There had been signs and portents like the regular toppling over and defacing of the bust of Lauro Di Bosis near the Villa Lante and in the Gianicolo.

Something was happening all right, slowly it is true, but you could feel it.
The Italians felt it.
Little things.
An Italian poet had noticed plainclothes policemen lounging around the area of Quirinal Palace, the first time since the war.
At least they hadn't stepped up and asked to see papers in the hated, flat, dialect mispronunciation of Mussolini's home district -- Dogumenti, per favore.
But, who knew, that might be coming one of these days.
There were other Italians who still bore scars they had earned in police station basements, resisting.
They laughed and, true to national form and manners, never talked long or solemnly on any subject at all, but some of them worried out loud about short memories and ghosts.

We saw Giuseppe Berto at a party once in a while, tall, lean, nervous and handsome, and, in our opinion, the best novelist of them all except Pavese, and Pavese is dead.
Berto's The Sky Is Red had been a small masterpiece and in its special way the best book to come out of the war.
Now he was married to a beautiful girl, had a small son, and lived in an expensive apartment and worked for the movies.
On his desk was a slowly accumulating treatment and script of The Count Of Monte Cristo.
On his bookshelves were some of the latest American novels, including Bellow's Seize The Day, but he hadn't read them (they were sent by American publishers) and wasn't especially interested in what the American writers were up to.
He was interested in Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities.
So were a lot of other people.
He was interested in Italo Svevo.
He was thinking his way into a new novel, a big one, one that people had been waiting for.
It was going to be hard going all the way because he hadn't written seriously for a while, except for a few stories, was tired of the old method of realismo he had so successfully used in The Sky Is Red.
This one was going to be different.
He had bought a little piece of property down along the coast of the hard country of Calabria that he knew so well.
He was going to do one or two more films for cash and then chuck it all, leave Rome and its intellectual cliques and money-fed life, go back to Calabria.

Berto seemed worried, too.
He knew all about it and had put it down in journal form in The War In A Black Shirt, a wonderful book not, for some strange reason, published in the U.S.
He knew all about the appeal of a black shirt and jackboots to a poor, southern, peasant boy.
He knew all about the infection and the fever, and, too, the moment of realization when he saw for himself, threw up his hands and quit, ended the war as a prisoner in Texas.
Berto knew all about Fascism.
So did his friend, the young novelist Rimanelli.
Rimanelli is tough and square-built and adventurous, says what he thinks.
He had put it down in a war novel, The Day Of The Lion.
These people were not talking much about it, but you, a foreigner, sensed their apprehension and disappointment.

So there we were talking around and about it.
The English lady said she had to go to Vienna for a while.
It was a pity because she had planned to lay a wreath at the foot of the Garibaldi statue, towering over Rome in spectacular benediction from the highpoint of the Gianicolo.
Around that statue in the green park where children play and lovers walk in twos and there is a glowing view of the whole city, in that park are the rows of marble busts of Garibaldi's fallen men, the ones who one day rushed out of the Porta San Pancrazio and, under fire all the way, up the long, straight narrow lane to take, then lose the high ground of the Villa Doria Pamphili.
When they lost it, the French artillery moved in, and that was the end for Garibaldi that time, on 30 April 1849.
Once out of the gate they had charged straight up the narrow lane.
We had walked it many times and shivered, figuring what a fish barrel it had been for the French.
Now the park is filled with marble busts and all the streets in the immediate area have the full and proper names of the men who fell.

We were at a party once and heard an idealistic young European call that awful charge glorious.
Our companion was a huge, plain-spoken American sculptor who had been a sixteen-year-old rifleman all across France in 1944.
He said it was stupid butchery to order men to make a charge like that, no matter who gave the order and what for.

"Oh, it would be butchery all right", the European said.
"We would see it that way, but it was glorious then.
It was the last time in history anybody could do something gloriously like that".

I thought: Who is older now?
Old world and new world.

The sculptor looked at him, bugeyed and amazed, angry.
He had made an assault once with 180 men.
It was a picked assault company.
They went up against an SS unit of comparable size, over a little rise of ground, over an open field.
Object -- a village crossroads.
They made it, killed every last one of the Krauts, took the village on schedule.
When it was over, eight of his company were still alive and all eight were wounded.
The whole thing, from the moment when they jumped heavily off the trucks, spread out and moved into position just behind the cover of that slight rise of ground and then jumped off, took maybe between twenty and thirty minutes.
The sculptor looked at him, let the color drain out of his face, grinned, and looked down into his drink, a bad Martini made with raw Italian gin.

"Bullshit", he said softly.

"Excuse me", the European said.
"I am not familiar with the expression".

The apartment where we were talking that afternoon in March faced onto the street Garibaldi's men had charged up and along.
Across the way from the apartment building is a ruined house, shot to hell that day in 1849, and left that way as a memorial.
There is a bronze wreath on the wall.
Like everything else in Rome, ruins and monuments alike, that house is lived in.
I have seen diapers strung across the ruined roof.

The English lady really wanted to put a wreath on the Garibaldi monument on the 30th of April.
She had her reasons for this.
For one thing, there wasn't going to be any ceremony at all this year.
There were a few reasons for that, too: Garibaldi had been taken up and exploited by the Communists nowadays.
Therefore the government wanted no part of him.
(It is sort of as if our government should decide to disown Washington or Lincoln for the same reason.
) And then there were ecclesiastical matters, the matter of Garibaldi's anti-clericalism.
There was a new Pope and the Vatican was making itself heard and felt these days.
As it happens the English lady is a good Catholic herself, but of more liberal political persuasion.
Nothing was going to be done this year to celebrate Garibaldi's bold and unsuccessful defense of Rome.
All that the English lady wanted to do was to walk up to the monument and lay a wreath at its base.
This would show that somebody, even a foreigner living in Rome, cared.
And then there were other things.
Some of the marble busts in the park are of young Englishmen who fought and died for Garibaldi.
She also mentioned leaving a little bunch of flowers at the bust of Lauro Di Bosis.

It is hard for me to know how I feel about Lauro Di Bosis.
I suffer from mixed feelings.
He was a well-to-do, handsome, and sensitive young poet.
His bust shows an intense, mustached, fine-featured face.
He flew over Rome one day during the early days of Mussolini and scattered leaflets over the city, denouncing the Fascists.
He was never heard of again.
He is thought either to have been killed by the Fascists as soon as he landed or to have killed himself by flying out to sea and crashing his plane.
He was, thus, an early and spectacular victim.
And there is something so wonderfully romantic about it all.
He really didn't know how to fly.
He had crashed on takeoff once before.
Gossip had it (for gossip is the soul of Rome) that a famous American dancer of the time had paid for both the planes.
It was absurd and dramatic.
It is remembered and has been commemorated by a bust in a park and a square in the city which was renamed Piazzo Lauro Di Bosis after the war.
Most Romans, even some postmen, know it by the old name.

Faced with a gesture like Di Bosis', I find usually that my sentiments are closer to those of my sculptor friend.
The things that happened in police station basements were dirty, grubby, and most often anonymous.
No poetry, no airplanes, no dancers.
That is how the real routine of resistance goes on, and its strength is directly proportionate to the number of insignificant people who can let themselves be taken to pieces, piece by piece, without quitting.
It is an ugly business and there are few, if any, wreaths for them.
I keep thinking of a young woman I knew during the Occupation in Austria.
She was from Prague.
She had been picked up by the Russians, questioned in connection with some pamphlets, sentenced to life imprisonment for espionage.
She escaped, crawled through the usual mine fields, under barbed wire, was shot at, swam a river, and we finally picked her up in Linz.
She showed us what had happened to her.
No airplanes, no Nathan Hale statements.
Just no spot, not even a dimesize spot, on her whole body that wasn't bruised, bruise on top of bruise, from beatings.
I understand very well about Lauro Di Bosis and how his action is symbolic.
The trouble is that like many symbols it doesn't seem a very realistic one.

The English lady wanted to pay tribute to Garibaldi and to Lauro Di Bosis, but she wasn't going to be here to do it.
Were any of us interested enough in the idea to do it for her, by proxy so to speak?
There was a pretty thorough silence at that point.
My spoon stirring coffee, banging against the side of the cup, sounded as loud as a bell.
I thought: What the hell?
Why not?
I said I would do it for her.

I had some reasons, too.
I admire the English lady.
I hate embarrassing silences and have been known to make a fool out of myself just to prevent one.
I also had and have feelings about Garibaldi.
Like every Southerner I can't escape the romantic tradition of brave defeats, forlorn lost causes.
Though Garibaldi's fight was small shakes compared to Pickett's Charge -- which, like all Southerners, I view in almost Miltonic terms, fallen angels, etc. -- I associated the two.
And to top it all I am often sentimental on purpose, trying to prove to myself that I am not afraid of sentiment.
So much for all that.

The English lady was pleased and enthusiastic.
She gave me the names of some people who would surely help pay for the flowers and might even march up to the monument with me.
The idea of the march pleased her.
Maybe twenty, thirty, fifty.
Maybe I could call Rimanelli at the magazine Rottosei where he worked.