ANZIO

On the way down to Anzio we had wanted to put in for an hour or two at Fregene, the fashionable beach just north of Rome that Fellini has celebrated in La Dolce Vita. But it has no harbor and there was a swell running and the amount of scandal we might have picked up there on a Sunday morning would not have been worth the discomfort of pitching and rolling anchored off an unprotected beach. So we steamed on down to find Anzio in the grip of a festa, with thousands of people crowding the waterfront to cheer swimming races and a contest in which young men tried to keep their balance on a greased spar long enough to grab a handkerchief tied to the end of the pole before falling off into the oily water. Other thousands of people were eating fish soup and fried octopus in the many restaurants built on piles above the harbor or eating cotton candy and raw mussels from huge wet piles on stands set up in the street. Later there was a concert by a popular singer in the large square in front of the church of Santi Pio e Antonio and dancing to the music of a loud band and fireworks at night. All kinds of small boats darted in and out, children were everywhere, and there were no signs either on the buildings or on the Sunday faces of the crowd that this was the place where not too long ago armies had fought for their lives.

The American military cemetery is some miles inland at Nettuno, and I decided to take my son there, feeling that at the age of eleven it was time for him to pay his respects to the dead in whose debt he lives. The cemetery is a sober but beautiful park now, and when we went there late in the afternoon the only other people to be seen were three young Italians, two boys and a girl, eating sandwiches in the shadow of the monument to the young men who were buried there.

We left Anzio the next morning and saw what looked like a limitless fleet of jellyfish, parachute-shaped and delicately fringed in purple, moving in thick formations, and in what looked like deadly purposefulness, toward the land. Luckily, they had come one day late. The festa was over, and there were many Romans normally at work that day who would have been having an uncomfortable time of it if that stinging armada had moved in on the crowded beaches the afternoon before.