ITALY: Excursion

Gorizia is a small (pop. 30,000) Italian city through whose eastern outskirts runs the boundary between Yugoslavia and Italy. Ever since the 1947 peace treaty which set up this artificial boundary, gregarious Gorizians had chafed mightily under border control rules that permitted only a handful of them to cross the frontier. Last week, the Italians and Yugoslavs decided to relent, issued about 2,000 permits allowing the bearers to cross the border on Sunday.

All Saturday night, Yugoslav residents streamed toward the line. They came in trains, trucks, horsecars and on bicycles—some with permits, most without. When the barrier finally went up on Sunday morning, a mob of 5,000 enthusiastic residents of the Yugoslav zone stormed into Italian Gorizia.

The Yugoslav crowd spread quickly through Gorizia's shops, cafes, bars and restaurants, filled their shopping bags with food, wine, stockings, towels, lipsticks and medical supplies. Yugoslav housewives exhausted the supply of brooms in a matter of minutes. In a sidewalk cafe, one elderly Yugoslav said: "This is the first real coffee I have had in three years. I must drink it slowly, or it will poison me."

That afternoon, the Yugoslavs began the trek back, the housewives waving their brooms, the girls their lipsticks. Yugoslav authorities feared that further excursions into the capitalist parts of Gorizia would breed discontent among Tito's subjects. At week's end, Italian newspapers carried a laconic communiqué: "Permits to cross the Italian-Yugoslav frontier will be stopped until further notice."