Sunshine & Scars

For some people, life was pleasant in Rome last week. Bright sunshine and tempering breezes by day, a waxing moon by night added charm to the beautiful, eternal city.

As always, lovely flowers were for sale at the foot of the Spanish Steps. Famous restaurants were open. In one, the San Carlo, Proprietor Umberto Storci fell with joy on the neck of an old customer, New York Timesman Herbert Matthews. Said

Matthews in a nostalgic dispatch: "He had been serving German soldiers until 5 o'clock yesterday afternoon."

Crowds followed Lieut. General Mark Clark's jeep through the streets. Barelegged young women in summer prints and sportswear promenaded the Corso Umberto. The view indicated that there was not a girdle in Rome.

In the big department stores, cotton goods, gloves, cosmetics, costume jewelry, electric cookers and hot plates were on sale.

Italian flags adorned most buildings, Allied bunting fluttered from a few cornices. The "Oltremare" travel agency displayed two large colored posters blithely advertising the United States Steamship Lines.

Fear's Pale Face. Under the glitter of the resurgent city, hunger, death and the pale face of fear haunted many & many a Roman.

U.S. correspondents were annoyed when they had to pay $1.13 for two boiled eggs and a cup of weak tea at the Hotel Majestic (they would have paid as much or more in comparable restaurants at home). Thousands upon thousands of Romans and refugees went hungry. Roman housewives could find sugar at $10 a lb., string beans at $5.50 a lb., rice at $5 a lb. Their husbands probably had not worked for months. Until the Nazis left, able-bodied male Italians had been afraid to walk the streets lest they be deported to forced labor in Hitler's Reich. Many a family in Rome had devised secret hideaways behind sliding panels or revolving bookcases, or at the ends of cellar labyrinths. There the menfolk could hide, subsist on meager, hoarded rations if the Gestapo came.

Buildings and parks still bore the scars of Nazi bullets, fired into Italian crowds by Nazi soldiers. Correspondents visited a Nazi torture chamber in the Gestapo jail at No. 145 Via Tasso, talked with Angelo Yoppi, a hopeless cripple after 52 days' imprisonment there with his hands and legs tied behind his back. They peered into a cavern on Rome's outskirts, where the Nazis had piled like cordwood some 500 Italians massacred last March in reprisal for the grenade-killing of 32 German soldiers; now weeping Romans stood at the tomb's mouth, searching for relatives among the cadavers.

In Rome's ancient Jewish quarter, beyond the Tiber, less than a third of the former 18,000 residents were left. But even some Jews survived the Terror. Some found private refuges. And there was always the Vatican, a haven for many, regardless of religion or political affiliation.

Beneath St. Peter's dome stood Monsignor Enrico Pucci, head of the Vatican's semi-official news bureau. He looked out across the jeep-filled streets of the Eternal City and murmured: "Oh, it's just another changing of the guard."

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