ITALY: The Beach

Europe’s liveliest public show these days is broad, tree-shaded Via Veneto, which runs from Rome’s Piazza Barberini to the ancient Roman Gate of Pinciana. Its wide sidewalks are speckled with bright umbrellas and gay, colored tables. Its curbs are flanked by fashionable hotels and shops. Rome’s American colony calls it “The Beach.” An exhausted tourist, slumping into one of the comfortable chairs in mid-afternoon when proper Romans are enjoying a siesta, sees nothing but empty tables or exhausted fellow tourists. But just before lunch, in the late afternoon, or from 10 at night until early morning, the Via Veneto becomes a lively circus of Rome’s most colorful characters, and a gawker’s delight. Last week its season was at its height.

For Rome’s international set, the Via Veneto is outdoor club, place of business, trading post and town pump. At the tables, porcine movie producers discuss deals over an aperitivo, sad-eyed young English poets finger their last published articles, handsomely tailored young men while away their time, expertly assess the jewels on neighboring matrons and debate whether to offer their services as escorts. Sauntering by in an endless stream are pretty, dark girls with swelling bosoms and swelling hopes of catching a producer’s eye, gawking tourists from Germany, Switzerland or the U.S., or uninhibited Italian families who stop to stare, and sometimes guffaw.

Ham & Eggs. Via Veneto’s regulars have their appointed places. At Rosati’s Café, strollers can spot most nights Novelist Alberto Moravia, Foreign Minister Gaetano Martino, Vice Premier Giuseppe Saragat, or, after Midnight, Film Star Anna Magnani and Director Vittorio De Sica. Across the street, the Strega’s tables swarm with so many starlets and bit players that harried directors have been known to hustle over and do some fast casting on the spot. Most international is the Caffè; Doney, where newsboys hawk the London Daily Telegraph, France-Soir and Variety, and waiters accept orders for milkshakes or ham-and-eggs without batting an eye. Patrons include Egypt’s ex-King Farouk, Hollywood’s ex-Star Bruce Cabot (now a fixture of Rome’s colony of movie expatriates), visiting U.S. executives, Turkish businessmen, passing luminaries.

For lunch, Via Veneto troops off to the Capriccio, where Ingrid Bergman, Gloria Swanson or Marta Toren may be sighted among a scattering of princelings, or the Colony Club, run by an Italian-American from Long Island who features hamburgers, chili con carne and “Mrs. Wagner’s baked beans,” all recipes drawn from Macy’s Cooking Encyclopedia.

The Big Difference. At night, Via Veneto’s habitués plunge into a basement presided over by an ageless, red-haired U.S. woman known universally and simply as Bricktop. “John Steinbeck was in a while back,” recalled Bricktop last week, “and when Louis Bromfield was here, he opened and shut the place. Tennessee Williams was in this morning, and Truman Capote comes in whenever he’s in town.” But Rome is not like the old Paris of the ’20s, and Bricktop won’t hear it compared. Not only are there no Princes of Wales; there are no Hemingways or Dos Passoses along the Via Veneto. Instead, there are the fast-buck boys, actors who are “resting,” artists who aren’t painting, and people who like to be seen, and people who like to be seen with them.

“The big difference is that people don’t spend money any more, honey,” mourns Bricktop. “In Paris in the old days, with just four tables, with maybe the Prince of Wales at one and Cole Porter at another, and everybody drinking champagne—even if they were drinking whisky, they had to pay for champagne—why, I could make as much in one night as I make in a month here. People don’t have as much fun any more. Of course, in those days, people didn’t have nothing to think about.”