Pizza with Togliatti

In Rome one night last week, on the eve of general strike, an unusual group of dinner companions sat down in a restaurant. This is the story of TIME Correspondent Emmet Hughes, who was there:

To get to the little pizzeria Romualdo on the Piazza della Torretta, a little way from Corso Umberto, you have to wind through narrow streets whose buildings seem to teeter perilously close to each other above, almost shutting out the clear winter sky overhead. It is a pleasant meander to a pleasant place. The unpainted wood tables and slightly rickety straight-back chairs promise the compensation of good food. The promise is kept with true Neapolitan pizza--the best water-buffalo cheese melted with just the right amount of garlic into a flour pancake, light as the finest bread.

The Modest Overcoat. Here you will meet taxi drivers and tailors and government workers and Carabinieri off guard duty at the pompous official buildings a few blocks away. On a particular evening last week, a short, broad-shouldered man in a modest heavy black overcoat, a weather-worn grey hat, came in about 9 o'clock and gave a casual "buona sera" to the grinning waiters, who know him well. He likes to come here often, to talk casually with the Italian workers and hear what they have to say. He came over and shook hands and sat down at our table. I had seen him many times before, but had never met him. Few Americans have: never in his life had he sat down to dinner with an American newspaperman. He was Palmiro Togliatti, captain of the world's biggest Communist party outside Russia.

Also present were Orson Welles (currently in Rome filming Cagliostro and meeting Italian politicos in his spare time); three conservative Italian journalists who know Togliatti well; young Emmanuele Rocco, Communist Unita's brilliant political reporter.

Togliatti was as candid as he was articulate. Most men of 54 should begin to show the wear of work like organizing Italian Communism's winter offensive, traveling the country to address rallies when he can escape his almost daily duties in Parliament, writing editorials for his press, hammering out the rough issues of party discipline. But Togliatti's eyes were brighter, the lines in his face less deep, the broad grin quicker and more assured than I had ever seen them before.

The Unrecognized Watcher. Togliatti, who likes to cap an Assembly debate with an obscure quotation from anything including the Bible and Pinocchio, that night debated happily such revolutionary questions as the use of the gerund as a participle, the correct version of lines from a 16th Century Italian poet, the corruption of the Italian language by certain "francesismi" (Gallicisms). Behind his steel-rimmed glasses his brown eyes sparkled merrily as he told how he had watched 30,000 Communist-led partisans give the Eternal City a mighty show of force:

"I was standing in the crowd on the steps of a building, just watching--not in any official capacity, and unrecognized. But one partisan saw me, rushed out of line and up the steps to greet me. A little seven-year-old girl watched wide-eyed and decided that this was an important occasion that demanded formality. So she drew herself up very straight and gave me and the partisans a perfect Fascist salute."

Sipping white wine mixed with water, Togliatti answered all questions without quibbling, bluntly and lucidly:

The Firm Bite. No, he didn't fear that the Communists' strike tactics were costing them votes. While the party's strength held fast in the north, "its greater energy" was making deep inroads into the rural south (and recent small-town elections support this claim). He was especially happy over the party's successful proselytizing of the stubbornly conservative "contadini" (peasants), who have everywhere been the Marxists' highest hurdle: "In population percentage our strongest local federation in Italy is in Siena--in the heart of Tuscany's vineyards and olive groves--and I'm not sure there's even a single factory there."

Yes, next March elections could be approached confidently because the bloc alliance with the Socialists is stronger than ever--it didn't even exist at the last national elections.

Yes, 20 years of Fascist suppression had in some ways produced an unusual Communist party: less than one out of three Communist Assembly deputies has ever read Marx.

Then, slicing into a juicy pear, Togliatti took a good firm Communist bite at the Marshall Plan. No, in the long run it could not help Italy. Why? He said that he here agreed with classic liberal economics: it would make the country a charity case, dependent on American aid, and sluggish in developing its own healthy economic character. Italian export industries, he argued, should be filling old German markets in eastern Europe--"countries which are thirsting for our goods." "But," he charged: "America prefers to keep those markets sealed up for the industry of western Germany that you can control directly. ... If we had been in power in Italy during this time, the country's export industries today would already be creating a strong economy." Wryly he said that, when he got letters from America asking him about the Marshall Plan, he answered simply: "I feel about it just the way an American taxpayer should."

"By Popular Pressure." Finally--over the kind of raw Italian coffee that sets an American's teeth on edge--we came to the big question: what are the Italian Communists up to and how far are they ready to go? Actually the question did not have to be asked, because Togliatti attacked it himself. He spoke with the disciplined fluency of a man long practised in saying no more and no less than the moment calls for: "We Communists haven't changed our program of reform since we left the government. Only today we obviously cannot realize it by collaborating with the government, but by popular pressure. The news is false which the rightist press has been distributing about the date of a revolution." Choosing each word carefully, he concluded: "But one can never, generally speaking, rule out an eruption of movements of revolutionary character. Even to found the United States of America a revolution was necessary."

The Unhurried Man. Twice during the long evening, the lights in the little pizzeria went out (as is the habit with Rome's electricity), and we talked in darkness. Then little gas lamps were brought out--strong enough so we could see each other's silhouettes and the light glittering on the neat little silver hammer-&-sickle pin Togliatti wore in his lapel.

Only once did he turn interrogation upon America. "In all the United States is there no city that is Communist?" No. "No section of a big city?" No. "Any street even?" No. And he gave a shrug and a smile, half of incredulity, half of mocking despair.

Our cognac toast to peace was drunk (Togliatti swallowed his in one quick gulp), and but for ourselves the Romualdo was empty. It was long past 1 a.m. when Togliatti fished out his pocket watch from under the grey sweater that kept him warm beneath his double-breasted blue suit, mourned the hour and the parting. Five hours after our meeting, the black overcoat and grey hat disappeared into the night; by the time the rest of us got to the door they were gone,

I felt that I had never seen a man who at once seemed so unhurried, yet so very, very sure of where he was heading, of how he would get there, and when--which undoubtedly was precisely the impression he so intelligently worked to create.

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