From our Diplomatic Correspondent
Italian papers that have reached this country since the fall of Fascism make unusually interesting reading.
The format and size have not changed, and the only visible alteration is in the dropping of the Fascist date. (Dictators and revolutionaries with any historic sense will surely give up this trick, for it only serves to mark the permanence of the Christian era and the impermanence of any other.)`.
The first marked difference was in omitting the news and commentary on the war, this being confined to official bulletins with the German on the back page instead of the front. The effects of the fall of Faleism and the regaining of liberty were themes filling up many columns, Questions of wartime organisation, after receding into the background fog a day or two, returned to prominence. as indeed matters of rationing, .transport and local administration increased in importance.
Propaganda themes against Britain and the United States were eased up at first, but they returned and some capital was made out of the effects of bombing, with quotations of Catholic condemnation.
NEED FOR ORDER But an important preoccupation was with the need to maintain order, calm and discipline internally, all this with the \expression of a strong note of loyalty to the King as the unifying factor. A personal factor was to be found in the assumption of editorship by new men returned to public life after years of obscurity. Thus the Giornale d'Italia of July 28 carried a personal statement by 72-years-old Bergamini, who was its editor from 1901 to 1924. He wrote:
" I resume the direction of the Giornale d'Italia, which I founded in 1901 under the high auspices of Sidney Sonnino. In ieturning to my, old post, which I have never forgotten but always held in affection, I am actuated by one single motive, one single ideal which is as a passion and a burning flame: love of Italy and liberty."
Tullio Giordano, a Liberal journalist and former editor of the Gazetta del Popolo, aged 66, declared, on resuming editorship of this Turin paper, that his aim was to protect the interests of " the