Word: romes
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Truncheons & Cold Water. Act II opened some 48 hours later, at midnight, when Rome's first serious general strike since 1922 began. Key demands of the Communist-dominated Chamber of Labor: 10 billion lire ($16,500,000) for public works and Christmas gratuities to aid Rome's 70,000 unemployed. Actually, Government plans already called for almost 10½-billion lire for public works; the Reds professed not to believe this...
Palmiro Togliatti's Italian Communists last week decided to test their muscles. For the experiment they chose Rome itself. The action consisted of a taut parade of 30,000 Communist partisans, followed by a general strike-all painstakingly stage-set as a pageant of Communist power. But the action drifted away from the script; toward the end there were touches of Mardi gras and, finally, Italian Communism's worst humiliation...
...Communists had mobilized buses and trucks all over Italy. Before the government of Christian Democrat Premier Alcide de Gasperi quite knew what was up, thousands of partisans (mostly Communist) had converged on the capital. People who could remember 1922 thought that it made Mussolini's march on Rome look like a clumsy straggle of Boy Scouts...
...black-market money exchanges in Rome's Piazza Colonna, the news came as a profound shock. But to Italian exporters, U.S. importers and world traders everywhere, the news was the best out of Italy in months. Last week, the Italian government abandoned the fictitious value it had set on the lira. It devalued the lira from 350 to the U.S. dollar to what it considered its true worth-the last month's average black-market price of 589 to the dollar...
Lesson for Reds. The first results of the new devaluation program looked good. When Italy cut back the value of the lira before (last week was the third time since the liberation), domestic prices went up. Last week, they dropped. In Rome, housewives found that poultry, olive oil and sugar prices were down 20 to 50%; meat which had cost up to 900 lira a week before could be bought for under 500. Farmers, who had refused to sell their products when the lira was becoming more worthless every day, now hastened to unload as it increased in real value...