Victory

In Italian monasteries dawn found monks who had been praying all night that Christianity would prevail on this day. Two hours before the polls opened, a bent, solitary woman, carrying a camp chair for the long wait, crossed Rome's vast, deserted Piazza del Popolo; the garish posters, remnants of one of the world's most momentous election campaigns, proclaimed their slogans like demagogues before an empty hall.

Over the Ponte Fabricio to Tiberina Island moved a long file of brown Franciscan nuns, the rustling of their robes lost in the rushing Tiber below. Soon solitary groups swelled into crowds; the tide of people stirred all over Italy--fishermen with bare, brown ankles and ruddy-faced mountain men and pale white-collar workers and factory hands with red kerchiefs and robed bishops and small-town women with babies in their arms. In many churches, Mass times were shifted so that the faithful would find it easier to reach the polls when they opened at 8. Priests read the Collect for the third Sunday after Easter:

O God, who dost show to them that are in error the light of Thy truth, that they may return into the way of righteousness; grant to all those who profess themselves Christians to reject those things which are contrary to that name, and follow such things as are agreeable to the same . . .

On the Eve. The Communists held their last big rally before the ancient Church of Saint John Lateran. From a ten-ton truck decorated with cardboard doves of peace, Palmiro Togliatti spoke to 100,000 Romans. Said he: Alcide de Gasperi had called him a cloven-hoofed man, and he had a good mind to take off his shoe to show that this was a lie. "But it is better to put hobnails in the shoe and kick De Gasperi out."

In the last-minute excitement Italians rushed to buy tickets in a nationwide pool on how many seats each party would get in the new Assembly. Manhattan's Daily News summed up the situation in a homey headline: "Italy Picks Uncles Today; Will It Be Sam or Joe?" All Sunday and half of Monday, Italians voted. The Reds had hoped that bad weather would keep many people from the polls (a small turnout would favor the Communists). The skies were grey; occasional showers and hailstorms pelted voters. The Christian Democrats, striving to get all the voters to the polls, provided ambulances for the sick and infirm. When they ran out of stretchers, hospital attendants carried patients on their backs. The Italian radio announced: "Dear listener, the program is dull from now on--nothing but chamber music. You'd better switch off the radio and go and vote."

The Miracle of Itri. There was little violence. Carabinieri stationed around polling places merely kept the crowds moving (the Reds tried to slow up the voting wherever they could), and minded babies while mothers cast their ballots. Some Communist members of the election boards tried, despite hawk-eyed poll watchers of the major parties, to invalidate ballots--the slightest blemish on a ballot was enough for the purpose. (One Italian columnist implored his female readers to remove their lipstick before wetting the flap of the ballot "just as if you were giving a little kiss to a man with a suspicious wife.")

By & large, Italians conducted democracy's most vital business, in a holiday spirit tempered by dignity and humor. In Milan, Contessa Castelbarco, Toscanini's eldest daughter Wally (see Music), was the first voter at her polling place in a schoolroom. The lone Communist member of the election board unctuously escorted her out, thanked her for voting. "Thank you," she replied sweetly. "But are you the host?"

When Alcide de Gasperi cast his vote after a one-day rest in Capri, his wife said: "I hope my husband will not be the Premier again. He is so tired." Said he: "We will not fail democracy." Then he went off to Castel Gandolfo to bowl with some of his friends among the local peasants. He was losing badly when a sudden rainstorm broke up the game.

But Christian Democrats, confident of victory, found other portents. In Formia, near Naples, plump, moist-eyed Elvira Wangrillo told how a Communist had joined a pilgrimage to the sanctuary of Itri where, confronted with the picture of the Madonna, he fell to his knees, struck dumb. "He has been that way ever since," related Elvira, "the doctors say it's a miracle."

When the polls closed at 2 p.m. Monday, officials at some 42,000 election boards throughout Italy settled down to count the votes on the basis of proportional representation.*

Even in the North. As early returns piled up, it seemed certain that the Communist bid for mastery over Italy had been crushed. The erratic weather had not kept voters from the polls; the turnout throughout the nation approached 90%. The threat of civil war, which had hovered over the polls despite the peaceful progress of the balloting, diminished considerably as dispatch after dispatch told of imposing anti-Communist strength--even in the industrial north, in Italy's reddest citadels.

Communism had been stopped at the Adriatic.

* A certain number of Assembly seats are assigned to each electoral district, according to its size. The total number of votes cast (e.g., 500,000), is divided by the total number of seats (e.g., 10), giving an electoral quotient (50,000). A party polling 160,000 votes of the total in its district can fill three quotients, i.e., get three seats. The spare 10,000 votes are diverted to a national pool where they are merged with spare votes from other districts until there are enough to fill another quotient.

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