Price of Fame by Sylvia Jukes Morris

Author:Sylvia Jukes Morris [Morris, Sylvia Jukes]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-8041-7969-0
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2014-06-16T16:00:00+00:00

An exhausted Clare checked into the San Domenico Palace Hotel in Taormina, Sicily. Her room overlooked the bay, and had a view of the snowy bulk of Mount Etna. But a cold wave that held all of Europe in an icy grip affected the usually sunny resort as well, so after enduring five days of rain that kept her cooped up, she returned to Rome and its freezing fountains.18

The governmental crisis was unabated, threatening her with many challenges in the coming weeks. She was at least relieved to hear that Yugoslavia had agreed to secret Trieste negotiations in London. Tito’s representative was Dr. Vladimir Velebit, a hard-line Slovene. His counterparts were Geoffrey W. Harrison, an undersecretary in the British Foreign Office, and Llewellyn E. Thompson, the U.S. Ambassador to Austria. It was probable that several anticlimactic months would pass before Manlio Brosio, Italy’s Ambassador to Great Britain, would be able to make his case.19

On January 29, the Italian Chamber of Deputies debated whether to give Fanfani a vote of confidence. Palmiro Togliatti stood up and said acidly that the new Premier’s liberal agenda was guided by a foreign power. “The things you, Honorable Fanfani, have said against us have already been said by the American Ambassador on her peregrinations. My advice is, don’t run after her. She is a porta sventura.”20

Everyone in the Chamber knew that this phrase, meaning a bringer of bad luck, also connoted malocchio, “the evil eye,” a sinister power that in popular belief brought disasters, from crop failures to volcanic eruptions to the death of the Pope.

Signora Luce’s Milan speech last June, Togliatti went on, with its threat of aid reduction, had weakened the Christian Democrats. And her meddling in the Trieste question had inflicted trouble on Premier Pella. “Beware of all advice that comes from that quarter,” he warned.

Fanfani rose to his feet to protest such an attack on the representative of a foreign nation. As a man, “I must lament that the most elementary rules of chivalry have been so crudely disregarded.” De Gasperi followed, denying that other countries had a hand in formulating Italian policy. Togliatti evidently mistook Italy “for one of the Soviet Union satellites.”21

When the vote was taken, all the minor coalition parties that Fanfani depended on—the Monarchists, the Liberals, the neo-Fascist Social Movement, and Saragat’s Socialist Democrats—withdrew their support, leaving him with 260 ayes and 303 nays. As a result, on February 10, Fanfani, after just nineteen days in office, was replaced by Mario Scelba.22

Scelba was the fourth man to serve as Prime Minister of Italy since Clare’s arrival less than ten months before. He swore in a left-of-center cabinet, consisting of fourteen Christian Democrats, four moderate Socialists, and three Liberals. Monarchists were conspicuously lacking. For this reason he, too, was not expected to last long.

Clare nevertheless welcomed the elevation of another Christian Democrat. Scelba was an able former Minister of the Interior, and on socioeconomic issues was firmly left of center. He had been an enforcer of law and

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