(3 of 3)
Bologna: The Communist capital of Italy, Bologna was the only big Italian city to remain Red in 1951. Burly Mayor Giuseppe Dozza is an oldtime Comintern conspirator and ruthless wartime commissar, but he has run Bologna with a combination of the backslapping amiability of a Tammany politician and the careful budgeting of a conservative capitalist. Opposing him is one of the most remarkable men in Italian politics: lank-haired Giuseppe Dossetti, a professor of canonical law, who looks and is an anguished, ascetic mystic. A dedicated advocate of the "Christian community" on the model of his good friend, Florence's La Pira, Dossetti distinguished himself in the resistance, after the war became vice secretary of the Christian Democrats. But one day in 1951 he abruptly resigned all his offices and retired from politics, to plunge into an intense spiritual self-examination ("In those years, I unburdened myself of all personal interests"). He was persuaded by Bologna's Cardinal Lercaro to emerge from seclusion to challenge Dozza's rule. Gaunt and burning-eyed, he moved his bed into party headquarters, began speaking ten times a day through Bologna's "Little Stalingrad" suburbs, switched from the usual Christian Democratic attack on Communism's ideology to concentrate on Dozza's city management, hammering on the fact that employment had dropped in Bologna while soaring elsewhere in northern Italy. Communists, at first dismissing him as a fanatic without a chance, are now quite concerned about him.