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Rome's Fiumicino airport was jammed with pilgrims last week. Some were Roman Catholics arriving to observe the Holy Year paschal ceremonies in the Eternal City. More secular-minded visitors included Communist delegations from 70 countries, who flew in for the 14th National Congress of the Italian Communist Party. It promised to be the most important such meeting in years. Principal topic on the six-day agenda was the compromesso storico --the "historic compromise" under which for the first time the Communists seek partnership in an Italian government. As a result of economic disorder and disenchantment over an inept succession of center-left coalition governments dominated by the Christian Democrats, Communist hopes have never been brighter.

As thunderstorms raged outside Rome's Palazzo dello Sport, Party Secretary Enrico Berlinguer, 52, explained the significance of the compromise in a 3 1/2-hour keynote addressed to the 1,124 Italian delegates at the congress. It was Berlinguer who two years ago first proposed the idea that Italy's second largest party should become a partner in the government, after 30 years of opposition. Berlinguer argued that Communist participation in a government with other parties was essential "for the future of Italian democracy." He did not spell out the specific terms under which the party would enter such a government, in what some observers refer to as "detente at the neighborhood level."

In an apparent effort to placate political moderates, the secretary promised that the Communists, if they came to power, would seek a Europe-oriented foreign policy for Italy, independent of both superpowers and hostile to neither. He also said that the party would not insist upon Italy leaving NATO. In deference to the church, which strongly opposes the historic compromise. Berlinguer promised that the Communists would pay "rigorous fidelity to the concept of tolerance and respect for every conviction and faith."

Berlinguer's theories are rejected by some hard-liners within the party, who were brought up on the classic revolutionary dogma of unending class struggle. Nonetheless, it was virtually certain that the delegates would approve the secretary's platform. The larger question was the reaction of other Italian political parties. Amintore Fanfani, the conservative secretary of the Christian Democratic Party, remains adamantly opposed. "If the Christian Democrats do not want to commit suicide," he said earlier this month, "they must say no to the compromesso storico tomorrow, as well as today." But left-wing Christian Democrats are not that opposed to the idea, nor are some socialists and members of the small but influential Republican Party.

Since he became secretary of the party in 1972, Berlinguer--the Sardinian scion of landowning aristocrats --has worked hard to promote a new respectable image for the Communists.

Many middle-class Italians apparently believe that the Communists are not the threat they seemed to be a few years ago. A recent poll by the Milan daily Corriere della Sera showed that 38% of the voters were in favor of the compromise, while 34.9% were opposed; 27.1% were either undecided or confused as to what the compromise would mean.

That poll, however, was taken before the sudden emergence of the militant, Communist-led left in Portugal, which Berlinguer sought to explain away last week as "a very complicated political process" following four decades of fascism. "It is clear," he insisted, "that conditions in Italy are altogether different from those in Portugal." Nevertheless, when word reached Rome that Portuguese Christian Democrats had been barred from upcoming elections, a delegation of Italian Christian Democrats, attending the Communist congress as observers, walked out in protest.

The possibilities for compromise will be clearer in June, when regional and municipal elections take place across Italy. The Communists are expected to do well. For one thing, membership in the party has risen to 1,601,507, an increase of 135,000 in three years. For another, Parliament earlier this month passed a law lowering the voting age from 21 to 18; nearly 40% of these newly enfranchised youths are expected to vote Communist, either from conviction or from dissatisfaction with lack of jobs and inflation. Even if the Communists win heavily, however, Berlinguer indicated last week that the party will wait for power rather than demand it or fight for it openly. Said he: "We are a patient, tenacious people."

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