For days beforehand, news stories went round
the world direly reporting that nothing less than freedom itself was at
stake in Sicily. And as the time came for Sicilians to elect a new
regional assembly, Christian Democratic orators by the Fiat-ful raced
about the island tirelessly echoing the warning of Italy's Premier
Antonio Segni: “We must be on our guard if we are not to awaken in the
bear hug of Communism.” Last week, in hundreds of arid mountain villages and scores of swarming
coastal towns, the citizens of semiautonomous Sicily quietly went to
the polls and made their much-ballyhooed choice. To the confusion of
just about everybody except the Sicilians, the real victor was neither
Communism nor Christian Democracy. It was “Sicilianism” in the orotund
person of Silvio Milazzo, president of Sicily's regional government. Cheap at the Price. The emergence of rumpled, chubby Silvio Milazzo, 56,
as the voice of his island's traditional separatism had typically
Sicilian origins. A Christian Democrat since early youth, Landowner
Milazzo was a reliable party wheel horse up to the time ambitious
former Italian Premier Amintore Fanfani
began to slip his bright young men from Rome into Sicily's Christian
Democratic organization. Last October, outraged by this infringement on
Sicilian autonomy , Milazzo bolted
the party. He managed to get control of the regional assembly by
putting together a crazy-quilt coalition of Monarchists, Fascists,
dissident Christian Democrats and Communists. To punish Milazzo, and to regain dominance of Catholic Sicily, the
Christian Democrats appealed to the Vatican. Armed with an ad hoc papal
decree forbidding Catholics to vote for any candidate allied with the
Communists, Sicily's imperious Ernesto Cardinal Ruffini sent Catholic
Action groups from house to house warning voters against Milazzo, even
attempted in vain to prevent Milazzo from joining Palermo's Corpus
Christi procession fortnight ago. In the U.S., the Hearst press urged
its Italian-American readers to shower Sicily with anti-Milazzo letters
and telegrams; advising the use of night-rate cables, New York's
Journal-American pleaded: “Even $2.75 is a small price for preserving
democracy.” Noble Animal. President Milazzo, Jesuit-educated and a practicing
Catholic, countered these attacks by naming his rump party the
Christian Social Union, choosing as its emblem a map of Sicily with a
cross planted on its southern tip —where St. Paul is said to have
planted one 2,000 years ago. And from a thousand ancient balconies he
appealed skillfully to the age-old Sicilian conviction that
“foreigners”—whether Saracen, Norman or mainland Italian—have only
one interest in Sicily: the amount of plunder they can take out of it.
“They have called me a Trojan horse,” croaked Milazzo in a
campaign-frazzled voice. “But I am not that. I am a pure-blooded
Sicilian horse, a noble animal. I am an anti-Communist leading only a
rebellion against the injustices of Rome.”
