Italians as Builders and Pioneers

by His Excellency GIOVANNI GRONCHI

President of the Republic of Italy

*

FOREIGN visitors to Italy have often expressed 1-^ their astonishment at the almost miraculous JL tempo of postwar recovery and reconstruction. These people seem to be unaware of the spiritual foundation of this “miracle.” The Italian is a builder, a pioneer — not unlike, in spirit, to the American — and his faith and endurance have enabled him again and again to rise from the ruins am| start afresh, at home as well as abroad.

During recent months I have had the opportunity to reread a writer whose work is somewhat remote from modern taste although he still touches us Italians in our innermost feelings: Edmondo De Amicis. In certain of his pages De Amicis allows us to relive the tragedy of the great Italian emigration which took place seventy or eighty years ago. His description is charged with a pathos to which we cannot remain indifferent, even today. He recalls for us the crowded, wretched ships bearing in their holds masses of unemployed toward an unknown country which could, and often did, cruelly delude their hopes. A suffering humanity it was — yet driven on by an unbending will to work— that came to the still legendary and adventurous new shores in search of the daily bread which their motherland was unable to provide. Some, in those years, were doomed to failure, for reality knows neither comprehension nor pity; it operates an inexorable selection between the fit and the unfit and frustrates, no less inexorably, the efforts and sacrifices of those whose capacities are inferior to the tasks imposed.

The mother country was, at that time, unprepared to grasp or cope with this situation, and too often she left her sons to drift without plan and without an adequate organization behind them. They came face to face with the terrible hardships which beset the path of immigrants in a faraway country, armed only with their skills and their hope—the hope, as the saying went during those years, of making a fortune in the Americas, in countries which needed heroism and the adventurous spirit of the pioneers.

But those who succeeded were many. They made their way through immense difficulties and they built their future. The spirit of enterprise, the will to work, the constructive capacity of these Italians have often amazed and always aroused the deepest admiration of the native populations of the countries to which they emigrated. I need not remind my American readers of the success achieved by Italian immigrants in commerce and banking, in politics and in the arts and sciences; nor of the fact that the Italian has been an important ingredient in the “melting pot” of American life. And it is easy to imagine my pride and emotion when the President of the Brazilian Republic recently recognized in public that his great country owes the better part of its progress to the work of the Italians.

This same pioneer spirit has been operating here at home in Italy in the years following the disaster of the War. As Minister of Industry in the first Italian governments immediately after the armistice, I had a most direct and personal experience of the force of this spirit, which is still fresh in my memory. Almost at once I understood that our country was headed for a rapid resurrection. For I saw with my own eyes, workingmen digging in the rubble of bombed-out factories and bringing back to light what was left of machines and tools. I saw how they reconditioned them, put them together with loving care; how they managed to reconstruct even complicated and delicate instruments such as precision lathes, or planing and milling machines, with a truly admirable patience and persistence, and with a skill no one would have expected to find as a native ability in even the unskilled worker. All this happened in a spirit of fraternal collaboration with the technicians, who put aside any prerogative of hierarchy, and with the proprietary class, who forgot about profits and personal gains, ready to face the risks of the future. All of them were convinced of the common duty to put all they had in the service of rebuilding the country. This was, in the end, a wise calculation, as it was bound to be and always has been, whenever individuals or nations have been willing to set aside their personal or their group egotisms. Self-isolation, or the belief that one can build one’s own fortune without the collaboration of others and, especially, against the interest of others, has always been doomed to failure.

Political discord and class struggle thus were silenced in Italy for a while; and since it was a matter of creating the bases on which to rebuild after an immense disaster, all were ready, of one mind and one heart, to go to work together — workingmen and owners, technicians and managers, rich and poor.

This is how the miracle of Italian recovery has come about. These two examples I have given of the Italian pioneer spirit should make the “miracle” plausible and logical: the natural result of a common effort . None of us ever doubted its realization; no one in Italy hesitated to believe that in a relatively short time we were to become again a country that might command the sincere respect of the world.

This faith was, and still is, based on the conviction—which should not be mistaken for a form of pretentious nationalistic pride — that the will to work, the capacity to work, and the moral force to resist even severe adversities, are innate qualities of the Italian people. They are aspects of its spirit and its temper; and the perception of the necessity of good fellowship and voluntary collaboration in the hour of trial and hardship works in them as a common instinct of self-preservation and progress.

This collection presents other aspects, other “perspectives” of the Italian as builder and pioneer, above all in the fields of the arts and letters. It is my hope that the reader will gain from it a deeper insight into our ancient and yet so modern culture, and that this insight may further enhance the friendship that ties our people to the great American nation. Translated by E.M.B.