The Problem of the South: The Redevelopment of the "Mezzogiorno"
by UMBERTO ZANOTTI BIANCO
1
THE DEPTH and intensity of the problem of the Italian South must be seen to be believed. Roughly a third of the country, the lower end of the peninsula, which is usually called the “Mezzogiorno,”has suffered for centuries a condition of severe economic depression and social distress.
I well remember my visit to the South after the earthquake of 1908. It took me nine hours of walking over primitive mule paths to reach the chosen typical village, lost in the barren hills behind the Ionian coast of Calabria. It was set on a hilltop, surrounded by lonely fields devoid of any tree or house. The earthquake had left only fifteen out of more than a hundred hovels standing. The concrete and steel allocated for the construction of new houses could not be brought for lack of roads, so the inhabitants had set up housekeeping among the ruins. The school-less teachers held class in their windowless bedrooms, leaving the door open for light and air. The nearest physician was six hours away by mule path; the functions of pharmacist and midwife were filled by an old woman with shaking hands. Because there was no bridge, the peasants, to reach their fields, had to crawl on a long narrow board over a deep ravine. Nine had already fallen to their death. With a cadastral register untouched since the time of the Bourbons, many a wretched goatherd was unjustly fined when he took his animals to pasture. The visibly illnourished children lived on a bread made of lentils, chick-peas, and barley.
Since the Risorgimento, when Italy was unified in the 1860’s, and especially in recent years, great efforts have been made to raise the Mezzogiorno from its backwardness. Yet any traveler even today sees whole regions of such hamlets wasting away in inhuman degradation. Is it surprising that such conditions often led to riot and rebellion, such as the violent, and futile, uprisings which spread throughout Sicily in 1894?
The problem is not new. Though vast woods, mentioned by Greek and Latin writers, once made the climate more temperate and the rainfall more normal, and regulated the rivers, even during the Roman Empire latifundia — the large landed estates worked by slaves or tenants who were little better than serfs — were spreading, slave revolts were frequent, and malaria raged everywhere. The region’s inhabitants were the constant prey of conquerors, from the Byzantines on; unending wars of succession, pillage, and massacre denied them any continuum of civilized development. Understandably, they developed the defects of servility, duplicity, boastfulness, and a mixture of pugnacity and cowardice, till a sixteenth-century proverb said, “The Kingdom of Naples is a paradise inhabited by devils.”
Until the unification of Italy there was but little change. The post-Risorgimento encounter of North and South was a collision of two worlds so different that Cavour Stated that achieving harmony between them presented as many difficulties as the war with Austria and the struggle against Rome. What the South was then like was well described in a report sent to Cavour by Costantino Nigra, the Governor of Naples: “... under the Bourbons [the Spanish princes who ruled most of the South from Naples from 1734 to 1860] every branch of public administration became infected with the most revolting corruption. Criminal law is simply an arm of the Prince’s vengeance; civil law is less tainted, but it too is obstructed by arbitrary government. There is no liberty whatever, either for individuals or communities. Honest citizens are thrown into prison along with notorious criminals. The exiles cannot be counted. As for public servants, there are ten times the number required. High officials are granted huge salaries, whereas common employees get a pittance, with the result that widespread corruption and stealing are accepted as a matter of course. Newborn babies are put on government rolls, thereby receiving credit for service from earliest infancy. There is no elementary education at all; secondary schooling is meager; university training is even less adequate, while the education of girls is slighted still more. The poorer classes wallow in ignorance. Means of communication are few. Streets are not safe; nor is property; nor are lives.
“The provinces are neglected. There is little commerce and less industry . . . As a consequence, hunger and poverty are piled on ignorance . . . Richly-endowed charitable institutions are impoverished by huge armies of clerks . . . Brigandage is rampant in the provinces, while larceny thrives everywhere. The freedom and good name of citizens is in the hands of a brutal and arrogant police. Public works are authorized, paid for, and not executed . . . With few exceptions, and especially in the parishes of Naples, the clergy is numerous, ignorant, utterly bereft of dignity and a sense of its office. The populace is superstitious. All classes of society, including the higher ranks, engage in some form of begging. There are neither books nor newspapers . . .”
2
THE progressive and driving government of the new Italy, in Piedmont, encouraged by its successes in the North, was under the illusion it could induce the South to recognize the need of administrative reforms, of taxes to pay the debts of the war of liberation and for railways and other public works, of discipline for military organization. But as soon as conscription was announced, the wretched Southern masses took to the hills. As Nigra had written, “They thought that liberty was synonymous with a profusion of jobs and bread.” Brigandage was brought under relative control in 1865, only after repeated dispatch of disciplined troops and enactment of the Pica law threatening death for anyone found in possession of arms.
It took a generation for the North to begin to understand the South humanly and economically. For this change of opinion much credit must be given to a series of impassioned young investigators. First of their “revelations” were the articles sent in 1861 to the Milan newspaper, La Perseveranza, by Pasquale Villari, a Naples historian. Then, in 1875, a young man from Leghorn named Leopoldo Franchetti published his Economic and Administrative Conditions in the Neapolitan Provinces, the fruit of a hazardous trip through the former Kingdom of Naples the previous year.
Franchetti described as disastrous the lack of roads in the South and the control of local administration by the propertied class. As contrasted with the prosperous Tuscan tenant-farming system, the primitive condition of Southern farm laborers and the anti-social spirit of the landowners roused his indignant criticism. Things were so bad that he approved of emigration as a positive factor.
The following year, aided by his friend Sidney Sonnino, Franchetti made an even more detailed study of Sicily. The two men showed exceptional courage in exposing the links among the Mafia, brigands, and fences, and the connection between professional criminals and the well-to-do classes. Their report won recognition as a classic of its kind, and influenced Parliament , as did the weekly magazine, Rassegna Settimanale, which they founded. Among the most forceful writers for this publication was Giustino Fortunato, an ardent reformer.
The convincing picture of the South published by Fortunato revealed life there as “a savagely bitter struggle between man and nature which has left painful and indelible scars on both . . .”He put his finger on the key trouble: “a common factor — the total lack of capital —has leveled all classes: property owners and proletariat; bourgeoisie and peasantry; the educated and the illiterate. Even among the less poor, parsimony is the rule.”
Consequently, the first reforms Fortunato proposed were the establishment of a fair system of taxation, carefully controlled credit, and free trade, as the means of facilitating the circulation of capital, oxygen of depressed areas. He was, naturally, opposed to the protective wheat tax, which encouraged an already excessive monoculture. And to obtain Parliamentary representation for a disfranchised peasantry, he called for universal suffrage. To war against the age-old affliction of malaria, Fortunato, with Franchetti, proposed a law for State sale of quinine. And to combat the intellectual and moral poverty of the Southern bourgeoisie, he supported every project for establishing schools.
“The economic inferiority of Southern Italy,” Fortunato pointed out, “is due to climate rather than soil. There, sun and water, the chief requisites for an abundant vegetation, never go together. When the sun shines, it scorches; when rain falls, it destroys. What is needed is the re-establishment of pastures, woods and forests, along with the planting of vines, olive and almond trees, which thrive in the brilliant light of the South, rather than the excessive cultivation of cereals which, by its impoverishment of the soil, has been one of the greatest obstacles to the rebirth of the region.”
Modern agronomists agree that the Mezzogiorno’s agricultural economy is still out of balance, too heavily concentrated in cereals and pasturage. True, along the coast where trade has developed — with railroads and elimination of malaria — we find olives, almonds, vines, citrus and other fruits, but less than a fifth of the district is irrigated; and for lack of an up-to-date marketing system, brief hursts of prosperity alternate with long periods of depression. Only about 5 per cent of the farms are adequately capitalized or of an efficient medium size. As the outstanding Italian agronomist RossiDoria states: “. . . the contracts, the property relations, and the social structure of Southern agriculture run counter to the most elementary requirements of civilization, production, and technology.”
This wretched and penniless Southern half of Italy has been more than a tragedy in itself; providing no market for the industrial products of the North, it has also been a drag on the more progressive half of the country. But, over the years, public opinion has been slowly won over to Mazzini’s dictum, “Italy will be what the South will be.” However, the current revival would have been impossible without the earlier post-Risorgimento efforts, long-term and cumulative.
The “iron treatment.” prescribed by Cavour had by 1911 built the great railway network from Rome to Reggio Calabria, Taranto, Otranto, and Foggia, with its numerous branches. The truly Romanscale Apulian aqueduct , including branches, nearly 1800 miles long, crosses nine provinces and brings water to over three hundred towns and villages. Requiring 99 tunnels totaling 65 miles, 43 canal bridges and 141 reservoirs, it was finally completed after thirty years of work in 1937. The man-created Silani Lakes, together with the Arvo and Ampollino reservoirs, collect 128 million cubic meters of water and produce 210,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity. In Sicily, the Alto Belice dam, completed in 1923, provides electricity for Palermo and irrigates the now fertile Conea d’Oro. Naples has advanced in industrialization with the Bagnoli steel plant, the Ilva blast furnaces, the Cotoniere Meridionali textile factories, and various chemical, electrical, mechanical, and other plants.
A privately sponsored organization, the National Association for the Interests of the South — first formed to help the victims of the 1908 earthquake in Calabria and Messina — aided the whole region with kindergartens, libraries, dispensaries, clinics, professional schools, medical and adult education centers. Fascism closed it down.
Since the War, the Government has concentrated on the key problem of land reform, expropriating some large estates and redistributing them in small holdings to peasant families. Other small parcels have been turned over to workers in industry and trade to create vegetable gardens and fruit groves. In Campania, Apulia, Lucania, Molise, Calabria, Sardinia, and Sicily, some 73,049 plots totaling 984,585 acres have been so distributed.
But redistribution alone is not enough, as was shown after the partition of Church lands in the last century. Then peasants had to sell to large landowners property they could not work profitably for lack of capital and equipment. The Government therefore has implemented a three-point program:
Land transformation, by construction of houses and roads, provision of drinking and irrigating water, reforestation, and mechanization;
Creation of agricultural industries, wine and olive oil processing plants, tobacco factories, cheese dairies; encouragement of co-operatives;
Human rehabilitation by primary and vocational education, and social, health, and religious welfare programs.
The Southern Development Fund (Cassa del Mezzogiorno) set up by the State in 1950, engages in land reclamation, land reform, construction of aqueducts and sewers: highway improvement and railway building; promotion of tourism by loans to hotels, financing of excavations, reorganization of museums, and restoration of monuments. Recently it allocated funds for establishing agricultural and business schools, elementary schools, and kindergartens. In its first five years the Fund invested 410.3 billion lire in the South.
Despite these gargantuan labors and the growth of Southern industry, the production gap between North and South widened from 414 billion to 765 billion lire between 1951 and 1955, Apart from the lendency of Southerners, including banks, to invest in the more profitable North than at home, this disparity can be explained by other factors — low living standards in the rural areas, widespread illiteracy, lack of skilled workers, insufficiency of auxiliary enterprises to keep industries flourishing. Therefore private capital is still unwilling to undertake the large-scale investments advocated by the Economic Commission of the United Nations for the development of the area.
The Government’s efforts have been variously criticized from Right and Left for their heavy drain on the treasury, the low proportion of farmsteads allotted to very large families, the heavy installments families must pay to buy the land, the paternalism of the reform agencies, and so on. Only after some years will it be possible to make an objective assessment.
The State must be aware, as one expert has written, “that agricultural progress in the South is to be expected not so much from money investments in land . . . as from increased output, from the higher quality and evaluation of the produce, and from
modern production and marketing techniques . . .”
Each generation of Italians has contributed to the long, slow task of bringing Southern Italy up to date; and, even if some economic indices seem to show the contrary, they are gradually succeeding.
Translated by Miriam Chiaromonte