The Hot Iron

The most striking thing about Italy last week was just that. Not for years had the nation witnessed so far-reaching a surge of strikes. From Milan to Messina, from Bologna to Brindisi, men strutted the streets with banners, sat stubbornly with arms folded in occupied factories or simply stayed home. There was no common denominator to the strikes, no overall pattern of agitation as in the past, but rather a vague feeling among Italian workers that the iron was hot. And strike they did.

Railroads ground to a halt at the height of the Holy week tourist influx -- biggest since the war -- as 185,000 workers walked out for 24 hours in protest against "clandestine" bonuses ($200 apiece) awarded to 2,800 white-collar types. Simultaneously, doctors in three of Italy's 30 medical unions struck, demanding higher wages and better working conditions in clinics. Then the opera went on strike, darkening stages just before performances of Strauss's Fledermaus in Rome, and Rossini's Moses at Milan's La Scala.

In Florence, city employees turned off the gas; in Genoa, gardeners walked away from their flowers; throughout Italy, telephone operators engaged in a "hiccup strike" -- disregarding calls or answering them irregularly. Even the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Rome closed down, as workers popped their caps for more money. Within the past month, the Bank of Italy, the Italian Atomic Energy Commission, Rome's 36 nightclubs and the rubber industry have been struck, and last week officials of the Treasury and Finance Ministry walked out -- thus giving Italian taxpayers a 48-hour breather on their income tax.

At the root of the unrest lies Italy's chronic inflation -- a problem which Premier Aldo Moro's Socialist-Christian Democratic coalition government has had a hard time handling. Moro is due to visit Washington this week, but if things go on as they have been, he may find the whole country on strike when he returns. Sophisticated Romans shrugged it all off as just another piquant manifestation of life in Italy today. Not Milan's Corriere della Sera, which warned that the strike wave of 1919-22 "exasperated the population and was a cause -- far from secondary --for the public favoring nascent fascism."

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