"The Prince's" Prince

In a private nursing home at Rome last week meningitis brought Death to a prince unique in the quarrelsome and stingy house of Caetani which traces its descent with certainty for eleven centuries and boasts among its collateral ancestors two Popes, Gelasius II (1118-19) and Boniface VIII (1294-1303).

In Italy today Benito Mussolini is "The Prince" (i. e. the State) as imagined by Niccolo Machiavelli. Different was Prince Don Gelasio Caetani who died last week. He closely fitted the ideal of Erasmus: "The Prince exists for the sake of the State."

Youngest but one of five brothers, Don Gelasio fled the incredibly gloomy and sordid palace of the stingy Caetani in Rome to graduate from Columbia University's School of Mines in 1903 as "Mr. Gelasio Caetani." He then became a "wop" digging gold in Idaho for John Hays Hammond. "Knowledge of my origin," said Prince Caetani afterward, "would have spoiled my camaraderie with my fellow miners."

From Idaho he went to Mexico, then emerged in San Francisco to found the successful engineering firm of Caetani, Burch & Hershey. It was making Prince Caetani rich when the War broke, but as soon as Italy joined the Allies he rushed home to serve his State. When he reached the front on the Dolomite Alps, 10,000 Italians had lost their lives trying to capture "The Eye of the Austrian Army," an outpost on the 9,000-foot cone-shaped mountain Col di Lana. This extended so far into the Italian line that Austrian observers could spy out every Italian thrust before it could get well started.

As a mining engineer, Lieut. Caetani calmly proposed to blow off the entire mountain top. "Let's get under their seats," he said, "and blast." With 80 picked miners Prince Caetani drove a tunnel nearly half a mile long into the living rock, so quietly that the Austrians noticed nothing. Five tons of nitroglycerin were tamped into the galleries. On the night of April 17, 1916 the Engineer Prince was ready.

The air was calm. A full moon flooded the snow-capped Austrian spy peak. Thirty minutes before midnight Prince Caetani pulled the detonators. From where he stood the noise was slight. Skyward hurtled the white top of the mountain and what came down was black. With the greatest of ease Italian troops then occupied the smoking crater in which they found not even dead Austrians.

After the War Prince Caetani was elected Mayor of Rome, refused to take office as a protest against civic corruption. Elected a Deputy, he was one of the first authentic Italian princes to rally to "The Prince," Benito Mussolini, months before the March on Rome.

Il Duce, once established, sent Prince Caetani to Washington as Ambassador. In two years he exhausted every means of trying to make U. S. citizens see his own vision of Fascism as a regime giving Italy an imposed, Augustan and salutary peace.

Meanwhile Prince Caetani's brothers were betraying their heritage, selling off the lands of their father, the late Duke Onorato, which comprised by far the largest estate in Italy, a virtual principality within the realm. Only bachelor Prince Gelasio, with no child to whom he could leave his share of the Caetani lands, kept all he could and was among the first Italian proprietors to cooperate with Il Duce in Fascism's vast project of land reclamation. As an engineer, the Prince, trained in the U. S. for such work, was gripped and fascinated by the political concept of Benito Mussolini: an Italy so developed by land reclamation that for the first time in modern history she could feed herself.

In the reclamation work Prince Caetani was prevented by ill health from making more than an inspiring start. Other Fascists have carried on and "The Battle of the Grain" has been won. No longer active, though the King had made him a Senator for life, Prince Gelasio set himself to write the I Documenti dell' Achivio Caetani, a history of his house for the last 1,100 years. Said he just before his death: "It seems I shall not live to finish it, but at least I have brought the history of our house down to the 16th Century."

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