The Summertime Madness

Amid the stainless steel, leatherette and Formica of coffee shops in Manhattan's Radio City, balding businessmen and their wives from Wichita or Fort Wayne worried over the foreign schedules prepared by hard-pressed travel agents. "Well," one of them murmured, "if Ellen insists, I suppose we could steal a day from Venice to take in Portofino, but where will that leave our two days in Zurich?" In Hannover, Heidelberg and Hamm, German mothers wrapped the last of huge piles of Butterbrote in waxed paper as their cantankerous and impatient offspring squabbled over who was to sit where in the family Volkswagen. Dutchmen and Danes by the thousands were leaving their lowland homes for a brief, refreshing holiday in Germany's nearby mountains. Mountain-bred Swiss were flocking to the gently rolling hill country of Lake Constance. Once again, the great seasonal migration was on, and all over Europe indefatigable optimists were crossing and crisscrossing each other's paths in a brief, determined effort to sniff the green grass growing in somebody else's yard, for, as a sweating porter in Milan's grimy and teeming Central Station put it, "L'estate fa la follia" --Summertime makes for madness.

Dollars for Ancestors. In the van of the mad, meandering mob wandering the face of Europe last week were the travelers from the U.S. Fortnight ago, American Express had reported an early-season drop in Americans abroad, perhaps induced by unsettling reports of inflation and shortages and trouble overseas, but now they were descending on the Continent in overwhelming numbers again. The $150 million spent by some 270,000 Americans in Britain alone this year will provide enough hard curency to pay for most of the dollar-short United Kingdom's purchases of U.S. tobacco and wheat. But to many a Briton, forced by a still constricted travel allowance ($280 in foreign currency) to stay at home while others wandered, the warm economic comfort of tourism was somewhat chilled by recognition of the fact that his tight little island was terribly overcrowded.

Urged on by enterprising travel agencies, foreigners were crowding into every corner sacred to the English heart. Crew-cut Americans festooned with photographic equipment were everywhere. Saris and West African tribal robes drew only passing glances at such strongholds of the Savile Row sack suit as Claridge's and the Dorchester. The harsh accents of Sydney and Melbourne bounced almost unnoticed off the walls of pubs. Scots sextons helped citizens of Canada and the U.S. track down ancestors in their own quiet graveyards, while hairy German legs bristled stoutly beneath their Lederhosen at the changing of the guard at Buckingham or St. James's Palace. Headwaiters were busy guiding visiting Frenchmen through the mysteries of an English menu --which in virtually every good London restaurant is printed in what is presumed to be French.

International Picnics. Everywhere in this bumper year of European tourism, the leveling effect of endless mingling was evident. Observers of the passing show, sipping their coffee at sidewalk cafes in Duesseldorf or Cologne, could no longer spot the national origins of those who passed with the unerring precision of yore --the Austrian's alpine hat, the Englishman's twin-vent tweed jacket, the American's "aloha" shirt, the Frenchman's prim dark suit. As Europeans, Englishmen and Americans alike piled their families into compact, crowded cars to enjoy the old Continent in a new, middle-class way, tourism had taken on a more standardized look and a commoner manner. Americans, in fact, could often be identified in 1957 by the quietness of their dress.

The easily recognizable German vacationist of the past, setting out on purposeful foot with rope and climbing spikes for the peaks of the Dolomites, has given way to the family man at the wheel of the Mercedes or the Kleinstwagen tooling along with a trunkful of sandwiches, Thermos bottles and camping equipment on roads jammed bumper to bumper with other cars from other nations. Even the make of car was no longer a safe clue to the identity or position of its occupant. So far this year more than 7,000,000 cars with foreign license plates have crossed the borders into West Germany, while some 4,000,000 German cars drove out.

Italy remains the world's most tourist-favored spot, visited by 12.6 million people in 1956 (seven times the traffic of 1948). Florence last week had as many tourists as residents. Throughout Italy 700,000 people pitch tents in summer camping grounds--and half the campers are German. Thousands of trippers from all over travel by sightseeing buses, running in and out of churches, acquiring culture and sore feet and memories that will make it all seem better later. Days become a repetitious echo of the cry, "Bus now leaving." Venice-Florence-Rome is still the most traveled pathway, but Ischia as well as Capri, Sicily as well as Naples, now draw crowds. To shopkeepers and restaurant owners, the Europeans are the bread and butter of tourism, Americans the jam. Americans rank sixth among Italy's vacationing invaders; they stay fewer days, but they spend more.

Paris by Night. In all Europe this year, only the prewar mecca of continental tourism stands comparatively deserted. Boatloads and planeloads of people were arriving in France as they always had, but they were going right on--to Spain, whose low prices are a potent magnet, to Italy, and even to Greece, whose fewer hotels are so full that no newcomers could get a bed. "Foreign tourists pass through France, but they no longer stay," complained Le Parisien Libere. Conducted tours of "Paris by Night," promising Le Striptease and authentic Apaches, were down to a half of last year's business. Tickets for the Folies-Bergere could be had any night by just walking up to the box office. Hotels along the Riviera and the Basque coast were full, but full only of Frenchmen, themselves deserting Paris for the statutory three-week summer vacation (most factories and more than half the shops of Paris are closed in August, as all France takes off at once). Foreigners apparently had heard much of France's inflated prices, which made even more intolerable the reiterated demand for tips on the part of servitors whose only service consisted of sitting sullenly by a lavatory door or pointing out a seat in a theater to a man who had already paid for it.

Like those who passed through, many a native of France himself had decided this year to take his ease in another country, where gas is cheaper than the $1 a gallon charged in France. An estimated 1,500,000 Frenchmen had left France by last week to vacation in Spain, Holland or Switzerland, and the visitors arriving to take their place numbered only 60% of normal. "We are killing the goose that lays the golden eggs," moaned the Parisian newspaper L'Aurore. But the geese were still flying, high and far and fast, all over the rest of Europe.

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