Page:Gaetano Salvemini and Bruno Roselli - Italy under Fascism (1927).djvu/18

 a pocket knife and cuts out a large piece of the red velvet of your first-class car or the brown velvet of the second-class car, or places both feet down, covered with mud though they be, on the compartment plush, or goes somewhere else in the car and breaks a looking glass, or steals a few of such removable objects as are still kept somewhere in Italian trains. All of that formerly happened daily.

Once more, it was the thorough disorganization of the service, more than the railroad schedules, which was typical; a disorganization which has now given place not only to precision and punctuality, and also by such insistence upon the rights of the railroad that if you should by any chance place one foot on that same velvet of the first or second-class, you will soon find a Fascista railroad agent fining you twenty lire, if it is first-class velvet, or ten lire, if it is second-class velvet which you have in some way offended.

And gold—how to secure that was the heavier problem for Italy, who owes much of it to her war partners. Italy has no gold, and she has none of those raw materials mainly found in colonies by which other countries can repay, even without supplying gold, their interallied or international obligations.

Italy had, however, two very great assets before the war—emigrants' remittances and the so-called "industry of the foreigner," that is, the hotel and tourists' transportation industry, the selling of the beauty of the Peninsula to those who wanted to come and visit her. But, sad to relate, no sooner had the war ended when barriers of immigration (which I do not wish here to discuss) were placed in the way of the Italian people, so that everybody said to us, "We love you very dearly, but we can only take three thousand instead of three hundred thousand of you," or "We love you very dearly, but you must have one thousand dollars before you can land in our country." In other words the beginning of the Fascist régime found Italy owing much gold, yet confronted by the closing of an avenue of escape for Italians and of a possibility of their repaying indirectly with their remittances the unfavorable balance of Italy toward the other powers.

So Mussolini said: If our emigrants decrease, let their tourists increase! Let Italy sell her beauty to more and more, travelers. She has made travelers so welcome, so happy within her boundaries, she has attracted them with such good steamers, trains, and even airships, that they are flocking to that country, so that there is hardly any hotel room to be had anywhere. They are often coming from lands where they are too often reminded that the dollar is worth more than the depreciated European currencies. They are coming from all sorts of places where there is one or another handicap, strikes, war-time racial strife, and what not, and as they are flocking there, they are bringing their very valued assets into Italy, thus making it possible to offset this very serious handicap of lack of local gold.