ITALY: I Have Done Much Wrong

At long last, Italian newspapers were beginning to direct their nose for news toward a malodorous situation: the bad records of the Communists in the Chamber of Deputies. A onetime resistance hero named Edgardo Sogno began it with his Pace e Libertá campaign (TIME, Nov. 1). Last week Rome's influential II Tempo took up the history of bald and boisterous Vincenzo Moscatelli, a Communist Deputy and member of the party's Central Committee. In 1932 Comrade Moscatelli was caught by Mussolini's police and sentenced to 16 years in prison; that gave him a certain claim to fame as an anti-Fascist hero, and even entitled him to a seat in Parliament after the war, as a "Senator by right."

But II Tempo, looking into his record, discovered that Moscatelli had served only five years in jail, after which he was kept under a form of "house arrest" that apparently permitted him considerable freedom. Why? II Tempo supplied the answer by publishing a facsimile of a groveling letter written by Moscatelli to the Fascist authorities in Piedmont: "I have done much wrong to the fatherland and to the Fascist regime. Today I am glad and proud to be able to declare that I, with a spontaneity beyond any suspicion and an impulse springing from soul-searching sincerity, am determined to reject those Marxist conceptions which Fascist reality has completely emptied. I know now that the corporate state is capable of realizing what elsewhere remains a mere promise . . . The instinctive certainty that Fascist justice will know how to reward him who shows a wish to rehabilitate himself gives me the best hope for an early return to my family. It will stimulate me to . . . become more deserving of the Duce's generosity in the climate of the new imperial Italy."

Italy's Communists could not ignore this embarrassing exposure of their anti-Fascist hero.* From party headquarters came a quick but lame explanation: Comrade Moscatelli had written the letter—without meaning a word of it—at party orders, in order to be set free to continue with "delicate" party work. This explanation was almost worse than none. II Tempo pointed out that Moscatelli had in fact earned his release by squealing on several comrades as soon as he was arrested. Added II Tempo: "The squealing paralyzed the party's activities in the region for many years."