolished because he became annoyed at red lights. Though he has done little for Naples' 30,000 homeless and 150,000 jobless, Lauro has spent public monies royally, handing out huge monthly "travel" allowances to deskbound functionaries, and beaming broadly on open corruption. When one Lauro councilor admitted taking a bribe from a contractor, Lauro made him chief of all city building. To complaints, a Lauro aide retorted airily: "The cat who can't reach the fat says it smells." His Monarchists are split, his Neo-Fascist allies in decline, but Mayor Lauro still has a way with Neapolitans, and a good chance of reelection.
Florence: Bouncy, bubbly little Giorgio La Pira, who lives like a monk, talks like a prophet, and never lets private rights stand in the way of what he considers public good, is in trouble. His cheerful spending of public funds has run the city into deep debt. He has outraged conservatives by his highhanded requisitioning of empty villas to house the city's poor, his seizure of bankrupt factories to preserve jobs for the workmen. His former conservative allies, the Liberals, have deserted him and joined the Monarchists and a local businessmen's party to put up a slate against "La Pirata." Local wags promptly labeled it "The Unpopular Front." But La Pira has so discomfited the Communists and stolen so much of their platform that, in desperation, the local Reds are waging a weird campaign urging balanced budgets. "Why worry about the tax burden?" asks La Pira. "Everybody evades taxes, anyway."