EUROPE: The Summertime Madness

• Share

Amid the stainless steel, leatherette and Formica of coffee shops in Manhattan's Radio City, balding businessmen and their wives from Wichita or Fort Wayne worried over the foreign schedules prepared by hard-pressed travel agents. "Well," one of them murmured, "if Ellen insists, I suppose we could steal a day from Venice to take in Portofino, but where will that leave our two days in Zurich?" In Hannover, Heidelberg and Hamm, German mothers wrapped the last of huge piles of Butterbrote in waxed paper as their cantankerous and impatient offspring squabbled over who was to sit where in the family Volkswagen. Dutchmen and Danes by the thousands were leaving their lowland homes for a brief, refreshing holiday in Germany's nearby mountains. Mountain-bred Swiss were flocking to the gently rolling hill country of Lake Constance. Once again, the great seasonal migration was on, and all over Europe indefatigable optimists were crossing and crisscrossing each other's paths in a brief, determined effort to sniff the green grass growing in somebody else's yard, for, as a sweating porter in Milan's grimy and teeming Central Station put it, "L'estate fa la follia" —Summertime makes for madness.

Dollars for Ancestors. In the van of the mad, meandering mob wandering the face of Europe last week were the travelers from the U.S. Fortnight ago, American Express had reported an early-season drop in Americans abroad, perhaps induced by unsettling reports of inflation and shortages and trouble overseas, but now they were descending on the Continent in overwhelming numbers again. The $150 million spent by some 270,000 Americans in Britain alone this year will provide enough hard curency to pay for most of the dollar-short United Kingdom's purchases of U.S. tobacco and wheat. But to many a Briton, forced by a still constricted travel allowance ($280 in foreign currency) to stay at home while others wandered, the warm economic comfort of tourism was somewhat chilled by recognition of the fact that his tight little island was terribly overcrowded.

Urged on by enterprising travel agencies, foreigners were crowding into every corner sacred to the English heart. Crew-cut Americans festooned with photographic equipment were everywhere. Saris and West African tribal robes drew only passing glances at such strongholds of the Savile Row sack suit as Claridge's and the Dorchester. The harsh accents of Sydney and Melbourne bounced almost unnoticed off the walls of pubs. Scots sextons helped citizens of Canada and the U.S. track down ancestors in their own quiet graveyards, while hairy German legs bristled stoutly beneath their Lederhosen at the changing of the guard at Buckingham or St. James's Palace. Headwaiters were busy guiding visiting Frenchmen through the mysteries of an English menu —which in virtually every good London restaurant is printed in what is presumed to be French.