THE MALTA SUMMIT : Italy to Greet Gorbachev in Grand Style

Blending the lessons of ancient history and modern terrorism, Rome will salute Mikhail S. Gorbachev today with a Caesar’s welcome and high-tech security.

Roman traffic, sludge at the best of times, will snarl to a halt this morning to clear passage for a procession of vehicles carrying the Soviet president, his wife, Raisa, and their party past cheering pedestrians and an army of 5,000 Soviet and Italian security agents, including sharpshooters atop imperial ruins and Renaissance palaces.

The visit involves substance as well as pomp. On the eve of Gorbachev’s arrival, the Italian auto maker Fiat and the Soviet government agreed Tuesday to invest $1.3 billion to put hundreds of thousands of Soviet families on wheels.

And the red carpet is out at the Vatican, where Gorbachev will confer privately with Pope John Paul II on Friday before heading for Malta and a weekend summit conference with President Bush.

John Paul will stretch protocol to make Gorbachev especially welcome. Vatican officials said the historic first encounter between a Soviet ruler and a Roman pontiff could lead to permanent links between the Kremlin and the Vatican.

“To us, he’s a symbol of change for a better Europe, for a better world,” Soviet spokesman Gennady I. Gerasimov told some of the 1,500 reporters who are here to cover the visit. That is also the official and grass-roots view of Gorbachev in a Western Alliance country that was one of the first to support perestroika , Gorbachev’s reform program.

The auto accord, which Fiat calls the biggest joint venture between a Western company and the Soviet Union, is one of a score of Italo-Soviet agreements to be signed as part of Gorbachev’s first visit to Italy as president.

Under it, the Soviets will own 70% and Fiat 30% of a factory in Elabuga, about 600 miles southeast of Moscow, that will make 300,000 subcompact sedans a year. Part of the production will be exported to the West.

The car, provisionally called the A-93, is of joint Italian-Soviet design, Fiat managing director Cesare Romiti told reporters. He hailed the agreement as “an important contribution to the development of economic and industrial cooperation between the Soviet Union and Italy.” The first cars should be available at the end of 1993, he said.

At present, the Soviet Union manufactures 1.3 million cars a year, and 3 million bicycles, Soviet officials said. Current production satisfies less than half the demand, Soviet Auto Minister Nikolai Pugin told reporters, and even a planned increase to 2.3 million units a year in 1995 will satisfy only about 60% of the market.

Fiat, which began selling cars in Russia in 1913, established a plant in the Soviet city of Togliattigrad, named after the first leader of Italy’s Communist Party, in 1970. Soviet-modified Fiats as well as tractors and agricultural machinery have been manufactured there ever since.

The Soviets passed over joint venture proposals from American and Japanese auto makers in choosing Fiat, Pugin said, and he quoted a Russian proverb: “An old friend is better than two new friends.”

The agreement, the final details of which are still to be ironed out, contains a no-nationalization clause and a promise that Fiat’s profits may be repatriated.

“This is an act of faith in a new market that will develop with new rules,” Romiti said.

At the Vatican on Tuesday, papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro said that the Pope’s meeting with Gorbachev could lead to renewed links between two historic foes.

“The Holy See is asking for the possibility of a type of permanent, stable relationship,” Navarro said, noting that formal ties between Russia and the Vatican were broken with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

Soviet spokesman Gerasimov, underlining the new Kremlin approach toward religion, said, “Christian values are human values, and they are the same as socialist values.”

Navarro made it clear that the Pope will go out of his way to make Gorbachev welcome in the Vatican. Normally, the Pope receives visitors at the entrance to his personal library. For Gorbachev, he will go to a salon nearer the entrance hall and then personally escort the Soviet leader to the library.

The Pope will repeat the journey at the end of a private meeting expected to last at least an hour. Then he and Gorbachev will deliver short prepared addresses.

At the Vatican, and virtually everywhere else he goes in the course of his visit, which opens today with meetings with President Francesco Cossiga and Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, Gorbachev will be shadowed by TV cameras transmitting live.