ITALY: Togliatti's Round

For four months the chief preoccupation of Italian politicians of every stripe has been the merger negotiations between Vice Premier Giuseppe Saragat's Social Democratic Party and Pietro Nenni's Red-lining Socialists. By last week most of Rome's pundits agreed that unification was a foregone conclusion. All that remained was for Nenni to meet Saragat's prime condition for unification: denunciation of the "unity of action" pact that has bound Nenni's Socialists to Italy's Communist Party since 1946.

The pundits were reckoning without the Byzantine deviousness of Lenin (formerly Stalin) Prizewinner Pietro Nenni. One evening last week Nenni and Communist Boss Palmiro Togliatti...