Five researchers on our New York staff recently came back from trips around Europe. Though they concentrated on Rome, Florence and Paris, their travels seldom overlapped, and each showed a high individuality in her choice of things to see and do. From Lapland to the Isle of Capri, the five of them covered most of the territory in front of the Iron Curtain.

Music Researcher Dorothea Bourne took something of a busman's holiday. Landing from the new S.S. Independence in Naples, she was soon enjoying a magnificently costumed production of Otello at Rome's Teatro dell'Opera, later, in Venice, met Composer Gian Francesco Malipiero and Conductor Angelo Ephrikian. In Florence, while sampling the music at hand, she insists that in a nightclub she discovered the "last resting place of bop." At opening night of the Maggio Musicale she saw her first performance of Verdi's Macbeth, was a bit disappointed in the production but not at all in the music. Before she went off to Switzerland, she caught a dress rehearsal and the premiere of Ildebrando Pizzetti's new opera Iphegenia.

In nine weeks Theresa Cohen, Hemisphere Researcher, covered a lot of territory. Baggage stickers for only her major stops would read something like this: Le Havre, Paris, Cannes, Rome, Florence, Venice, Interlaken, Paris, London, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and, again, London. Along the way she was able to find time for visits at TIME'S European bureaus, where she picked up her mail from home, parked extra luggage and got knowing advice about where & how to travel. Her experiences ranged all the way from a climb up Mont Chevalier to a glimpse of the royal family in London. "It was," she says, "worth every cent I owe."

Soon after landing at Oslo, Sport Researcher Anne Denny took time out to do the story of Holmen-kollen ski jump (TIME, March 12), then went to Stockholm to board a boat that broke through Baltic Sea ice into Turku, Finland. In Helsinki she talked with officials of the 1952 Olympics, took a trip up into Lapland. There among the hospitable Finns she had a wild ride in a reindeer sleigh, skied, watched trotting races on the frozen Kemi River. Though she later divided three weeks between Paris and Brussels, her next long stop was again ski country, this time in Bavaria.

Sunbathing in the Tyrolean Alps, believes Ruth Silva, is much better than rushing around. So she spent seven weeks in Austria, where she also saw Russian soldiers jeeping about Vienna, and made at least one trip a day to sample the art of fine pastry cooks. She also traveled around Italy and France, "did all the things tourists usually do--went up the Eiffel Tower, visited the Colosseum and catacombs, rode along the Appian Way." Her favorite spots: the book stalls along the Seine in Paris.

Shortly out of Naples aboard the Turkish ship Ankara, Eleanor Tatum saw a spectacular sight: Stromboli's volcano spouting off loud & fiery blasts. She had a brief stop at Athens on her way to Ankara for a visit with her brother, an engineer on the U.S. aid program for Turkey. After a flight back to Italy, she ran across a TIME story in need of a correspondent, covered it, happened by St. Peter's at the right moment to see the Pope at a beatification ceremony, then went on to Paris and London.

The schedules of these researchers explain why the Rome Bureau has set up a blackboard on which to keep track of the latest addresses and telephone numbers of TIME visitors to Europe.

Cordially yours,

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.