A-p-o-l-l-o-n. Seven women formed the first rank of the marchers. Each held a large blue card with a gold letter written on it. Together the cards spelled out a word which, if not puzzling to most Italians (a small- scale survey convinced me that it is), would certainly halt most foreigners in their tracks. Each of the women was middle-aged and respectable in appearance. A car with a loudspeaker on the top kept playing a song over and over to arouse the marchers’ spirits for the long walk. Fifty thousand pairs of feet shuffled away from the Colosseum on the morning of December 5, their destination the Piazza San Giovanni in Laterano. The Italian government was in one of its periodic crises and the Left marched in a carefully measured show of strength.
In the preceding week, worker-police clashes throughout the country had erupted into bloodshed—including two fatalities. Tensions ran high in the capital as the day of the general strike arrived.
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