SUMMER DAYS IN ROME
By DEREK PATMORE One senses this new urgency and energy in the Italians when visiting the intellectual circles. Too poor, most of them, to take holidays by the sea or in the mountains, these young intellectuals remaining in the capital are anxious to see Italy take her rightful place in the European concert of nations, and they provide one of the most encouraging portents in a country which has emerged bankrupt but determined to rebuild itself after a disastrous war. That endeavour is expressing itself in many fields. Take, for example, the cinema. The Britiih public have already been astonished by the depth and brilliance of the Italian picture " Open City." After talking to many of the Italian film directors here, I can assure British filmgoers that there are many more interesting Italian pictures on the way. There is Vittorio De Sica's " Sciusia " which is a tragic but intensely moving story of Rome's young vagrants. There is Mario Soldati's " Daniele Cords," in which our own Sarah Churchill has scored an outstanding success, and there is the Vatican-supported picture " Apocalypse " from an original story by a French writer, Henry Clark, which promises to out-do even Cecil de Mille in spectacular effects. For faced with the world-menace of Com- munism, the Vatican has at last decided that Communist propaganda must be fought with its own weapons and it has entered the lists with unexpected modern efficiency. A special school for motion picture making and the training of film critics is being started in the Vatican this September, and already the first big Vatican film pro- duction " Fabiola "—a story of the early Christian martyrs in Rome— is being, made by one of Italy's most famous film directors.
At the same time, the Rome theatre has experienced a renaissance. At last liberated from the chains of Fascism, a few young Italian theatre directors have astonished the Roman public with a number
of new and arresting productions. Outstanding amongst these new ' theatrical directors is Luchino Visconti. Descendant of the Viscontis of Milan and a pupil of Pierre Renoir, the French film director, Luchino Visconti has created his own theatrical company, and his productions have already established him as the most promising of the younger Italian theatre directors. Last season, Visconti gave a remarkable production of "Crime and Punishment" as well as a number of new French and American plays, and during the corning winter season he is giving Keith Winter's " Old Music," Shake- speare's " Romeo and Juliet " and " 'Tis Pity She's A Whore," apart from a number of new Italian plays. Visconti has breathed new life into the Roman theatre,. His productions are imaginative and different. They also have the freshness of youth—for he has surrounded himself with young talent. His leading actress, Rina Morelli, is considered the most gifted of the younger actresses and his juvenile Giorgio Di Lullo handsome enough to be a Hollywood star.
Among the charms of midsummer Rome are the many open-ais restaurants. There is the Tre Scalini in the Piazza Navona, where one dines on the pavement overlooking Bernini's fantastic fountains, and there are the many small trattarie on Monte Mario, just outside the city, where one eats under wine-covered trellises and looks down on the electrically-lit panorama of the capital. When I was dining one night on Monte Mario with Torriacca, the owner of the Eliseo Theatre, he told me that the Italian theatre still lacked new authors. "Only one new dramatist has emerged since the war," he told me, " He's Eduardo Da Filipo, whose Filomena Marturano ' has been the great success of last season. Da Filipo is remarkable because he's both actor, producer, and dramatist. A Neapolitan, he writes in the Naples dialect, but his plays are the most interesting since the days of Pirandello."
Another distraction is the series of open-air concerts held in the Basilica Mazzencio and the Opera in the Baths of Caracalla. The flood-lit ruins of these great imperial baths make a superb setting for the open-air performances of the Rome Opera Company, and I have seen both "Carmen " and " Aida." The modern Italian still loves spectacles, and the production of " Aida " is typically Italian with its massed choruses and its Egyptian triumphs which out-do anything that Covent Garden can produce in the way of pure spectacle. However, there is something pathetic about " Aida " as seen in the Italian capital. This story of the conquest of Ethiopia and the fatal love of Rhadames for the Ethiopian girl, Aida, recalls all too vividly the Abyssinian campaign and the ill-fated glories of Mussolini. Still, the Italians have a fortunate manner of forgetting the past and living in the present ; they seem oblivious of the _im- plications, and " Aida " remains one of the most popular operas in their whole repertoire.
Foreigners visiting Italy today are apt to wonder how far the Italians have managed to bury the doctrines of Fascism. Does a latent Fascism still exist in Italy? Or is a people used to dictator- ship now drifting towards the other extreme—Communism? After talking to Italians belonging to many different classes I have come to the conclusion that the average Italian abhors any form of dictator- ship. As one young intellectual said to me: "Yes, I was forced to be a Fascist, but it taught me to want to be a good democrat." How- ever, the famous Italian writer, Ignazio Silone, himself an ardent Socialist, was somewhat pessimistic about Italian youth. Discussing the present situation in Italy he told me : " Our young people are too frivolous. They forget the past too easily. There are still a number of Fascists in Italy who ought to be punished." When I asked Silone about his literary work, he told me that he had started a new novel. " But politics have interfered with my writing," he went on to say. "However, now that I am living outside Rome I am beginning to write again." Another Italian writer who has been maturing since the liberation is Moravia, whose novel Agostino has recently been well received by the English critics. Moravia has just published a long new novel, La Romana, which Italian critics hail as his most ambitious work and which I understand is already being translated into English.
Italian readers as a whole are still very ignorant about current British literature—this is one of the legacies of Fascism. So it is pleasant to find that there is a small group of Italian scholars in Rome who are devoting their abilities to making English letters known to the Italians. Outstanding amongst these men is Professor Mario Praz, whose The Romantic Agony is well known to many British readers. Praz remains indefatigable in his efforts to introduce the English classics to his compatriots, and he has just finished a new edition of translations of Elizabethan plays as well as preparing a book on the Victorian novelists. Another who has done good work in this field is Dr. Augusto Guidi, a young writer and scholar, who has translated E. M. Forster (A Passage to India), Hopkins and Milton into Italian, and has also written an excellent study of Coventry Patmore.
Thus a new Rome is emerging from the old. Architecturally, it remains the most splendid city M Europe. The many fountains in the Pincian Gardens still splash. At night, the Colosseum is still floodlit, and the moonlight sheds magic over the great piazza of St. Peter's and Michael Angelo's Campidoglio. But everything in Rome pro- claims Italy'. refusal to be crushed by defeat. As in the past, when it seemed that the capital was finally destroyed by the invading Goths and Vandals, the city is taking on a new life. Rome, like the phoenix, is being reborn out of the ashes of the past.
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