Foreign News: Have a Unifa

Florence’s stately Parco delle Cascine (Park of the Farmsteads) is full of quiet, ponderous chestnut trees and brooding live oaKs beneath which the members of the city’s best society used to walk on Sunday afternoons, exchanging courtly salutes and smiling at one another’s poodles. With their customary sense of historic irony, Italy’s Communists last week chose this park for the biggest, gaudiest clambake that Dante’s city had seen in many a year.

Coney by the Arno. During the past month, the party had carried on a national fund-raising campaign for the Italian Communist press. Florence’s four-day Fèsta dell’ Unità (sponsored by the Communist daily Unità) was the grand finale. For weeks, 200 workmen had labored to build a kind of Marxist Coney Island.

On the last day, a Sunday, 500,000 merrymakers spilled into the park by the Arno. The big day started with a six-hour Communist parade which passed under a 45-ft. triumphal arch of green branches, topped by a “Unità” neon sign. Paraders chanted new political jingles. Examples:

We Communists are a league; We don’t give a damn for excommunication.

And:

ERP comes down to one thing only: Half a case of Coca-Cola.

The morning sky was grey, and the paraders had bitter words for the priests who had been praying for rain to relieve Italy’s drought. Superstitious Communists carried defiant signs: “Is it raining? Will it rain? Certainly not until after the Feast of Unita!” They were right; soon a hot sun enveloped the crowds as they watched bicycle races and boxing matches, played roulette, danced, drank, threw baseballs (50 lire for three shots) at caricatures of priests and bishops and of Premier Alcide de Gasperi and tough Interior Minister Mario Scelba, who was by far the most popular target.

There were other attractions. For 25 lire, Communists could measure their strength by pulling a huge sickle which—when pulled hard enough—brought a huge hammer crashing down on the head of a fat capitalist dummy in frock coat and top hat. For less athletic comrades, Unità made its points more subtly, in exhibits of socio-political art and Russian literature. An elderly Russian woman in a lacy Ukrainian peasant blouse stood by the book exhibit. A young associate explained: “Mrs. Jakobs is here on purpose to translate the Russian writings into Italian for the comrades. If a comrade asked her, she could translate a whole book.”

While loudspeakers blared Strauss waltzes, alternating with the Internationale, comrades milled among the booths, past anti-American posters, right into the arms of 3,000 Communist girls with red flowers in their hair, who insistently sold lapel badges marked “Unita.” No merrymaker could really begin to enjoy himself in peace until he had a badge in his buttonhole and a copy of Unita protruding from his pocket.

Pause that Refreshes. The fair’s most satisfying feature, everyone agreed, was the “Gastronomic Village,” a broad enclosure with seats for 4,000 people at long tables which were piled high with roast chickens, rolls, and flasks of Chianti. In an open-air kitchen, three cauldrons five feet tall steamed with a never-ending supply of spaghetti. Enthusiastic eaters hacked their way through mountains of food at 450 lire (75¢) a meal. After lunch, many stretched out under the shady trees, took off their shoes, spread a copy of Unita over their eyes, and slept.

For dessert, there was Palmiro Togliatti, who appeared in person to make a fiery speech in which he dwelt smugly on Russia’s possession of the atomic bomb. After the boss’s speech, the carnival ended in a burst of fireworks, followed by glowing reports from the party treasury that the Florence carnival had boosted the total sum collected for the Communist press beyond 300 million lire (slightly less than half a million dollars).

Just about the only sharp disappointment the Communists suffered was in sales of a soft drink called Unita, brewed to replace Coca-Cola, which the Reds have denounced as capitalist poison (TIME, Aug. 22). Unità, which looks like Coke but has a strong flavor of quinine and tamarind, was a flop. Since Communist palates still thirsted for real Coke, the party decided to play it safe. “Comrades,” announced a poster, “Coca-Cola was not invented by the Americans, but by the Russians, in 1912.”