Word: romagna
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When the workers' riots erupted in Poland, some of the loudest denunciations of the Communist bosses in Warsaw came from party spokesmen in Western Europe-most notably from the Red leaders of Italy's Emilia-Romagna region. Guido Fanti, the Communist president of the region, rose before his 50-member council to deplore "the tragic events of Poland." The Communist mayor of Bologna, Renato Zangheri, expressed "the strongest condemnation of the use of arms" to suppress the revolt...
...great surprise that the Italian Communists should be so quick to criticize the errors of their Polish comrades; they are a rather special breed. Emilia-Romagna is one of 15 Italian regions that last June elected semiautonomous governments under a nationwide decentralization program -and the only one in which the Communists and their allies won a majority. Rather than use their new-found power to try to cast the region along orthodox Marxist lines, the Emilia-Romagna Communists-who have been the dominant political force in the so-called "red belt" of central Italy since World War II-have chosen...
...building their showcase, the Communists skillfully capitalized on the region's natural advantages. Emilia-Romagna has long been Italy's richest agricultural region. For the past 20 years, it has led the nation in industrial growth; thanks to an influx of new plants and fat payrolls, the per capita income in Bologna (more than $1,600 a year) is rising at a rate of better than 9% a year. Businessmen find that it is one place where they can count on local Communist politicians to keep obstreperous left-wing labor unions in line...
...always find a party representative on hand at the railroad station or bus depot to point the way to a job, to housing or to party-run community centers with cut-rate bars and restaurants. Many of Italy's beaches are open sewers, but in Rimini, on Emilia-Romagna's Adriatic coast, swimmers enjoy waters kept clean by modern antipollution equipment...
...promote their avidly sought democratic image, the Communists of Emilia-Romagna not only twit their comrades in other countries, they go out of their way to downplay their own presence. Although more than 400,000 of Italy's 1,492,000 card-carrying party members live in the region, President Fanti scoffs at Christian Democratic fears that the Reds intend to build a Moscow-style monolithic state. All the Communists want, he says soothingly, is a society "which is pluralistic, in which no ideology or faith would have an exclusive or privileged position...