Express to Nowhere

On a February day in 1937, Benito Mussolini sent a pickax crashing into the pavement of the Piazza Bocca della Verit`a to break ground for Rome's first subway. A world war and his own inglorious death interrupted the work Mussolini began. When these greater events were not threatening its progress, Italy's archaeologists poked into the subway excavation and held up the work, to make sure that the tunnelers were not destroying any buried relics of antiquity. But somehow, despite all handicaps, Rome's subway got built. Last week, after 18 years and $20 million, it was opened to the public.

The Pope's Vicar-General was on hand to give the new Metropolitana his official blessing. Rome's Mayor Rebecchini devoted his most flowery rhetoric to the completion "of this long and arduous undertaking." Even Italy's President Luigi Einaudi turned up to enjoy the first ride. Ensconced on a seat in one of the three streamlined cars that made up the first train, Einaudi was soon joined by a rush of some 1,000 specially invited guests who crammed themselves into the train in the best Times Square rush-hour tradition, while attendants in bright red garrison caps watched in helpless bewilderment. At least one distinguished rider had his coat buttons pulled off in the crush, but a fine time was had by all. and at the end of the ride one exuberant straphanger showed his pleasure by doing an impromptu acrobatic act on the bars provided for standees.

Nobody was unkind enough to stress the fact that Rome's long-dreamed-of subway was a mere seven miles long (only 3^ miles of it underground) and apparently designed to carry its passengers from nowhere to nowhere. Built well away from the heart of the city where the real traffic congestion lies, its ten stations (with such impressive names as Colosseum and Circus Maximus) trail out in a dreary anticlimax through Rome's environs to the great cluster of derelict, half-completed marble buildings which Mussolini once hoped would become the site of a permanent World's Fair. City planners are hopeful that the city may grow out that way. Besides, come summer, they hope business will be better: along the subway's lonely route is the railroad station where trains leave for Ostia, Rome's seaside Coney Island.

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