A COMMUNIST SITS ON THE MEDICI THRONE
LEHRMAN, HAL
A COMMUNIST SITS ON THE MEDICI THRONE By Hal Lehrman FLORENCE. TO INTERVIEW the Mayor of modern Florence, you climb the great marble staircase of the Palaxxo Vecchio, where the Grand Dukes...
...Pressed further, he said he had spent "a cer^tain time" in Russia "convalescing...
...During the day...
...Fabiani's brief but eventful life has left him little time to bone up on the annals of his illustrious predecessors...
...Of course, there are ways of telling that it is the Communists who are installed in City Hall...
...I learned later that one of the major financial proposals from Communist Florence rejected by Rome was a measure to increase the salaries of Mayor Fabiani and his municipal councillors...
...FLORENCE'S chief executive was horn- the son of a hungry grocer in Empoli...
...Hs it now traveling in Europt...
...A second-rate baritone named Pariso Voto is the present director ^of the Teatro Communale...
...Medallions on the wall commemorate the" Pope's meetings with Francis I and other storied European monarchs...
...When Mussolini fell in 1943, Fabiani was released from prison...
...Another pointed out that large sums of money have been raised in America for the musical organizations of Florence, Communistcontrolled center of Italian culture...
...He is managing the city "at least as efficiently as the Fascists <Hd-*-and he hasn't made off with the town funds...
...He lived his next nine years in jail...
...Thin, pale, a bit on the seedy side, Mayor Fabiani doesn't quite fit in physically with his impressive surroundings...
...PIPE OF WAX B.B.C...
...But at night, when I work here alone, the history in the room gives me a sense of stability...
...AT ANY RATE, young Fabiani was arrested by the biackshirts almost as soon as he arrived home from Russia...
...he got out of Italy into Franco just ahead of Mussolini's police...
...A mayor may be a Communist or even anarchist, but the prefect, backed by a sturdy national police, has the power to east him if he gets out of line...
...At sixteen he was already a secret Communist...
...His term has another year to go...
...He began organizing partisan units against the Germans in the Florence area...
...Fabiani became Vice-Mayor...
...Wlum I reminded him of it, he said...
...Richard Armour (HAL LEHRMAN is the famed coneipmilsU'who wrote "Russia's Europe...
...He did move into a rather bourgeois apartment shortly after his election, with a considerable amount of brand-new furniture...
...Oh yes...
...ON THE WHOLE, THE AVERAGE Florentine burgher says, Fabiani has been an agreeable surprise, and not at all the fearsome, blustering fellow they had expected from advance reports about Communists, in power...
...In local 194(3 elections he was made Mayor...
...TO INTERVIEW the Mayor of modern Florence, you climb the great marble staircase of the Palaxxo Vecchio, where the Grand Dukes of medieval Florence held sway, and' tiptoe into a magnificently-decorated chamber, once the study of Renaissance Pope Clement VIL This combination of the living past and Resent is not unusual in Florence...
...the Whole picture-postcard city is like a crowded museum...
...Therefore, as long as the Christian Democratic Party of Premier Akide de Gasperi stays in the driver's seat down in Rome, no Communist administration in the provinces is going to be anything but strictly obedient to the law.' • • • IT WAS THIS "despotism" of the centralized Rome government which composed the main theme of Mayor Fabiani's remarks in my interview with him...
...These prefects not only control the mayors' right to tax and spend, but also must pass on every city ordinance before it becomes valid...
...Every bend in the road uncovers another monument from the days of antique Florentine splendor, and every doorway is framed in the shadow of Savonarola and Michelangelo...
...Rules Bagpipes Not Music...
...I went to Moscow in 1932 from Paris, where I hud become ill...
...In \'XU ho returned as an underground Communist agent...
...For instance, although they and their Socialist allies have a majority of only three to two in the Municipal Council, by some mysterious leftist arithmetic they have a margin of eleven to two in the Executive Council which the Municipal Council chose from its own membership to run the city...
...A bold pronouncement, this, and when The news has filtered northward, then We can expect one day to read The screaming headline: "Scots Secede...
...The Communists," he said despondently, "play nice music for the western tourists but pick their performers by eastern methods...
...he oecount of a liberal who lost his pro-Seviet Illusions behind the iron curtain...
...The streetcars run an time, the street-cleaners make their apointed rounds, and the traffic cops—most of them recruited from the old partisan army—direct the stream of Florentine horsecarts, midget automobiles and battered old jalopytaxis with scrupulous impartiality...
...THE CEILING of Communist Mayor Mark) Fabiani's office, depicting scenes from the life of the Pope, is a riot of color applied by the brush of Vusari, the 16th century artist and biographer...
...Listening to Fabiani's account of his early life, I noted there was no referenr-b to any Moscow visit...
...They concede that Mayor Fabiani himself is the soul of decorum...
...I find myself in communion with the past...
...Fabiani is soft-spoken, dignified and moderate...
...First he gave me the Party line about the Marshall Plan, which is "a tool of American industrial interests in Italy," and, the Atlantic Pact, which "seeks to bind my country to America's militaristic ambitions," This done, he ttfrned vigorously to a long, detailed complaint that Rome has been sabotaging his administration by tightly controlling Florence's pursestrings, blocking an adequate budget for urgent reforms, causing a deterioration of roads, schools and hospitals, and generally acting ornery in order to discredit him and persuade the citizens of Florence to vote the Communists out at the next election...
...One way he reportedly keeps himself in good graces is by hiring operatic choruses twice as large as necessary, all_with Party cards, and giving them three times the usual number of rehearsals, at full pay...
...Behind the Mayor's chair is a mural map of Florence in 1512, when the House of de Medici, to which Clement belonged, returned to its native city from exile...
...Finally he admitted he had studied in a Moscow school "for five or six months," but he had difficulty remembering the name of the institution or exactly what studies he had pursued...
...Newspaper headline That isn't music, girls and boys...
...It seems that in intensely centralized Italy, municipal mayors play a faint second fiddle to the local prefects, who are the direct representatives of a very tough anti-Communist Interior Ministry in Rome...
...But on the Mayor's desk the only token of the past is a glass paper-weight, on the base of which is a crude drawing of the Palazzo Vecchio — adorned with a hammer and sickle...
...But he feels thoroughly at home...
...But he has been living there quietly ever since with his wife, formerly a partisan fighter, and their two little sons, without any visible signs of sudden wealth...
...That's merely loud, unpleasant noise...
...After the Allies swept northward, Florence was taken over by the partisan National Liberation Committee...
...WHAT IS MORE, one doesn't have much hope of a job in any municipal department unless his political affiliations are satisfactory...
...As he indicated to me himself, he never went to school at all—until he reached Moscow...
...Ho became an apprentice in a barbershop when he was eleven...
...The piper pipes—-no player he...
...A year later, in 1930...
...Anti-Communist Florentines grudgingly say they can't complain about the Fabiani administration...
...For this reporter, nevertheless, it was a new kind of experience to chat for an hour at Pope Clement's massive desk with a 36-year-old Mayor of Florence who started life as a barber, graduated from a Moscow political academy, and is today one of the brighter lights of the Italian Communist Party...
...So says, at least, ths B.B.C...
...Sophisticated Florentines, however, suggest that Fabiani has been so circumspect only because anything else would have gotten him in a peck of trouble with the central government—which happens to be dominated by the Christian Democrats, archenemy of the Communist Party...
...when this office Is filled witji people, I'm tot) busy to notice, he told me earnestly...
...Too poor to attend school, Mario was taught at home by two big brothers...
...A disgruntled tuba-player out of work told me that nobody can sing in the Opera or play in the Orchestra of Florence's Tcatro Communale without a Communist membership card...
...This worthy, it is alleged, was secretary of the same theatre during the Fascist regime but saw the light in time immediately after Liberation...
...But most Florentines philosophically discount such monkey-shines as the normal petty graft of any party in office...
...In this reluctant vagueness about his Russian period, Fabiani is like other Communist bigshots, especially those now running the "popular democracies" of Eastern Europe, who lived their formative years in Moscow but do not care to have the fact publicized...
Vol. 32 • April 1949 • No. 14
