Brawl in Ferrara

Valdo Magnani and Aldo Cucchi, Deputies and former comrades who have put Italy ahead of Russia, dropped in last week on a small foundry owner, Giacomo Fabbri, in Ferrara. While they lunched on rice and salami, the foundry's workmen sent them a note of welcome and a request for a talk. They agreed. Meanwhile, word of their presence had reached the ears of Maria Prampolini Bonfanti, a hatchet-faced, middle-aged Red partisan, known as La Passionaria di Ferrara.* At local party rallies, La Passionaria always gives orders when to clap and when to boo. Now she quickly sent small boys scurrying through Ferrara to round up the party's toughs.

Valdo and Aldo were still talking to the foundry workers when La Passionaria's gang, about 50 strong, marched into the courtyard chanting, "Get out of Italy, get out you traitors." Cucchi asked, "What do you want?" Someone in the mob shouted: "Let him have it boys!"

Cucchi (who once won a gold medal for partisan bravery) defended himself stoutly, knocked down half a dozen attackers before he was laid low by a flying tackle. His assailants jumped on him, pounded his head with a stone. By the time the police arrived, 20 minutes after the melee began, the heavily outnumbered dissidents & friends had dealt enough telling blows to scatter most of their Communist adversaries.

Magnani, who suffered bruises, again defied his former comrades: "They have noticed that we are no longer escorted by police, but we are not afraid. We will hit back." Bleeding Cucchi said: "I expected this to happen one day or another . . . the Communist party . . . behaving like an oriental tyrant."

* Not to be confused with the Spanish Civil War's La Pasionaria, last reported in southern Russia's Tbilisi undergoing treatment for a kidney ailment.

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