4 JANUARY 1946, Page 12

ROMAN CHRISTMAS

By ELIZABETH WISKEMANN Rome, Christmas, 1945.

TO walk through Rome and observe the enormous trafficking in expensive goods which goes on in its shops and its market- places in this year of want is to face a perpetual mystery : one cannot explain to oneself whence all these things come, or who can afford to buy them. Visitors from London are naturally indignant, for they forget that grotesque contrasts between poverty and wealth are nearly always the symptoms of the general poverty and demoralisation of

any society. • The German occupation of the major part of Italy was an appalling national experience, yet one which inspired the noblest political emotion. This was even more the case in Italy than in the rest of Europe, because the struggle against the Germans could be more precisely identified with self-liberation from a long and disgraceful serviture to a shaming regime. But the Allied occupation—this is the tragedy of the " dopoguerra "—has been demoralising for Allies and Italians alike, and it could not have been otherwise. A friendly occupation in the name of democracy provides a contradiction in itself, because the foreign soldier is bound to be a privileged person. He is politically ignorant and judges the occupied country mistakenly; often in the circumstances of today he instinctively intervenes on behalf of former Fascists or their friends because they seem to be having bad luck.

And now he has outlived his job, and in the case of the British soldier, finding his 400 lire to the pound very thin, he easily slips into black-marketing ; in the case of the American he often has South Italian relatives who are relapsing into brigandage. The worst case is that of the Pole ; there are well over too,000 Polish soldiers here who have refused to return to Poland and have nothing whatever in prospect. They are violently anti-Communist, of course, and already, not without a certain justification, they are regarded by Italian working-men as the mercenaries of the Right ; everyone knows that the Italian Government has to support all these troops. The last straw has been that Anglo-Saxon soldiers have sometimes shown a preference for German prisoners here, the men who carried out the orders of the Nuremberg criminals in Italy—this has completed the demoralisation of the Italians.

Their emotions flame up and die down more quickly than ours ; it does not follow that they are less true. When the Allies arrived the Italians, still exalted by the struggle against the Germans, hoped everything. But, as Corrado Alvaro wrote in a brilliant article in the Mondo the other day, " Since no one appealed to their good qualities, they (the Italians) were impelled to display their magnifi- cently bad ones," and they had to try to survive. To a letter just published in an American paper in Rome explaining that the Americans often felt more sympathy for the Germans than for the Italians because the Germans seemed to have lost nothing but the war, Alvaro has replied in Nuova Europa ; it was not difficult to reply to this at Christmastime and to soldiers who had come in the name of a Christian civilisation. The Allied forces here are well fed, for, while no longer faced with the exertions of war, their rations are still more generous than those of the civilian population in Britain. The Italian population is starving to the paradoxical extent that a gift of food is usually worth re-selling. Elementary education ceases at the age of eleven in Italy, even in normal times, when buildings and books are available ; this means that one sees the merest children selling Naafi cigarettes (and sometimes smoking them) with the excited absorption of a normal child learning some fasci- nating game. There is less of this in Milan and the other northern towns, but there one will hear exasperated Italians cry out against that other curse of all military occupations, the increase of prosti- tution. " They are turning Milan into Naples," one will hear. And everything is made worse by the constant rise in prices, the alarming inflation to which the printing of AM-lire is bound to contribute.

The Christmas controversy in Rome is the question of the electric light supply. British soldiers with whom I have spoken simply did not know that most of the city was without light except for about two days a week during December. When they left the lights burn- ing brightly in requisitioned buildings where it was allowed, they did not notice if the houses nearby were in darkness, but it is not surprising that the Italian Press has reacted acidly ; it should be added that it has enjoyed complete freedom to do so. An astonishing number of newspapers-22 dailies and 120 weeklies—is published in Rome alone ; there are frequent cries of panic over the exhaustion of the paper-supply, yet this journalistic exuberance is able to con- tinue. On the whole, it is quite good journalism, despite twenty-one years of Fascism, and it has been free to express every possible point of view. Anxiety was recently caused in several quarters, not by censdrship from above, but by the occasional refusal of printers to print views of which they disapproved. The new De Gasperi Government, having taken office, among other things, to maintain the freedom of the Press, made an unfortunate debut when two papers were immediately confiscated by the Roman police. Since De Gasperi is the first clerical Premier of United Italy, old anti- clerical journalists began to roll up their sleeves. The matter has, however, been satisfactorily settled by the decision to return to the Press Law of 1906, which was considered revolutionary in those days because it abolished " preventive " confiscation except in the case of extreme obscenity ; it leaves it to the magistrates to take action against journalistic offences.

Given these conditions and these controversies, how may Italian public opinion be summed up? A great disillusionment cannot be denied. Even the return of the Northern Provinces to Italian ad- ministration at the end of the year is not the consolation which It might be, because, as at least one newspaper has written, this, so long as peace has not been made, will only mean that Allied Military Government in the North is replaced by the Allied Commission, whose presence in Rome it is impossible to forget. All but the very rich or the very dishonest are in the greatest economic diffi- culties, and the genuinely anti-Fascist Government Parties have made the mistake of ignoring the mentality of the lower middle- class, a very big section of Italian society. Its members are par- ticularly hard hit by the inflation ; they are bewildered by the elo- quence of the Press ; they fall a prey to various forms of pseudo- Fascism which play upon their disappointments and their depriva- tions. One of the most dangerous forms of Nazi-Fascist corruption, that of buying political support with economic assistance, is being imitated by various new political " Fronts " of doubtful integrity, and it would be absurd to hope that ragged and starving people could resist such offers.

The elections which are now being prepared, and which may be expected to be held without the exertion of any undue pressure, can alone reveal the political effect of all these circumstances. Although small Neo-Fascist cells continue to be discovered by the police, certain local elections—such as those held by the Allied authorities at Belluno (only the head of each household being allowed to vote)— suggest that the Left is not weakening to the extent many people had imagined.