After a quarrel with Jean Colbert, Tony Maggiore in _Caesar’s Angel_ berates her friend Al Piazza: “You talk so big about it making no difference between American and Italian girls. You ever hear a good Italian girl open her mouth about politics? You hear her insulting the men?” This assertion is contradicted by Stella in Silone’s _A Handful of Blackberries_, but even were it completely true, it would be one of the minor differences between American and Italian political behavior patterns. Immensely different historical antecedents separate the two peoples. The Italian, with a background of autocratic rule except for comparatively short intervals, has played his political role on a far different stage from that of the American. But there is more to it than just politics. The economic bases which help to form political groups have produced in Italy a stratification in which the layers are more widely separated than any in America. The migrant fruit pickers, the dust-blown Okies, the exploited miners in America seem well off beside the systematically persecuted peasants and submerged city _lumpenproletariat_ of Italy. The Italians at the other end of the scale are just as far from the norm. Gould, Fisk, and Vanderbilt may have owned railroads, but Prince Torlonia owns immense ranges of the Roman and Tuscan countryside, together with 35,000 acres of the Fucino basin worked by eleven thousand farmers. But this great gulf between classes is only one of the factors which appear responsible for Italy’s political ills. Silone concentrates mainly upon the peasantry in his novels. His heart is close to them, and his description is sympathetic. But he does more than set forth their sufferings. His books also diagnose the cause of their problems and suggest solutions. Many of his peasants appear like credulous, superstitious children. The four-day thunder and lightning storm which nearly sweeps Pietrasecca off its mountain in _Bread and Wine_ is blamed upon two lovers who have gone to live in a house considered damned. Don Paolo watches the gathering of a crowd which is swept into such a hysteria by its roar of “CHAY DOO! CHAY DOO! CHAY DOO!” that it forgets to listen to the oracular radio voice it has come to hear. Silone pities them: “a people whose wisdom was summed up in a few proverbs passed down from generation to generation, had been literally submerged and overwhelmed by propaganda.” Don Paolo also blames this ignorance upon the Church in Italy. Like his teacher Don Benedetto, who was said to have called the reigning pontiff “Pope Pontius XI,” Don Paolo feels that Italy needs A Christianity denuded of all mythology, of all theology, of all Church control; a Christianity that neither abdicates in the face of Mammon, nor proposes concordats with Pontius Pilate, nor offers easy careers to the ambitious, but rather leads to prison....