390
PARTISAN REVIEW
At election times the walls are all painted with slogans and rival
posters climb higher and higher on the gate. For the great election
of 1948 many of the best of them, as well as the leaflets that floated
down through the trees from planes and other stunts that may have
swung the tide, were the work of an American publicity man hired
late in the game by the Demo-Christians and who called himself
the King of Contacts. It is touching; nobody had ever heard of
him
before, hardly anyone knew his real name then; like a mysterious
knight of old, or Castor and Pollux at the Battle of Lake Regillus, he
won that great victory practically single-handed, then quietly dis–
appeared, and perhaps now in countries far away mothers are sooth–
ing their children as they listen to the leaflets flitting against their
window-panes in the storm: "8sh my darling, sleep; the King is
watching over us...." Here at that time a priest or two was
slightly mauled in the piazza, and as before any election there was
huffinesa and occasional fur flying at the cafe. Then the day after the
vote, although the wall-writing never stops, the posters are scraped
off here and everywhere, so that for a few hours the whole city is
knee-deep in wet paper, which shortly ends up like all other good
things in the ancestral sewer, and life goes back to its
pazienza
and its
regular rhythms and its regular gas, electricity and public transporta–
tion strikes whose purpose nobody attempts to divine.
The real common denominator of the section, and in a sense
of the whole city because it is high over all of it like a shrine and the
eye rises to it from almost everywhere, is just out of sight of the piazza,
but the sense of it enfolds all the life there; everything would be more
brittle without it.
This is not the Dome. It is the Fontana Paola, built to show off
the new water brought in when Pope Paul V fixed up the old
acqueduct down the road-the same water that provides that very
different appeal in front of 8t. Peter's and also supplies most of
Trastevere. The fountain
is
often criticized as architecture; its curves
are thought to be heavy and its proportions bad; its griffins and
eagles are perhaps rather spikey for its sensuous lines, too much
like gargoyles. But in the particular case this is caviling. It is not
exactly that the building suggests a church, any more than a centaur
suggests a horse; it is one; its typical baroque church fac;ade, from
