ITALY'S FANFAN

TO the White House this week for the latest meet-the-President colloquy comes short (5 ft. 3 in.), sharp-witted Italian Premier Amintore Fanfani, 53. Sturdily pro-U.S. and pro-NATO, Fanfani brings no pressing problems and no requests for aid.

Since Fanfani took over last year, Italy's postwar economic renaissance has boomed faster than ever. National output rose 7% last year, investment 20%, consumer demand 10%. Italy has curbed inflation and made the lira good as gold, piled up some $3 billion in balance-of-payments credits. TV sets are almost as common as cars. An economics professor who still takes time off from his duties as Premier to teach at Rome University, Fanfani is making a vigorous attack on the sectors that have not fared so well in Italy's resurgence. He pushed through Parliament an $800 million "Green Plan" to aid agriculture, as well as a $600 million recovery plan for long-neglected Sardinia. He often goes on tour to hear local complaints and to see what is being accomplished with new government grants--and little escapes his sharp eye. Once in Calabria an overzealous official trucked dairy cattle from one project to another to give his boss the illusion of rapidly spreading herds. Fanfani noted that they were the same cows at each stop, fired him on the spot.

Son of a country lawyer, Fanfani learned his political arts hopping from ministry to ministry under the late Premier Alcide de Gasperi, acquired such a grip on the Christian Democratic Party reins that De Gasperi once complained: "If I appoint him Minister of Industry, I am sure that some day, on opening the door to my office, I'll find him sitting at my desk." Fanfani did just that, but only after De Gasperi was ailing and in semiretirement. Fanfani's first premiership lasted only eleven days in 1954, his second for a frustrating 210 days that ended in 1959 when his steamroller tactics lost him the support of his own Christian Democratic Party colleagues. Fanfani learned from the experience, came back last year wiser in the ways of cooperating and compromising. Today Fanfani has the parliamentary support of three other parties and the benign abstention of the powerful Nenni Socialists. Though the Communist Party polled one-third of the votes in last fall's election, the actual number of card-carrying Communists in Italy declined 17% in 1960.

A sternly moral Catholic and family man devoted to his wife and seven children, Fanfani lives modestly, nibbles apples all day, seldom entertains or goes backslapping. He has written some 40 scholarly books, still writes an occasional poem, once painted pictures to help make ends meet.

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