Word: gasperi
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Well aware of the problem, Premier Alcide de Gasperi's government, which draws support from Italy's huge landowners, had failed miserably to carry out a sensible land-reform program. In Rome, Jesuit Father Riccardo Lombardi, who has carried his ardent revivalist "Crusade of Love" across the land (TIME, Dec. 20, 1948), cried: "The mighty of this world, the ecclesiastical and civil authorities, must do something for those who cannot wait because hunger gnaws at their vitals...
...right to move onto certain fallow lands-provided they first obtained permission from provincial committees set up to consider their claims. The committees have been working at a snail's pace; with his usual policy of trying to please everyone-the landowners as well as the peasants-De Gasperi had pleased no one. Last week the government was readying a new and better land-reform bill. It provides that unused or poorly used land of 8,000 estate owners will be expropriated, bought up by the government and sold to peasants on easy payment terms...
Premier de Gasperi held one of his rare press conferences, gave out reassuring figures showing Italy's rising food production. He hopefully pointed to ECA projects in Italy which are trying to educate the peasants to use their land to better purposes. At La Sila, not far from Melissa, the Italian government, with ECA help, is spending 15 billion lire ($24 million) on a project to improve the land, plans to settle 20,000 peasant families there. They will be instructed in crop rotation and other modern agricultural methods, get new tools and fertilizers. The U.S. has earmarked about...
Recently, De Gasperi himself went to Calabria to talk to the peasants. He told them that, until the situation was cleared up by law, they might keep the land they had seized. He promised reform. Said he: "... I am no revolutionary, but I cry woe betide landowners who don't heed the call of the present hour...
...until they got land, the peasants would be skeptical. Said Maria Rosa Giuliano, who lives in a windowless cavern with her nine children: "We will believe in the good things De Gasperi says when we see them. We liked him-the poor, thin man. But we have been disappointed too often...