ITALY: Roman Holiday

“Here we are in Rome,” complained an American tourist, camera in hand and vivid sport shirt on torso, one red-hot day last week. “But where are the Romans?”

They were taking a holiday. It was Ferragosto Day (Aug. 15), Italy’s best loved and most ancient annual holiday,* and from the teeming Eternal City (pop. 1,600,000) a million Romans decamped to their seaside villas and to public picnic grounds in the Abruzzi Mountains or at war-famed Anzio Beach. Shops, offices, banks, even Vatican City’s Sistine Chapel, were closed up tight, though St. Peter’s, as always, stayed open. Garbage went uncollected. milk undelivered, newspapers unpublished and tourists unsolicited by the prostitutes in Villa Borghese park. At his summer palace of Castel Gandolfo. Pope Pius XII rested for a couple of days; so did Premier Alcide de Gasperi and most of his political friends and enemies. Communist Boss Palmiro Togliatti spent the weekend hiking in the Alps with a collection of village Communists.

Even the cops disappeared from Rome’s deserted boulevards. Explained one of the sweating few who remained at his post: “There’s nothing for [policemen] to do. No respectable crook would be caught dead in town on Ferragosto.”

* Rome has celebrated Ferragosto for some 2,000 years. Most historians trace its origin to the three-day jeriae augustales (holidays of Augustus) proclaimed in 29 B.C. in honor of the triumphant return of Caesar Augustus from his campaign against Antony and Cleopatra. Some say it has even earlier beginnings. Six centuries later it became a universal Roman Catholic holiday, celebrating the anniversary of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven.