Foreign News: THE WATER OF ARSOLI

The young prince, whose ancestor thwarted great Hannibal, tossed in a canopied bed and decided to become a Saragat Socialist. The young peasant, who had turned Communist, sweated in a stiff black city suit and cursed his mother because she had borne a clever son. The priest twisted this way and that. Lovers quarreled. Children conspired against the priest in the night. A Fascist banged the table with a return of bygone bravado. And an old woman with a spade stood spraddle-legged in a potato field and cursed them all with a dry, screaming passion.

These things all happened recently at Arsoli, a village 30 miles from Rome. They are part of the great 20th Century drama. Not only Arsoli is locked in dubious battle between simple present needs and distant complexities. Seldom, however, is the 20th Century story stripped bare of the fat political phrases, the dusty economic phrases, the soft ideological phrases. Last week TIME Correspondent William Rospigliosi cabled Arsoli’s story:

Arsoli huddles against a mountainside looking westward over the Roman plain. Alternately, the sun bakes it and torrential rains lash it to pour down the barren hillside. In the flat valley lie 479 hectares (1,184 acres) of Arsoli land, once famously fertile. Now 435 hectares of the valley are as sterile as the grey boulders above. From the other 44 hectares poplars raise their heads, shining like a mirage in a desert. Here are the Arsoli springs, the most abundant in all Latium. On these 44 hectares no Arsolian can set foot. The clear, sweet water goes to Rome. It has gone there since 600 B.C., when King Ancus Marcius built an aqueduct.

Thus the people of Arsoli have had 2,500 years to get used to the diversion of their water. In a way, they are proud of the deprivation. When they visit Rome they see sparkling jets gushing from the distended cheeks of gargoyles. “That’s Arsoli water,” they say. They see it running out of the nostrils of Bernini’s marble horses in the Piazza Navona. “That’s Arsoli water,” they say. Not even 2,500 years, however, can get men used to starvation. As the land about Arsoli dried up, they began begging Rome for a little of their water. They noted that the new pipes installed in 1930 leaked. The 44 hectares had become a bog in which toads and snakes and things lived. Arsoli wanted to revive its dead fields by draining off some of the wasted water.

Search for Words & Work. The state-regulated company that owned the water works said no to the Arsolians. Rome was still growing (as Arsoli died), and some day Rome would need every drop of Arsoli’s water. “You know how it is,” Arsolians say. “Townsmen’s tongues are glib. We have to look for words.”

However, as the grey desert grew, so did unemployment. Young and old, with no brown earth to dig, spent whole days dejectedly in the village square. Requests that Rome should allow Arsoli people to work in the capital were left unanswered or denied. The villagers then begged that public works be started in Arsoli. Housing was still medieval—half the village had no drains (chamberpots are emptied out of windows in the early dawn). No housing projects came to Arsoli.

With liberation, Arsolians trustfully hoped for better times. Local Communist Boss Fabio Alimonti went to Rome. Dressed in his best shiny black suit, he faced Rome’s prefect. Said he: “You take our water for your benefit and spill what you don’t need. The people of Arsoli cannot be left to die. Find a pump to bring life back to our hills.”

When the prefect remarked that Alimonti used language far above his station, that his was no peasant’s talk, Alimonti replied: “I could throttle my mother for having given birth to a clever son. I wish I were like other Arsolians who are ready to go down before your force. I cannot. I see things as they are. My fire won’t let me sleep nor eat nor laugh till I see justice done.” When Alimonti returned to Arsoli he believed that he had won his point. To the peasants crowding round him in the shadow of the castle, which overhangs the whole of Arsoli, he quietly announced that he thought something would be done.

After months went by and nothing happened, angry Alimonti sat down at his rough desk. In fine handwriting for which, too, he curses his mother, he wrote a letter to the highest authority, the republic’s then President Enrico de Nicola: “Now that we have a republic and that the people reign . . .”, and he explained Arsoli’s case: “Please see that something is done for this starving population.” Punctilious, prompt and useless was De Nicola’s reply. It ran: “Your request has been passed on to competent Roman municipal authorities.” That was the end of that.

Water That Christ Sent. Arsolians put two & two together. Said they: “Rome’s mayor is a Demo-Christian—naturally he won’t listen to a Communist. What we must do is vote Demo-Christian. Will Christians deny us water that Christ sent to us in the first place?”

So they voted Demo-Christian last spring. When the electoral results became known, local Demo-Christians told them of the government’s financial difficulties and the need for patience, so the people of Arsoli modified their request. Instead of begging for a pump which would cost 12 million lire (about $21,000), they declared themselves ready to wait, so as not to throw an excessive financial burden on the government.

But because of pressing unemployment they wrote: “We would humbly point out that there is no road between Arsoli and Cervara [a nearby town]. The path is so narrow that a mule can hardly get through. While you take your time to solve the urgent question of our water, please advance funds to build a road and employ our idle young men. We respectfully submit that these young men have nothing to put in their kitchen pots, and their parents are pained to see them grow up as wastrels.” Back came Rome’s answer: “Start work at once. The government will send money.”

So the young men who had been idling in the square bent their backs and started to work. In a week they had made 50 yards of a great wide road. The next week they did 100. At the end of each week they were told that the government had not yet sent funds. Finally the day came when they threw down their picks. They were willing to work for nothing, but they had no funds to buy material to build a bridge over a ditch. Today sheep feed on Arsoli’s road to Cervara and funds have not yet arrived.

Arsoli people no longer believe that Demo-Christian and Christian are synonymous. The Communists had failed them after Fascism had cheated them. The priests’ party was clearly no good. Where could they turn now?

Travail of a Prince. In their trouble they turned where they would have turned in the Middle Ages: to the local overlords, the Massimo family. Its present representative is curly-headed, witty young Prince Vittorio Massimo. When Hannibal wiped out the Roman armies in Apulia at the Battle of Cannae, the Romans entrusted their fortunes to one Fabius Maximus, later known as Cunctator—the Delayer, because he made Hannibal chase him around Italy for eight years. He was Vittorio’s ancestor. Now that the Arsolians brought him their troubles, Vittorio realized that something just as bad as Hannibal was at Arsoli’s gates.

Tossing on his canopied bed in his crenelated castle, Prince Vittorio spent sleepless nights, sweating with worry. Later he said that he worked out this argument: “If we live in a capitalist world, that land is ours because it has belonged to my family and Arsoli for generations. If we live in a Christian state and the capital takes water from us, it should at least not let us starve.” The young prince remembered that his family includes two Popes—St. Anastasius (died 401) who denounced the Origenist heresy, and St. Pasquale (died 824) who stood up to the Frankish kings. Clearly it was up to Vittorio to act for Arsoli.

He decided that his duty to Arsolians lay with that party whose avowed program was to spur Demo-Christians to speed up reform: Giuseppe Saragat’s anti-Communist Socialists. Within a few days he had founded a local Socialist Party section. Arsolians rushed to join. Socialism gave them the right to call Vittorio “Comrade,” rather than “Excellency.” So ingrained is their respect for the Massimos, however, that many compromised (as Socialists will) and called Vittorio Compagno Eccellenza—Comrade Excellency.

Vittorio had a party; he needed a program. His youthful mind thought out a youthful solution: Arsoli would build a sports ground which would provide: 1) immediate employment; 2) an interest for Arsoli youth; 3) revenue, if teams and spectators from other towns came there to play.

Even the Boy Scouts. When Vittorio announced his scheme in the tiny local headquarters of the Saragat Socialists, Comrade Vittorio Proietti almost banged his head on a low-hanging lamp as he jumped up to embrace Vittorio. Twice he embraced him, crying: “Comrade Excellency, Comrade Excellency, we shall win over to Socialism all of Arsoli’s youth.” Then an idea struck Proietti; he burst into long peals of laughter: “Why, we may even get Catholic Boy Scouts to turn Socialist.”

He rushed out. His first new recruit was Romolo Dibiagio. Romolo’s khaki shorts were tucked high because he had sprinted to come to Socialist headquarters. Breathlessly he cried: “Is it true? A sports ground?” He was soon joined by others who had been playing football in the square with a ball made of rags, and had broken one of Arsoli’s few street lamps. Dante Bruni, whose father was Arsoli’s most prominent Fascist, assumed the old dictatorial line. Banging his fist on the table, he cried: “Unless I see that sports ground built, I’ll start a local section of [NeoFascist] M.S.I.—Movemento Sociale Italiano. Said the prince: “But we are going to build it.”

It turned out that the only suitable site for the sports field was next to the local school. The lay of the land is such that the field must embrace part of Vittorio’s land, then, across a ditch, some land belonging to the Arsoli municipality, which has a Communist administration.

Unexpected opposition came from the village priest, for three reasons: 1) he thought the field might distract youths from church; 2) Saragattians had thought up the idea, and this would diminish the Demo-Christian hold on the non-Communist youth; 3) the Communist municipality, if it gave land, might claim some credit for the sports ground. From his pulpit, the priest thundered that the land would be wasted, although almost nothing grew on it except 25 olive trees.

There was muttering in church as the priest spoke. Even ardent Catholic Actionist Sigfrido Marcotullio, a sportsman as well as a Demo-Christian, asked: “Is that priest’s talk? Is it in the Gospel?”

Other Demo-Christians were on the priest’s side. Said pale, bookish Homero Giovannini: “I’m against the sports field. I hate football. If Arsoli youth needs exercise, they can race round the village square on bicycles.”

“We Want to Belong.” He ran into trouble immediately, however. His fiancee, slim Leonilde Nardoni, who had formerly been engaged to a sportsman, cried: “I’m your fiancee, so I have to agree with you, but remember that half of me is for the sports field. I may decide to throw in my lot for the sports field, after all.” The threat shut bookish Homero’s mouth.

Others were not ready to buckle under. In the dead of night small figures climbed over the gates of Massimo Castle, pattered through the garden and courtyard, climbed upstairs right into Vittorio’s bedroom. They were choir boys and local Boy Scouts. One spoke for all, as the tousle-headed prince, rubbing sleepy eyes, sat up rn his canopied bed: “We have come to give you our support for the sports field. We want to belong to the Socialist Party. Only we don’t want the priest to know.”

The Priest Switches. Vittorio went ahead and measured out the sports field. He was worried when he had finished. It would entail cutting down at least 17 olive trees. Hungry Arsoli needed its oil.

When news of the prince’s doubts reached the priest, his reaction was unexpected. He switched and gave his ecclesiastical support to the football field. He whispered his reason for this change to hawk-nosed Demo-Christian Augusto Belli, the prince’s steward: “If the prince demurs at striking down the trees, can’t you imagine how the Communists will be against their being cut? The Reds, after all, are the ones who gather olives on that ground!”

The priest got his Demo-Christian friends in Rome to send an expert of the Agricultural Ministry to decide if trees should or should not be sacrificed. The functionary, however, fooled the priest. He declared that they were not worth saving.

Prince Massimo was sitting in the local pub nursing his doubts when the news was brought to him. He banged his fist on the rickety table, crying: “Did the Ministry really say that? Thank God, then we needn’t hesitate any more.” Eyes shining, he rushed to Socialist headquarters, shouting: “We can go ahead—we can go ahead!” Quickly he went to find Communist Mayor Mario Alessandri. Massimo put a proposal to him. Before dawn he had his answer. Said Alessandri: “We are all for the sports field at whatever cost. We think our children’s children will thank us more for a sports field than for a few decaying olive trees.”

Dismayed, the priest saw his mistake too late. He had handed over to the Socialists and Communists a propaganda instrument of the first order. There was only one thing left for him to do. About one million lire would be necessary. The municipality would not dare advance this. Prince Massimo was short of cash. Only the government in Rome could advance it. The priest rushed to government departments, pleaded that there was urgent housing and sanitation work to be done at Arsoli while the municipality was threatening to waste money on a football field. Thus when Prince Massimo approached the government for funds, the reply was: “Is it really necessary to build a football field just now?”

Arsoli people grew angry. Now Socialism, like all their former hopes, was getting them nowhere.

Fireside Suffrage. Angrily, a group of youths rushed to the site of the sports field. There they found a sallow old woman, Santina Paincentini, leaning on a spade. She was digging potatoes she had planted there under the olive trees. She saw their intention at once. Stepping between the brown heaps of freshly dug potatoes, she cried in a loud voice: “Fine conscience you have to cut down olives whereby Christians live!”

Her invective was interrupted by a nine-year-old, naked to the waist, who cried: “This is no spud field for you, old spanker —it’s a football field for us.” The woman laughed: “There you have it! Those who want this football field still have the taste of mother’s milk in their mouths.”

Pointing a finger at the crowd, with knitted eyebrows under a black crown of hair, Santina spoke vehemently: “How many firesides are there in Arsoli? Get the men who are responsible for a fireside to say what they want done with this field, not suckling babes such as you.” The youths halted, uncertain what to do. Said one: “We have collected 557 signatures in favor of the football field.” Santina cried: “There you have it—500. There are only 300 firesides in Arsoli. There is no way of telling whether those signatures are of responsible people or babies! Responsible people know that to cut down olives is like cutting off a man’s feet. A man needs feet to stand on, not a ball to roll over on.”

Prince Massimo tried to argue with her: “But we must take the boys—all children—from the road, give them a place to play.” Stubbornly Santina answered: “You can’t cut off a man’s feet.” However, the youths decided to entrust to Prince Massimo another mission to Rome. Communist Fabio Alimonti said to the prince: “The duty devolves on your honorable and ancient family to provide.” Vittorio muttered: “The Socialists will get the field.”

Last week Vittorio was still exercising the patient tactics of Fabius Maximus Cunctator. Moodily he waited in Rome’s ministerial antechambers for a chance to put Arsoli’s case once more before indifferent government officials. After another fruitless day, he drove back to Arsoli’s graveyard hills, ghastly white under the summer moon. He wished Fabius had never saved Rome; he wished above all that old Cunctator had never taught Romans the tactics of delay.