To find Lucia Ladanca's name in TIME'S May 30 issue, you had to read most of the way through a seven-column Foreign News story on Italy. At that point the story said: "The most disturbing economic fact of [Premier Alcide] de Gasperi's Italy is the almost hopeless poverty of such people as hunchbacked Lucia Ladanca, a Potenza housewife who lives with her tuberculous husband and eight-year-old son Bruno in a fetid tenement not far from well-stocked stores."

The story went on to say that the Ladancas never had enough money to buy Bruno trousers and shoes at the same time so that he could go to school, where he would at least get one good meal each day. "So he's growing up ignorant," Mrs. Ladanca said. "What's worse, he's hungry."

Some of you were moved by this incident to write us for Mrs. Ladanca's address, which our bureau in Rome supplied. Others wanted Bruno's measurements so they could send him shoes and clothing. A fortnight ago Correspondent George Jones, of our Rome bureau, visited Lucia Ladanca, and his cabled account, which follows, may serve as one illustration of the effect of American aid to Europeans:

"Potenza is a sunbaked community in southern Italy on a hilltop overlooking the Basento valley near the instep of the Italian boot. During the war, the U.S. Army had a rest center there for its troops. Today few foreigners enter this desolate, impoverished region whose capital is Potenza.

"Lucia Ladanca lives in a semi-basement room at No. 3 Via Fratelli Bandieri, a narrow, cobblestoned street swarming with seminaked children. She had first told her story to Correspondent William Rospigliosi of our bureau last spring. When I arrived, she had just received two letters from TIME readers. One, from Mrs. Betty Jane Davidson, of Bluefield, West Virginia, said that a food package was on its way and asked for shoe and clothing sizes for everybody in the family. The other, from Bernice Sherman, of Bolton Landing, N.Y., also asked for clothing measurements.

"Lucia does not read or write any language at all, so she went around the corner to a small household supply store owned by brawny Luigi Ottavia, who was born in the States. He read the letters to her and wrote her replies. 'Within the morning,' he told me, 'everybody had heard about it.' They called on her one by one, looked at the letters, which they could not read, and talked about them. Some thought nothing would happen. Others, like Luigi Ottavia, who knew something of Americans, reassured Lucia that 'something will come of this.'

"At the time I was there, Lucia, who is a very devout woman, did not know what to think about this strange event that was connected with a ' giornalaio' somewhere in America. Her husband, who could not afford medicine or hospital care, had not heard from the pensions investigator who had finally arrived to look into his case. Bruno was as bare as ever, and the baby, Enzo, was getting by with a cotton singlet. All of them shared a diet which Lucia described as 'a little pasta, a little greens.'

"That was last week. This morning Luigi Ottavia sent word to the Rome bureau that the first food package had arrived. He said that Lucia opened it slowly before all the neighbors who could crowd into her dingy room, and that everyone's eyes shone at the contents: ham, coffee, soap, milk, chocolate, macaroni and rice. Said Luigi Ottavia: 'At last she's beginning to believe.' "

Cordially yours,

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