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This article focuses on the anti-fascist movement in Italy during the second World War. Italian patriots had opposed Fascism for more than twenty years. Under their leadership a popular army came into being. It is reported that around 250,000 Italians died in the fight for liberation. Italian patriots have also been fighting beyond the frontiers of the country. Many thousands joined the President of Yugoslavia, Marshal Tito, after September 8, 1943, and won his warm commendation. Before the liberation of France there was close contact between the Italian and French guerrillas fighting in the Haute-Savoie in France.

The pleasure felt in the U.S. over the outcome of the Italian municipal elections has been replaced by a sense of puzzlement. Although the Christian Democrats won many communes previously held by the left, the Communists and Nenni Socialists increased their popular vote. Both Communists and anti-Communists therefore claim a victory, hailing their gains and discounting their losses. The problem boils down to which party made the most important gain: in terms of political advantages, is Italian Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi's tighter control of the large cities worth more than the Communists' growing popular support? That question also can only be answered in 1953. The departure of the local Democrats from the Cabinet weakened De Gasperi: his government lost the semblance of coalition and became clearly clerical. Unless De Gasperi is able to recapture his lost ground-and nothing indicates that he will be, since the conservative vote is tending to drift away from Christian Democracy he will not command an absolute majority in Parliament after the next election.

The article focuses on the economic development in Europe, of which Italy is politically and strategically an important part. Italy today has 2,000,000 jobless, 10 per cent of its labor force. This is the highest proportion in Europe and more than double what it was in the Fascist period. Conditions in Italy have changed more radically since the end of the war than people in the U.S. realize. The people no longer believe in the inevitability of unemployment. The Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) mission in Italy has proposed a different approach. Leon Dayton, head of ECA told the Italian government that full employment must be Italy's first goal.

Italian Premier Alcide De Gasperi has denounced the attempt on Italian Communist party leader Palmiro Togliatti's life; but Senator Sandro Pertini, an independent Socialist, spoke the truth when he rose in the Senate and accused the government of responsibility for the deed. The young would be assassin, a university student and correspondent of rightist papers, is a secondary figure in the drama. The shooting itself may have been an individual act, but one cannot conduct a campaign of hate, month after month, without inviting some unbalanced fanatic to take action which to him is the logical expression of this attitude. One cannot allow fascism to become organized legally and believe that order and democracy are safe.

Under the new Italian constitution, approved by a joint session of Parliament on December 22 by a vote of 453 to 62, relations between church and state will be regulated by the Lateran Pacts, the agreement signed in 1929 by the Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini and Pope Pius XI. The pacts were incorporated in the draft constitution on March 25, when the Constituent Assembly approved Article 5 by a vote of 350 to 149. By accepting Article 7 the new Italian Republic signified that it recognizes Catholicism as the sole state religion. In the debates of last spring Article 7 was supported by all the right-wing parties. The Communists, holding the balance of power, kept everybody guessing about their position until the last moment.

Left-wing rioters in Italy are attacking fascist and near fascist meetings, breaking up the offices of rightist organizations, staging parades and demonstrations. De Gasperi's centrist government attempting to restore order by police action, blames the communists for instigating the violence. The communists on their part attack the government for its refusal to eradicate organized fascist elements which they claim have provoked the workers into acts of reprisal. Last week, in a stormy debate in the Assembly, the Communist deputy Giuseppe di Vittorio said, "The only way to avoid civil war is to suppress fascism and abolish its press." This article gives an account of fascist activities in the last two weeks.

This article focuses on social conditions of Italy after the second world war. The author says that the masses know that a closed caste is already so solidly entrenched that no true democracy or social justice is possible. And this perhaps explains the continuous trend toward the left shown in the recent local elections. There are today two million unemployed, which means that ten million persons, about one-fourth of the population, are without even the minimum necessities of life. This is the country's fundamental problem, and one doubts that any Marshall plan, an economic plan by George C. Marshall for recovery of World war II, could solve it.

The article focuses on the politician Alicide De Gasperi, who have sharply disagreed as to the role that Catholics should play in Italian politics. De Gasperi has maintained that the Christian Democratic Party should be inspired by Catholic doctrine and principles but be independent of immediate Vatican directives. De Gasperi has backed the church as a religious organization, helping it to gain control of education and to fight divorce and birth control, but he has not completely surrendered to its political ambitions. To the church, however, a government that calls itself Catholic should place all the interests of the church first and completely identify the good of Italy with that of the Vatican.

The article focuses on an incident that occurred in the city of Turin in Italy, where, a group of neo-Fascists, members of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), were covering the walls of buildings with manifestoes insulting the Resistance movement . Some passers-by called the posters shameful and were beaten up by the neo-Fascists. The next morning a group of workers, outraged by this revival of squadrismo, deserted the assembly line at the Fiat works and other automobile factories and wrecked the headquarters of the Italian Social Movement. The destruction of MSI. headquarters caused a sensation. In Parliament the opposition objected that the government could not apply laws which, though they had not been abrogated, were contrary to the constitution.

The resignation of Giuseppe Saragat and the other Social Democratic ministers from Alcide De Gasperi's Cabinet had a strange purpose. It was probably the only time in parliamentary history that a group of ministers resigned, not in protest, but to demonstrate their solidarity with the government. The country might have been amused had not two men been killed and seventeen seriously injured in a dash between police and peasants the same day. For the Social Democrats to be absorbed in their never-ending disputes while such things were happening seemed to the workers a sign of complete unconcern for their problems.

The Roman Catholic church, in an effort to tighten its control over Italy, recently directed the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office to issue a decree of excommunication against about one-third of the adult Italian population. A day after the decree was issued the church felt it must be softened a little. Newspapermen who inquired of the ecclesiastical authorities how it should be interpreted were told that Eastern Europeans who had joined the Communist Party only to obtain a living would not be excommunicated, nor would persons who favored the party as an instrument for the material betterment of the working classes but rejected its ideology.

The article presents information on the trial related to Italian prince Valerio Borghese. On February 17, Valerio Borghese, on trial for collaboration with Nazi Germany and for atrocities against the partisans, was acquitted by an Italian court. The Prince is a member of a famous Roman family with close Vatican connections, part of that old aristocracy which the Pope recently asked to set an example of Christian living. His trial was moved from Milan to Rome so that the family could utilize its connections there to set in motion certain forces that might aid him.

The article discusses labor movement in Italy. When the minority Christian Democratic faction of the Italian General Confederation of Labor (C.G.I.L.) announced its decision in July to split with the Communist-dominated majority bloc, Catholic workers were as confused as leftists, and publicly opposed the action. Unity of the working class was a precept of the late Achille Grandi, the great Christian labor leader who helped found the C.G.I.L., and the Catholic worker, in these unstable times, considers unity indispensable to the defense of his rights and interests. The walk-out of the eleven Christian Democratic labor leaders was carefully planned some weeks before the recent general strike arising from the attempted assassination of Palmiro Togliatti, although the strike is given as the reason for the split.

The new government of Alcide De Gasperi have won absolute majority in both houses of Italy's Parliament. The inclusion of the moderate Socialists and Republicans is significant. De Gasperi realizes the need and the popular craving for reform and he does not underestimate the value of Pacciardi and Saragat in the Cabinet. Having devoted his main effort to the fight against communism, he chose his party candidates in the light of this aim. The inclusion of a few moderate leftists in the government will help answer the charge that it is reactionary, but they cannot seriously affect Cabinet decisions any more than they have done in the past.

A clear warning that Italy is heading toward inflation is seen in the fact that paper money circulation increased from 402 billion lire on June 30, 1946, to 584 billion lire on June 30, 1947, and has now reached 640 billionaire. Never before have Italian liberal's felt so strongly that direction of the government must be transferred to a party with a workable plait of economic and political reconstruction. The Socialist Party is thought best fitted for this !ask, being the most democratic of the three mass parties and the most independent of foreign pressure.

This article focuses on the organization created by the Roman Catholic Church to dominate Italian life. The organization is named as "Catholic Action," it claims three million members and is the most powerful mass movement in Italy today. Catholic Action has cells even in the tiniest villages, but it depends directly upon the Pope, who appoints its leaders. Its goal is to increase the participation of the people in the apostolic mission of the church. The Fascist government kept Catholic Action under strict control and prevented it from interfering in the business of the state: its activities were limited to the religious field.

The article presents information on various political developments related to Italy. To most Italians security means to keep out of any war. Well realizing this feeling, Italian leaders like Count Carlo Sforza have declared repeatedly that the government's policy is not to commit Italy to military alliances but to struggle toward the formation of a European federation. Since Sforza believes that European unity must rest upon the economic interdependence of the nations concerned, he worked out a customs union with France as the basis of a wider entente.

The article focuses on the political situation in Italy. The recent wave of political disorders in Italy has been interpreted as the prelude to a Communist revolution. The reasons for the strikes and other disorders are rather to be found in the abnormal conditions under which the coming elections will be held. The Christian Democrats feel sure of victory, and this confidence is based on the almost dictatorial power the government will have during the two months preceding the elections. The present government has been very careful to place in local offices men faithful to the Christian Democratic Party and the church and has removed civil servants appointed by the Military Government or the Partisans. This policy has caused much resentment in Milan.

The political situation in Italy is becoming tremendously important. What is now happening here is bound to have great influence on the whole balance of power in the Mediterranean. According to persistent rumors, the Allies are building up their military strength in Italy and not giving a thought to leaving the country. Wanting to see himself how much truth there was in these rumors, the author made a weeklong trip through central Italy. In Florence, Italy, the author discovered that the whole Cascine, Florence, Italy, section is being requisitioned to accommodate 150,000 American soldiers. In Leghorn, the Americans seem to be unloading war material day and night. On the Adriatic coast, near Rimini, Italy, British troops supported by Polish units and German prisoners of war are ruling the countryside.