Southern Italy

FOR the past dozen years, billions of lire and some of Italy’s best brainpower have been lavished on the rocky lands and people of the Mezzogiorno. Centuries of poverty and exploitation have given Southern Italy a crushing inheritance of ignorance, suspicion, and apathy, but there now exists a proved blueprint showing how to tackle the worldwide problem of the have-nots.

While the Italian North, centered in Milan and Turin, booms with unprecedented prosperity, the South remains Italy’s poor relation. Its borders can be delineated by drawing a line across the peninsula near Rome, slanting to the north as it goes east. All the lands to the south of that line the Italians call “Il Mezzogiorno” (“the Midday”), although no one seems to know exactly why. This is the country of Reggio, Catanzoro, Taranto, Potenza, Foggia, Ortara, Cassino — the heartbreak country well remembered by World War II veterans. It includes, statistically, the two large islands of Sicily and Sardinia with their combined populations of six million.

Forty percent of Italy’s fifty million still live in the South. It still provides 65 percent of the nation’s births and most of its emigrants. The government claims that the total income of the South has jumped 67.7 percent over the past decade. But a fully employed waiter, a shop assistant, or a barman still makes only $50 a month. Boys of twelve and under working full time get 1000 lire a month—about $1.40; in some bars and restaurants they work for tips alone. New state apartments outside Taranto rent for $10 a month; spaghetti costs around eleven cents a pound.

Assault on poverty

Psychologically, the sense of guilt that bothers the rich Northerners and the vote-conscious politicians in Rome probably paved the way for the assault on the South’s poverty that began in 1950. Earlier scatter-gun efforts had been made to uplift the South. One of the most useful acts of Mussolini’s career was to begin draining the Abruzzi marshes to drive out the malaria mosquito. One of his worst was his national baby derby, which gave the South just that many more mouths than it could feed. One woman had twenty-one children for Il Duce.

It was not until the factories of Northern Italy, like those in West Germany, France, and the Netherlands, retooled with American help and moved into top gear after the war that the Italian treasury finally began to accumulate enough money to give substance to the dreams for the rebirth of the South. Membership in the European Coal and Steel Community from 1950 on was a boon, and the Common Market a blessing. Over a ten-year period Italian exports rose 119.7 percent — autos and scooters, fertilizers, chemicals, plastics, synthetic rubber, precision instruments, steel tubes, Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren. Industrial production rose 75.3 percent, and agriculture 32.2 percent. Italy’s gold and foreign currency reserves, at last official count, stood at $3,313,000,000, topped internationally only by those of West Germany and the United States.

The money was going into the bank, and the spur of pride, or guilt, forced Italy to tackle the problem of the South at long last. The first act was perhaps the most significant of all. The Italians faced up to the facts: the South was isolated, the people were backward, and no amount of handouts would ever reverse the situation. They laid down as a basic principle that the economic and social progress of the South must be promoted not only in the interests of the South but to the benefit of the whole country.

The Bank for the South

As with all political dreams, the plans had to be shaped within political realities. Certain powerful landowning interests had to be catered to; sops had to be thrown to ward off the Reds; a Vatican anxious to keep its firm grip on the unsophisticated peasantry had to be mollified. The core of the scheme that finally, and almost miraculously, survived the ward heeling and string-pulling was La Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, “the Bank for the South,” set up as a publicly owned corporation in August, 1950.

Its full name, ten words in all, is seldom seen, but in translation reads: “Fund for Extraordinary Projects of Public Interest in Southern Italy.” The words were most carefully chosen by men well aware of the jealousies and pitfalls of Italian politics.

Dozens of agencies and government departments were already, on the face of it, busy tinkering with the Southern problem. The Cassa could deem “extraordinary” just about anything not being done well enough. It could construe the words “of public interest” in the broadest sense — beyond the confines of, say, normal or traditional public works.

Inevitably, political party watchdogs were posted to make sure the Cassa did not zoom off the runway. The entire development plan for the South — at least, the political responsibility for it — is in the hands of a special Committee of Ministers for the South. But in fact the concrete plans are drafted and executed by the Cassa, under its directorgeneral, Dr. Francesco Coscia.

The Cassa’s flexible plans

One of the Cassa’s secret weapons is its flexibility. Pigeonholes in Rome are full of plans, some of them powerfully backed, to solve the Southern problem. The Cassa does not fight them; it joins them and, while often publicly protesting the contrary, takes them over. Where the letter of the law is restrictive, the Cassa men push gently but relentlessly. For instance, when the Ministry of Education balked at sending teachers to new schools opened in land-reform areas, Cassa money was quietly used to pay teachers’ salaries, and the ministry had no choice but to come across.

Credit and finance are, of course, the Cassa’s main realms. As its lawful life was extended from the original ten to the present fifteen years, and its basic funds from the original 1000 billion lire to the present 2107 billion lire, plus another 212 billion earmarked for special projects, the Cassa’s efforts were channeled into aqueducts and sewers, land reclamation and land-use transformation, roads and civil buildings, new industry, tourism, fisheries, vocational training, handicrafts, and social welfare.

Even Italy’s rising national revenues could not stand the total strain, and the Cassa was empowered to raise loans abroad (total, $365 million), mainly to help finance industrial projects. For although the South was, and is still, overwhelmingly agricultural (cereals, vegetables, citrus fruits, olives, wine and table grapes), the Cassa planners know that only big industry can possibly hope to absorb the surplus manpower leaning on the pillars of every market-town piazza.

Criticism mounted in the early years as Cassa funds were swallowed by infrastructure investments that could not of themselves return a single lira — farm-to-market roads, catchment dams, power poles, rail spurs. Mussolini had made the trains run on time, but they ran through villages that had never seen a telephone. The Cassa stuck to its guns: it was not shooting for spectacular success; it was determined to try to build a self-sustaining economic mechanism.

The Communists yelled that the reforms were just a capitalist blind and alleged that the Cassa was a cacio, a cheese to be sliced up by the aristocrazia. When an Italian newspaperman, with no love for the ruling Christian Democrats, was asked if much graft had been siphoned off, he answered tartly, “About what you’d expect in an American state. No more.”

This man has become uneasy about what he calls “doctrinaire socialism” among the Cassa’s crusaders. Even the passing observer can glimpse a certain ruthlessness behind the reformers. If a new smallholder on expropriated land wants to grow grapes, as his family has done since the days of Augustus, and the planners suggest he grow artichokes, he grows artichokes.

Industry looks southward

Around the halfway stage of the master plan, industry began to move south — not nearly enough of it, but some. The Cassa claims that for every 100 lire it has provided to encourage industry, 1000 lire have been provided by private investment. Apart from major state-owned projects, like the steel plant at Taranto, which has contracted its output to Russia, and the Italian private giants, like Montecatini (chemicals) and Pozzi (sanitation equipment), foreign firms have established the new plants: Remington Rand in Naples, the Reed Paper group in Cassino, Radio Corporation of America with a $25 million investment.

There are other American firms which have established plants in the Mezzogiorno - Gulf and Esso, Union Carbide, Raytheon, Sunbeam, Willy’s. Rheem International, Thomas Electronic, Pfizer, Abbott Laboratories. Employment in industry in the South has risen by 7 percent.

But the South will be living off the land for at least a generation yet. Over the last decade, the percentage of the Southern labor force employed, however irregularly, in agriculture has dropped only 8 percent, from 51 to 43 percent. (The overall Common Market average is 27 percent; in the United States it is 12 percent.)

Plans to rationalize and improve agriculture are absorbing half of all Cassa funds. Where is the money going? It is expected that 1,360,000 new acres will be irrigated by 1965. The target of 5000 miles of access roads is near realization. Almost 100,000 new four-room farmhouses have been built with Cassa subsidies. Only 138 communities out of 2638 covered by the Cassa’s operations had adequate water and sewage systems in 1950; now 1115 communities with a total of five million inhabitants have been serviced. In the most backward areas, where illiteracy, near or total, was as high as 75 percent, the Cassa has helped build 3300 primary schools and kindergartens, eighty agricultural vocational schools, ninety-five industrial vocational training schools.

With many of the benefits of longterm capital investment still promised, the Cassa already claims healthy crop increases in the South. In the last complete report, wheat was up 18 percent, corn up 50, tomatoes up 52, peaches up 58, vines up 22, and olives up an astonishing 75 percent. Since 1950, funds granted as farm-improvement loans in the South have multiplied no fewer than fourteen times.

Land reform

Most controversial of all the projects for Southern redevelopment has been the “agrarian reform,” a polite term for land expropriation and resettlement. The Bank for the South has contributed 208 million lire to this plan. Altogether, two million acres of some of the world’s worst farmland were expropriated from large estates, with fair compensation, and eventually distributed in small parcels, averaging fourteen and a half acres, to a total of 109,000 peasant families.

The Italian constitution blandly states that children must attend school until they are fourteen, and the government last year agreed to provide free schoolbooks for children up to that age level. It is a sad sort of joke in most of the Mezzogiorno. Government critics claim that at least three times as many schools are required throughout the South to provide places for even the present six-to-eleven age group. Teachers are very scarce; even wealthy Milan found it was fifty teachers short recently.

When working-class schoolboys reach the accepted, if not official, leaving age of twelve, many of them go on to the labor market as cheap replacements for unskilled adult workers. Cynical employers snap them up and turn their backs on the unemployed men, who stooge along to the Communist street meetings. Teen-age girls from the Southern villages run away to the North by the thousands. They are seeking husbands with good jobs in the auto or petrochemical plants, but some of them end up in the new “expense-account” brothels or as free lances on the neon-bright streets of Milan.

These blunt truths and opinions need emphasis to keep the presentday facts of life in Southern Italy clearly in focus against the dazzlingpromise of the future. But that future is no longer a shoulder-shrugging millennium away.