Love in the Town Hall?

On the wall of the public registrar's office in the village of Campogalliano (5 1/2 miles off the main road from Modena to Bologna), hangs a large portrait of Garibaldi. From under beetling brows, the old revolutionary soldier looks down on two municipal workers: Ostilio Iotti, 26, whose wife is rich but not pretty, and Santina Caffani, a widow of 30 or more. Together they keep the village records and accounts. Last summer a rumor sprang up that Ostilio and Santina were more to each other than coworkers; the sofa in the registrar's office was often mentioned in these rumors.

"A Strange Twinkle." Ostilio and Santina are Christian Democrats. The village mayor, councillors and all the other officials are Communists. They decided to get rid of Ostilio and Santina. A few weeks ago the Communists brought from Modena the official party photographer, Mario Botti. He set up his camera in the room adjoining the registrar's office, drilled a hole through the wall, pierced the portrait so that the camera lens peered through Garibaldi's eye.

After three days of waiting, Photographer Botti got what he had been told to get, or so he said. A click of the camera caused Ostilio to look up. He noticed what he later described as "a strange twinkle in Garibaldi's eye." Ostilio and Santina rushed into the next room, as the photographer and two town councillors fled.

The town councillors delivered their negatives to Communist Mayor Guido Gialdi as "evidence." Gialdi suspended Ostilio and Santina, and forwarded prints of the negatives with a report to the provincial prefect. The prefect, an appointee of Italy's Christian Democratic government, ordered Ostilio and Santina reinstated until a formal hearing could be held. Ostilio and Santina filed a suit against the mayor for "defamation and slander."

Overtime for the Mayor. Campogalliano buzzed. Ostilio, said neighbors, had been beaten with a matterello (rolling pin) by his wife, who greatly outweighs him, and confined to his house for two days. Ostilio and Santina denied any improper relationship. Said Ostilio: "She's just an office colleague." Said Santina of Ostilio: "Among other things, I don't like his mustache." Santina opened a counteroffensive. Said she: "I could tell you a few things about the mayor. He often got me to work overtime in his office, and he has a pair of very long hands indeed."

Any compromising photographs, the bookkeepers maintained, could only be a clever photomontage. Photographer Botti told the police he had been hired by Mayor Gialdi, paid 4,000 lire, plus expenses, by a town councillor. Said he: "Professional secrecy prohibits me from describing the pictures of the love scenes." Mayor Gialdi said that two of the shots were "definitely compromising."

Last week the scandal had spread far beyond Campogalliano, as the Communists, with next spring's municipal elections in view, sought to discredit the Christian Democrats' carefully built-up record of morality in municipal government. Ostilio and Santina, cried the Communists, were "typical representatives of the bourgeois class, void of moral sense in spite of the many Masses they attend." Communist leaflets sloganed: "Showing today: Love in the Town Hall. Banned to children under 16."

Ostilio and Santina, still on the job in the registrar's office, waited for the February lawsuit and publication of the photographs which might reveal what had been seen through the eye of Garibaldi.

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