What Ever Became of La Dolce Vita?

For Italians la dolce vita has turned as harsh and unpleasant as the unseasonably cold and wet Roman spring. The economic miracle of Il Boom has petered out, leaving inflation and unemployment. The average Italian worker now spends $1.22 of his $1.55 hourly salary merely for food and shelter. Unemployment stands at 1,167,000, or 6.1% of the working force. Housing is so limited that every city has its shack dwellers--while Italy has a surplus of empty luxury apartments. Hospitals are desperately overcrowded; schools are running on three shifts. Rome University, built to cope with 12,000 students, has an enrollment of 93,000. In short, the country this spring is beset by a host of troubles that its politicians seem unable to cope with. And now, after enduring 34 governments since Mussolini's fall, Italian voters will go to the polls once again next week to choose a new Chamber of Deputies that promises only more of the same.

The trouble with Italy is that no one seems to be in charge. While the politicians bicker, the Italian bureaucracy --numbering 1,790,000--does most of the governing, but does it badly. Incredibly, the bureaucrats have managed not to spend $15 billion voted by Parliament for public improvements; some of these funds were actually approved ten years ago. Half of that money is for building roads, schools, hospitals and housing--which would also provide work for the unemployed.

The cumulative effect has brought about a perceptible change in the usually sunny-natured Italians. "Their genius for adjustment seems to have worn a bit thin," reports TIME'S Rome Bureau Chief Jim Bell. "Their natural charming cynicism seems increasingly infused with pessimism, and their inborn friendliness diluted by increasing daily tensions."

One recent poll showed that more than half of all Italians had no interest in next week's elections, and understandably so. Instead of emphasizing reforms and specific programs, politicians are bombarding the public with appeals to support the left, center or right. A cartoon in Rome's weekly L'Espresso sums up the voters' response. It shows a poverty-stricken woman in a hut with her ragged children, being asked by a public opinion pollster: "Are you for dynamic centralism or progress without adventurism?"

The campaign is not without its ironies. Communist Leader Enrico Berlinguer talks up, of all things, law-and-order and private enterprise. The strongest Christian Democratic Speaker is Amintore Fanfani, 64, onetime Premier and currently Senate President, and the man who engineered the "opening to the left," an alliance with the Socialists a decade ago. He has taken to attacking youthful demonstrators and proclaiming "we must react," as if to show that he is not now afraid to be called a reactionary. Fanfani, and leaders of other Italian parties, are really reacting to the neo-Fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano, whose call for law-and-order--along with voter disenchantment with other issues--may well double M.S.I.'s small (24-seat) parliamentary bloc in next week's vote.

The only real question that will be decided by the vote is whether the new Cabinet coalition will be center left --meaning comprised of the Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats, the Socialists and the Republicans--or center, with a Liberal Party instead of a Socialist component. Conceivably there may be no agreement on a coalition at all, and perhaps Parliament will be dissolved again, and yet another election held. Meantime, wage negotiations for 5,000,000 workers in 57 industries are scheduled before year's end, raising the prospect of another autumn of strikes --just like the one that marked the beginning of Italy's current economic slide in 1969.

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