Befana Calls on the Cops

Besides making the trains run on time, Mussolini also made Rome's turbulent traffic run smoothly. He prohibited the Roman pedestrian's custom of reading newspapers in the middle of the street. Once, interrupted in his meditations by a horn insistently honking in the Piazza Venezia below, Mussolini shouted an order that all "acoustic signaling" be forthwith prohibited in Rome. Romans whispered sadly that their "city of noise" had become the citt`a del silenzio.

After Fascism's fall, the horns honked again triumphantly. Jaywalking became an assertion of individual liberty. Then, last year, to show that freedom is not license, the police clamped down.

Roman cops, their topees set at a jaunty angle, intercepted all traffic offenders and on the spot collected sizable fines. To increase their civic zeal, the policemen were allowed to keep half of the fines. In vain the press cried out against this "unheard-of form of taxation."

Largely to appease the cops, hard-pressed Romans revived the prewar custom of handing out gifts to the police on Feast of the Epiphany--Jan. 6, the day on which Italian children get their Christmas presents. (The gifts are brought by Befana, a green-shawled lady who travels on a broomstick and wears dark spectacles to protect her eyes when she dives down chimneys.) Last week, Roman drivers halted their cars to hand over their presents to "off-duty" policemen who were especially stationed for this purpose next to the regular ones.

At every main intersection, the cops were knee-high in mounds of cheese, nuts, cake, fruit, beer, wine, liquors, and an occasional mug of shaving cream. One Roman police sergeant estimated that before Befana was done, each member of the 130-man traffic police force took home an average of four bottles of wine plus a pound of pasta.

Everybody hoped that such generosity would make Rome's cops a little more lenient with individualism--either the jaywalking or the horn-blowing variety.

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