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ITALY: Closed for Shame

2 minute read
TIME

The sullen olive groves and dwarf wheat fields around San Severo, on the spur of the Italian boot, have long bred Communists. Working for as little as 64¢ a day on land they could never buy, the San Severini were eager listeners to Communist organizers, who promised “The land will be given to you when Palmiro [Togliatti] is Premier of Italy.”

Slow-moving and small-scale though it was, land reform last spring began to come from Premier Alcide de Gasperi’s Christian Democratic government in Rome, and to seep down to the cactus-studded plains of southeastern Italy. At first, only 27 peasants around San Severo received land—four hectares (9.9 acres) each. But it set the peasants thinking. A Communist troubleshooter was rushed to San Severo to quiet the doubts.

“Comrades, for only 27 traitors you will not sell your souls to the Americans,” he said. This was hardly an answer to a rugged young peasant named Matteo Pistillo, nicknamed Spaccatutto (worldbeater) and long known for his unswerving devotion to the Communist cause. “All right,” he cried, “but when will Palmiro become our Premier? It may be true what the comrade said, but it is still truer that today I see the land reform.” Pistillo had heard of other defections from the Communist Party in southern Italy. By last month the reform had given farms to 146 families around San Severo.

Last week Matteo Pistillo the world-beater led 431 of his comrades into San Severo’s municipal theater, and there, before Christian Democratic Party workers who could not quite believe it, had them pile their Communist Party cards on the table and sign up as members of the Christian Democratic Party. “Friends, there are no more traitors here,” announced the worldbeater. “We free men are choosing the way of justice.” It was the biggest mass defection from Italy’s Communist Party (the best-entrenched in Western Europe) since the war.

Next morning the San Severini discovered that the town’s Communist headquarters had been shut down for a few days. Across the door was scrawled a message: “Closed for shame.”

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