ITALY: Red Rule in Fiat City

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Orderly Growth. Turin's new mayor can only hope to be equally effective in revitalizing his city. In his inaugural speech last week, Novelli called on fellow citizens of all political hues to join him in "a great experiment in urban reconstruction." It will not be an easy chore. In Bologna, growth was orderly and the population remained homogeneous. Turin, on the other hand, was barely able to cope with Italy's postwar economic miracle. As southern migrants rushed to Turin's factory jobs, the city grew by half a million people in the years between 1951 and 1971. This explosion stretched the city's facilities and services to the limit, dissolved neighborhoods, mottled the city's appearance with cheaply built, unimposing buildings and mutilated any sense of community.

The city grew haphazardly as speculators, darting through loopholes in the zoning laws, did most of the building. Classrooms are so scarce that some city schools operate on triple shifts. Traffic is so chaotic that it takes some workers five hours to get to and from their jobs. Novelli intends to streamline and reduce the municipal bureaucracy; he also wants to add 2,000 new classrooms and improve housing. Financing all this will be hard because recession hit Turin heavily. Today unemployment is up 25% from a year ago and is still rising as further cutbacks loom. Transportation will be especially difficult. The mayor wants to give streetcars and buses priority over automobiles, a heretical idea in the Detroit of Italy—Fiat is by far the city's dominant employer. Even Novelli admits that "in Turin, the automobile is like a pagan god."

Chaotic Sameness. He concedes that it is impossible to tear down all the jerry-built construction and start anew. But he hopes to "give the city back its face and character." The mayor, who still lives in the working-class quarter of Borgo San Paolo, remembers his youth: "My parents used to take me to the Piazza Sabotino for ice cream. They met their friends; I saw my schoolmates. There was a hedge row we called the Vialle dei Sederi ["Bottom Boulevard"] because of the great row of buttocks of people sitting there talking. Nowadays Piazza Sabotino looks like the track at Le Mans—no trees, no benches, just traffic and the chaotic sameness of the rest of the city." Someday Novelli, in what may be his most radical plan, also wants to expropriate idle land across the Po from Turin and convert it into a massive municipal park.

Turin's capitalists have been cautiously neutral toward the new administration. Former Christian Democratic Mayor Giovanni Porcellana, who looks forward to leading a "regenerative opposition," admits that "so far [the Communists] sound like Northern European Social Democrats." A lot of Italians will put the emphasis on that "so far."

For his part, Novelli insists that "we're not out to Bolshevize Turin." He describes himself primarily as a concerned Torinese rather than a dogmatic Marxist. "I've been to Moscow several times," he says. "With all our problems here, I'd still rather live in Turin."