Comeback

Palmiro Togliatti was back. Three months after his attempted assassination (TIME, July 26), he still looked pale; his voice no longer seemed to carry the old, metallic ring. When Togliatti appeared at a Communist rally in Rome last week, a plump countrywoman wiped her eyes. "Poor dear," she said. "He must still be ill, he's not his old self yet."

People's Day. Politically, Togliatti was quite himself. In his absence, tough, spiteful Luigi Longo had run the Italian Communist Party without any of Togliatti's suave, serge-suited craftiness. Loudly, Longo had threatened insurrection, had ordered unpopular (and unsuccessful) nationwide strikes. At a closed meeting of the party's Central Committee, Togliatti last week listened to Longo defend his policy, then flatly contradicted him. Said Togliatti: "We cannot pin our hopes on a large insurrectional movement . . . Our objective is still gaining a majority by preserving all our old alliances and making new ones. Let us beware of locking ourselves up in our own walls . . ."

In the ancient streets of Rome the old Togliatti touch was also in evidence. Togliatti called a local strike which sounded innocent enough, but which was more effective (and smelled worse) than anything the Italian Communist Party had tried in a long time.

All Saturday night and early Sunday, special trains and rumbling trucks disgorged comrades from the hinterland. By noon, Rome's streets were jammed with perspiring, singing men, women & children--most of them wearing red bandannas and clutching lunch hampers. Brazenly they occupied chairs and tables in sidewalk cafes, opened their lunches and nibbled leisurely, tossing melon rinds and bread crusts into the streets. Outraged cafe owners cursed the invaders. The comrades only laughed: "This is the people's day."

Still munching and discarding wrappings and bread crusts, they joined a huge Communist parade to the vast, oval-shaped Foro Italico which was transformed into a vast picnic ground; thousands squatted on the pavement and feasted from cardboard box lunches. In the glow of the setting sun, Togliatti appeared on a platform. He did not rant or threaten; he simply said: "A great sadness fills our souls when we see the ever spreading discord in our country . . . We witness this offensive being launched against workers who fight for their daily bread . . ."

When the crowds drifted home, they stopped for beer and snacks. More refuse filled the streets. The contents of broken bottles spattered into the' debris of the Eternal City.

Bread & Lipstick. Next day, Rome knew which way the wind blew. Forty-five hundred street cleaners went on strike at the Communists' call. It was a strike in sympathy for municipal white-collar workers who had also walked out. Suddenly, the street cleaners remembered that an Italian law forbids "sympathy" and political strikes. Hastily, they trumped up some "legitimate" wage demands (their present wages are equivalent or superior to those of Roman high-school teachers). Exclaimed Communist Francesco Giacinti, one of the strike leaders: "The government has raised the price of bread but not of lipstick . . . We're fighting for our daily bread."

As the strike wore on, urchins and a few old men & women prowled through the mounting piles of rubbish, patiently searching for scrap paper, cloth, bits of metal and cigarette butts. Cats & dogs dropped in for tidbits. Not far from the Pantheon, the traditional rendezvous of Roman cats, a spinsterish old woman called pleadingly to her bloated black & white cat, which feasted from a rubbish heap. In a nearby cafe, brawny comrades jeered. The old woman turned on them: "If the poor thing dies from indigestion, you will be to blame, you rebels!"

Finally, irate housewives took matters into their own hands, sturdily began to clean their sidewalks. The street cleaners' wives promptly hooted them and denounced them as scabs, but the housewives went on sweeping.

The Blue Suit Again. By midweek, the city fathers called in strikebreakers. They, too, encountered trouble. Idling strikers pointed scornfully at the newcomers' clumsy technique. Pretty, smartly dressed Communist Deputy Maria Luisa Cinciari-Rodano led 15 strikers' wives into battle against a detachment of volunteer garbage collectors. With resounding cries of "traitors!" and "robbers of bread!", Signora Rodano charged the unhappy scavengers.

She triumphantly carried a captured broom from the fray. At week's end, the street cleaners scornfully rejected an offer of a 10,000-lire bonus, held out for 15,000, Palmiro Togliatti appeared in the Chamber of Deputies. He wore his suavest air and his famous blue, double-breasted serge suit. Said he piously: "Parliament is the center of democratic life and it is bound to a concept of tolerance between men who fight for their own ideas."

Outside, Rome's air was rife with the aroma of decaying garbage and dead fish. Luigi Longo decided that the party could dispense with his services for a few weeks; he went to a hospital for a hernia operation.

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