A WANDERER’S NOTEBOOK.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19970, 11 December 1926, Page 2

A WANDERER’S NOTEBOOK.

A CLOSE' VIEW OF THE FASCIST!. XIII. Written for the Otago Daily Times. By Charles Wilson, ex-Parliamentary Librarian. Rome, "one of the very oldest of burgs,” as an American fellow tourist calls the Eternal City, I md a singularly lively place, especially on the first day ot my visit, for early on an almost too splendid summer morn an Anarchist has thrown a bomb at the car by which the great Mussolini was proceeding to the Premiers official building, and even the torndity of the midday heat —phew, ’tis almost as sultry as at Colombo—cannot prevent all Romo from thronging the main streets. The Black Shirts, the Fascisti, are soon about in their thousands, and in their noisy indignation against all who are even suspected of being opposed to their famous leader, II Duce, as he seems to - be popularly entitled, I witness the smashing, by a crowd of excited young men, of a long line of ■> -indows in a fine building which, so I am informed, is the headquarters of a big Socialist Co-operative Union. As a matter of fact, the union is a trading much rather than a political institution, but to the black-shirtod, black-capped young gentlemen—most of them seem to be in thpir cider teens, and not much more —the very word Socialist to-day is as a red rag to a bull. The Socialists represent the strongest and most aggressive of the anti-Mussolini elements in present-day Italy, and so, bang through all such wind. /s as can be reached, go the long poles of the Fascisti. There is a seething, excited crowd, and things begin to look rather ugly. When I see a company ot soldiers arrive, ,/ith two machine-guns in the rear, I and my lady companion come speedily to the conclusion that the air is scarcely healthy, and we hurry into a taxi and make off to the less tempestuous atmosphere of the lounge of the comfortable Hotel Savoia. T MUSSOLINI. By the time lunch is over the city is, however, astonishingly quiet, and although crowds of the Roman citadini are reading impassioned appeals to roll up to the Plaza Colunna at half-past 5, and show their sympathy with "Italy’s greatest son, and the unquestioned saviour of his country,” etc., there appears to be no great excitement. At the Piazza I hear the great man, surrounded by a dense bodyguard of “Black Shirts,” address the populace. Unhappily, my Italian is as fragmentary, and, on such an occasion, as futile as Ben Jonson’s Greek,, but, fudging by the almost continuous “Vivas, ’ the ■ Duce makes hit after hit. Next morning, in a little French sheet which is distributed at my hotel, I read the speech, which, although replete with all the verbal flamboyance, of the Latin race, is, save for an indiscreet outburst of Chauvinistic denunciation of another country, where the bomb-thrower had been living for a few months, scarcely so fiery as might have been expected. After dinner we hire one of the handy little open victorias, which afford so cheap a way of getting about the city, and make a jog-trot tour round some of the more populous quarters. Whatever the citizens ot Rome may think about the outrage, there is not much ebullience of spirit. They evidently deem it discreet in these days to keep their opinions to themselves. Whether the good folk who crowd the wineshops, or sip their coffee at the hundreds of little cafe-tables on the pavements, approve or disapprove of the young anarchist's performance of the morning, they ertainly make no great outward manifestation of their feelings. A quieter city than is Rome to-night I never saw. ‘THEY’LL GET’ HIM YET’.” “He has got us under the whip, but they’ll get him yet,” is a fairly colloquial version of an opinion expressed next day by a guide, whoso French I find singularly clear, and at this moment decidedly useful. He is very far from being an anarchist; indeed, 1 scarcely think ho is even a Socialist. But he tells me, and I find the same opinion in more than one social quarter, that this man, with a chin that sticks out like the stren of a steamer, with a face hard enough, to use a vulgarism, “to crack stones on,” is bound to meet a violent i death sooner or later. Undoubtedly, 11 Duce has done great things for latter-day Italy, but from the rightful path of honest if most strenuous reform he has strayed away of late into a more doubtfully wise course of unbridled dictatorship, a dictatorship which to many Italians spells little short of downright despotism. Meanwhile the cost of living must be something terrible for the working classes. The taxes arc most oppressive and seem to be ever increasing. Work is plentiful—you see no idle Italians—but the struggle for life in these days of high prices and low wages becomes for many a frightfully difhcu t problem. And for this the Duce is blamed. A FOOT IN BOTH CAMPS. Then again there is clearly a suspicion that politically Mussolini has “a foot in both camps.” There are those, indeed, who declare, under their breaths, that he is a political double deales, and that he is preparing for a capitulation to the clericals when it suits him. “Take it from me, says an Italian professor, , but for God s sake, place not my name in your articles, not even at the other end of the world, Mussolini is not to be trusted. Just now, he is at the top, but wait a while and you shall see him fall. Cnspi fell and so will II Duce.” But if the Mussolini gime -for he is the real King of Italy to-•day-conies to a sudden end, well, what then. To this it is difficult to get a straightout replv but evidently a Mussolini debacle seems likely to many seriously thinking Italians to bo followed by something akin to red revolution. In Pans, where later on I spend a fortnight, I find a grave suspicion of II Duce’s wisdom and, more than that, of his actual political honesty, yn questionably since .the outrage the Dalian press has been bitterly anti-French and what the Italian paper of to-day writes is practically what II Duce dictates. Chauvinism is a dangerous spirit to arouse in any race, especially among Latins, and . although three weeks in Italy have shown me many unmistakable evidences of the great man’s energy his courage, and with certain exceptions—his general well-doing, I cannot help feeling that he is govm n,n ' T more by fear than love, and that the future of Italy is none too secure. I can only trust this feeling of foreboding may prove un^ fie |’ TERNAL CITY. But one does not, at least I do not, come to Rome to discuss politics, am soon I am revelling in those traditional glories of the Eternal. City which not even the performances of the Black Shirts, the rise—and possibly the fall—of Mussolini, and the gradual transformation of old Rome into an over modernised, almost cosmopolitan city can displace in importance. For most of the foreign wanderers in present-day Rome, the Americans, whose name here is legion, the English, and the hordes of German tourists, who seem to have descended upon Italy t ‘ 3l ® summer like a host of locusts, Rome of to-dav is still the Rome of the marvellous Basilica di San Petro, the Rome of the great cathedral whose fame is woidcl-wide, the Rome of the superb Vatican Museum and the gorgeous Sistine Chapel, the Rome of that Colosseum where Nero fed myriads of unhappy Christians to the lions, the Rome of the grim Castle of &an Angelo, the Home of the turbid, fast-flowing liber, the Rome of the catacombs, that Eternal City whose past is still a subject of everfascinating study. It seems a shame not to spend at least a fortnight here. To tell the truth, there is a positive embarrass de richessos in the wondrous Vatican galleries alone, where one masterpiece of fi Ipture or painting succeeds, another with well nigh bewildering rapidity as one follows meekly behind the guide. Inipressions become almost chaotic, but when I return to the sober quietude of my modest little bookroom in far-away MaonI land. I intend to haul out my little portfolia of photographs, to dwell leisurely on tne much-storied pages of Baedeker or, much livelier reading, those of Mr E. y. Lucas’s recently-published “Wanderer in Rome.” Rome is not for a day, a week, a fortnight, but for all time. Its fascination grips on ever tighter and tighter. , and when in a humble wineshop on the 1 Piazza Snagna, close to those famous steps i whtre the visiting artist selects his ' models, I sip luxuriously at a tumbler filled with iced Orvieto, I find myself con- ; Burned by envy of the velveteen-coated, silvery-haired old American painter who tells me this is his sixth year in Rome. ’ and that ho is still far from hungering 1 to return to his native —and winclesa — Kalamazoo (Mich.), Peoria (111.), or | whatever his "home town” may be. j SOME STRAY NOTES. The latter-day Italian is, I fear, more or loss a cl»gonorate, and rather tasteless

individual so far as architecture is concerned. As in most great modern cities, the rage for a floridly over-ornate style of building is omnipresent to-day in Rome. The Roman of to-day points with pride to the huge monument to Victor Emmanuel II which has cost I wot not how many scores of millions of those lira now so desperately scarce in Italy. It _is to my fancy altogether too gorgeous, with its long row of glistening white marble columns. There is, too, that surplusage of gilt which is the bane of latter-day Italian architecture, and to me it is a veritable relief to turn to some of the ancient edifices, the noble Trojan Column, the small • but indefinably elegant _ Fountain of the Tortoises, to drink in the austere but compelling charm of the general view of the Roman Forum, to absorb, so far as the eye may allow, the superb effect of the sadly-ruined but still wonderfully impressive Colosseum. But visit Rome, so I counsel the travelling Eew Zealander, in the spring or the later uutimin, and do not, as I have recently done, sojourn on Tiber’s banks in the heat of the summer. Bodily exercise becomes a perfect penance in the hot months, and this year, in common, it would appear, with the major part of Europe, the heat has been greatly above the average. Three compensations, so I thank a beneficient providence, many of my fellow wanderers have found in the absurdly cheap wine of the country, doubly grateful when iced, the curious absence of mosquitoes—usually, I am told, a terrible nuisance in July, August, and September —and the comfortable victorias or little open cabs which amble through the streets in so agreeably leisurely a style, and the patronage of which entails an almost ridiculously modest tax on the traveller’s purse. But I would the Italian would grow and cure and sell some more agreeable brand of tobacco. The young elegants of the ancient city patronise. I notice, a long spidery tube of tobacco styled Virginia, and there is a Minghetti cigar which is not a bad smoke. But carry your pipe tobacco with you, even if you do have some trouble in dodging the Customs. Oh. for a modest fill of any good brand of the Virginia weed, as we New Zealanders know it! Were I to live in Italy 1 should be a hardened smuggler. lam moderately “bucked up,’ ->wever, by the prospect of seeing Florence and Venice, and so take to the train again, with its stuffy cars, its hot cushions, and its vile sulphurous smoke, in a fairly philosophical spirit. The previous articles of this series appeared in our issues of August 28, September 4, September 11, September 18, October 2, October 23, October 30, November 6, November 13, November 20, November 27, and December 4.