Enthusiasm High for Gorbachev’s Visit to Italy : Diplomacy: He will sign 15 bilateral agreements. Rome officials also seek expanded trade and investment.

One of Italy’s favorite politicians, Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, ventures into this blase Roman Catholic bastion of honest-to-God capitalism this week with results as foreseeable as the traffic tangles they will engender: popular adulation, political embrace and economic blandishment in support of perestroika.

The Romans, who have seen it all, Caesar to Charlemagne, are as wild about “Gorby” as the rest of a country that has made clunky Red Army wristwatches a symbol of both fashion and feeling. Even back when the United States was still warily watching nascent glasnost , an Italian poll showed that among Italians, Gorbachev was more popular than then-President Ronald Reagan.

Italy was one of the earliest West European champions of Gorbachev’s reforms, and his Wednesday-Friday visit here en route to a weekend summit at sea with President Bush will be a Roman circus of three rings.

History may best remember his coming Friday encounter at the Vatican with Pope John Paul II, but as important for Italy is Gorbachev’s impact on Europe. More, the Soviet leader casts a giant shadow on the soul-searching within the largest Communist Party in the West.

The Italian government will receive Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, in the conviction that accelerating change in the Soviet Union and East Europe demands an immediate, positive and comprehensive Western response.

“Italy decided early on to take Gorbachev at his word--and to test him. This view is now accepted within NATO and echoed by the upcoming summit,” said Marco Carnovale, a security specialist at the Institute for International Affairs in Rome.

In the tumult of change in East Europe, there is no longer much debate among Italy and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization and European Community allies over the “let’s help” attitude.

“There’s no more discussion in the West between cautious people and risk-takers,” Italian Foreign Minister Gianni De Michelis said in an interview. “Change is not only so rapid but, in my view, so irreversible, that now the only thing is to define the strategy to cope with it.

“The problem is how to manage it from an economic and political view.”

In a reaching-out policy begun in 1987 when the current Christian Democratic Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti was serving as foreign minister, Italy has argued that the surest means of making change in the East a lasting reality is to support it vigorously. “The best way to influence the process is to open ourselves to it,” De Michelis said.

In a round of meetings with Italian government officials, Gorbachev will sign 15 bilateral accords ranging from cultural exchanges to the conversion of arms industries, Italian spokesmen say. Italian government and private corporations are not only seeking to expand trade with the Soviet Union and East Europe but also to markedly increase their own investments there.

New joint agreements are pending that would produce more Italian-Soviet cars, tires, traffic signals, computer software, power stations, gas turbines and pipelines and shoes in the Soviet Union. One agro-industrial project will transform 400,000 acres in the Soviet Union into a modern truck farm and canning center.

Of about 680 joint ventures under way in the Soviet Union, almost 10% are with Italian firms. For a time, Italy proposed that West Europe sponsor a 1990s Marshall Plan to help the East catch up, but that idea has been overtaken by events.

“Until yesterday, the problem was one of economic help to smooth the political process,” said De Michelis, “but now the political process is faster than the economic one. So the problem of the economic sector is not aid but cooperation; the creation of involvements--not only of a one-way transfer of resources.”

However challenging, the Italian goal of peacefully tying West and East seems more achievable than untying the knots in the West’s largest Communist Party.

Gorbachev will encounter Italian Communists at a noisy crossroads. The irony is that Italian communism got to perestroika , or restructuring, long before Gorbachev, but now finds itself a step too short. The party is riven by debate over how much more to liberalize.

For 40 years, Communists have formed Italy’s second-largest political party--and the eternal opposition--in a country where governments are fashioned by coalitions that never include Communists except at the local level.

Italian Communists began drifting away from the Soviet party in the 1960s and broke entirely with it in 1980 over the invasion of Afghanistan. By now, the Italian party is virtually social democratic; its Marxists are a small, hard-core, change-resisting minority whose roots lie in their struggle against wartime fascism.

Although modernization enabled the Communists to avoid the disintegration of their counterparts in France and Spain, the party struggles today with the same identity crisis as the rest of world communism.

Implicitly acknowledging that there is no chance they will ever share national power as Communists, the party’s leaders are trying to weld a new union of the Italian left. Along the way, they plan to overcome furious internal opposition and change the party’s name, dropping the word Communist and such symbols as the hammer and sickle.

“In many ways, the Italian Communists anticipated Gorbachev, but now realize they can’t become just progressive capitalists. To survive, they must stress ideas that are significantly left and credibly alternative,” said Gianfranco Pasquino, a professor of political science who sits in the Italian Senate as an independent leftist.

Gorbachev knows the Italian Communist Party, by reputation, and at firsthand. In 1984, he was a middling member of a Soviet delegation that came for the funeral of Italian party leader Enrico Berlinguer.

Middling no more, Gorbachev must walk on eggs in his meetings with Italian Communists this week. In projecting themselves as an honest party with strong managerial capacities and a commitment to both protecting civil rights and enforcing civic duties, the Communists need a strong statement from Gorbachev acknowledging their positive, peaceful role, Pasquino says.

“Gorbachev can prove either an asset or a liability to Italian Communists,” Pasquino said. “On the one hand he is ‘the Liquidator,’ a visible sign that communism can’t work. On the other, he’s an attractive, progressive leader who’s not changing the name of his Communist Party.”