Commissars & Mystics

On posters plastered on sun-warmed walls all over Italy, bat-winged devils erupted from a walled town above the Christian Democratic slogan: "Liberate our communes from the trustees of Moscow!" For the first time in four years, Italy's 7,143 communes are electing new governments next Sunday. Though only municipal elections, they will be read as a political referendum on Premier Antonio Segni's year-old Christian Democratic government. Italy's biggest political guns, from Segni himself to the Communists' Palmiro Togliatti, scoured the country orating.

In 1951 the Christian Democrats wrested such big cities as Turin, Venice, Genoa, Pisa and Florence from the Communists with the help of a tricky electoral law--since repealed--which awarded two-thirds of the seats in a city government to the party polling the most votes. This time, proportional representation rules in all cities and large towns, and Christian Democrats may find themselves without a governing majority even in towns where they top the popular poll.

The Vatican has thrown the power of the church behind them; signs on church doors warn: "Remember you are apostate and excommunicated if you vote for the Communists." But in a land where many of the people are at once Roman Catholic and anticlerical, the Vatican is being discreet. Communists are embarrassed by the dethroning of Stalin, but Communism's fellow-traveling allies, the Socialists of Pietro Nenni, are expected to do well. Four crucial races:

Rome. There is real danger of a Communist victory in the Holy City. In 1952 the Christian Democrats were actually outpolled by the allied Socialist-Communist slate, but saved by the electoral law. Under fat, fumbling Mayor Salvatore Rebecchini, Rome has been plagued by tram strikes, power and water shortages. He finally withdrew as a candidate for reelection, in the face of Communist charges of corruption centering on the projected Hotel Hilton, which is yet to be erected on Rome's outskirts. The Communist candidate is Giuseppe di Vittorio, a tough Red union leader who is rated second only to Togliatti as an orator and vote getter. If Di Vittorio wins, the Christian Democrats in the city council will try to keep him from forming a government, thus allowing the national government to appoint a prefect to govern instead.

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."

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.

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