But you still don't know why it didn't work :)
You were reading only the first line of the file, so the line with print statement wasn't executed. Here is the proposed change:

local $/;
eval <FILE>;
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Ciao, Valerio

Or:

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";

eval can take either a block of code to trap runtime errors or a string to parse and sometimes execute at runtime. You're attempting to do the latter, but rather than pass a string as an argument you're passing a filehandle (<update>without the line delimiter implicitly undefined as in valdez's example</update>).

ehdonhon and sauoq's approaches are better if all you've got is Perl in those files, but this'll work too:

my $code;
open FILE, "/home/samn/cgi-bin/$page.rs" or die 'Monkeys!';
while (<FILE>) {
  $code .= $_;
}
eval $code;
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You might want to look at using CGI::Application and AutoLoader.

You can then tell CGI::Applicaton the set the functions that you want the cgi to call based on 'run_modes'. And when you enter that 'run_mode' perl auto load the function and call it.

I have not tried this, but in theory it should work, I think.

How about:

  require "/home/samn/cgi-bin/$page.rs";
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That probably will not work because, IIRC, require will only execute the code the first time :)