ITALY IN the mid-1950s was still, in many respects, an under-developed country. Its industrial sector could boast of some advanced elements in the production of steel, cars, electrical energy and artificial fibres, but these were limited both geographically, being confined mainly to the north-west, and in their weight in the national economy as a whole. Most Italians still earned their living, if they earned it at all, in the traditional sectors of the economy: in small, technologically backward, labour-intensive firms, in the public administration, in a great proliferation of small shops and trades, in agriculture. Standards of living remained very low. In 1951 the elementary combination of electricity, drinking water and an inside lavatory could be found in only 7.4 per cent of Italian households.1
Agriculture was still by far the largest single sector of employment. In the census of 1951 the category ‘agriculture, hunting and fishing’ accounted for 42.2 per cent of the working population, and this figure rose to 56.9 per cent for the South. Apart from the dynamic and prosperous farms on the plains of the Po, Italian agriculture presented a picture of substantial backwardness, with growth rates inferior to those of Yugoslavia and Greece. The 1950s saw a marked increase in the fragmentation of property. In the central areas of the peninsula the time-honoured sharecropping system began to decline rapidly. Young peasants were increasingly reluctant to follow in their parents’ footsteps; the landowners found their profit margins and authority diminishing; the buoyancy of the land market encouraged them to sell, most often directly to the sharecropping families themselves. In the South, as we have seen, a similar process of land sales was in operation, and peasants throughout the peninsula benefited from the law of February 1948 which had established the system of rural mortgages repayable over forty years. The effect of these land sales and the agrarian reform was to increase the amount of smallholding property by nearly 10 per cent in the period 1947–55.2
This increase in ownership did not lead to a golden age of peasant farming. Rather, the selection process which we have examined in detail for the Calabrian reform area (see pp. 133–5) applied broadly to small farms in the rest of the peninsula. For a minority of new properties, situated in fertile areas and aided by the reform boards and the public works of the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, the way was open for crop specialization and production for the market; for the majority in the hill and mountain regions there were no such prospects. In these regions, in both the Centre and the South, the peasant holdings were too small, poor and dispersed, and state aid too limited, to make anything more than subsistence farming possible. Thus land ownership, the perennial dream of the Italian peasantry, had become more widespread, but the terms and extent of ownership offered a means to survive rather than to prosper.3
For many millions of the rural population there was not even the consolation of a small plot of land. In 1953 the parliamentary inquest on unemployment estimated that 48 per cent of the rural workforce of the South was drastically underemployed, and the figures for the Centre (43.8 per cent) and the Veneto (41.3 per cent) were little better. In the 1950s, as in previous decades, this vast reserve army of labour could find only very partial satisfaction for its work hunger.
One outlet was emigration. This took a number of different forms, the most dramatic of which was emigration overseas, to the Americas and Australia. Between 1946 and 1957 the numbers of those leaving Italy for the New World exceeded by 1,100,000 the numbers of those returning: 380,000 had remained in Argentina, 166,500 in Canada, 166,000 in the USA, 138,000 in Australia and 128,000 in Venezuela. They were for the most part artisans and peasant proprietors rather than landless labourers, nearly 70 per cent were from the South, and by 1957 many of them had settled permanently abroad. In the Calabrian villages, South America in particular was dubbed 'e d'u scuordo, ‘the land of forgetting’.4
Another pattern of emigration, of a rather different sort, was that to north Europe. Between 1946 and 1957 the numbers heading north exceeded by 840,000 the numbers of those who came back: France took the lion's share (381,000), followed by Switzerland (202,000) and Belgium (159,000).5 The emigrants to these countries tended to go for shorter periods, on six-month or one-year contracts, and regarded work abroad as a temporary rather than a permanent solution to their problems.
Within Italy itself, the Industrial Triangle exercised only a limited pull in these years, mainly upon the rural populations of Lombardy, Piedmont and the Veneto. All the major cities and towns of the peninsula attracted a certain influx of rural labourers seeking work primarily in the building trades. There was also a small but significant flow of migrants, mainly rural labourers, from the deep South to other rural areas of Italy – to Tuscany, the Bolognese countryside and the Ligurian coast.
All these movements of population, as well as the increase in peasant land ownership and the work of the reform boards and the Cassa, ensured that the world of rural Italy was not immobile in the 1950s. And yet continuities still far outweighed changes. When in the mid-fifties the American sociologist Edward Banfield went to the village of Chiaramonte in Basilicata, he persuaded one of the peasants, Carlo Prato, to keep a diary for 1955. Prato, who was forty-three and married with two children, managed to find 180 days' work that year. In December and January he was employed on an olive-oil press in a nearby town, sleeping in barracks, working from two in the morning until nine at night and earning three meals, a little cash and half a litre of oil a day. After that he was unemployed until he found a job on a road gang some three hours’ walk from his home. In the summer he found decent wages with the major landowners of his village, but in the autumn months he had no work at all and just pottered around his tiny plot of land. The Pratos lived in a one-room house which they owned. In the summer it was alive with flies. There was no drinking water, no electricity, no lavatory. Although the winter at Chiaramonte was cold and wet, Prato's jacket was the only warm outer garment possessed by the family. Prato's wife suffered from permanent ill-health.6
The years 1958–63 saw the beginning of a social revolution which was to turn the world of Carlo Prato upside down. In less than two decades Italy ceased to be a peasant country and became one of the major industrial nations of the West. The very landscape of the country as well as its inhabitants' places of abode and ways of life changed profoundly. It is to the origins of this transformation and its first extraordinary years that this chapter is dedicated.
The period 1950–1970 was a golden age for international trade. In that time trade in manufactured goods increased sixfold; the degree of economic integration of the major industrial countries reached new heights; and mass production for mass markets, both internal and external, produced an unprecedented level of prosperity. Fordism (the automated mass production of consumer goods) and consumerism became the twin gods of the age.
How was it that Italy, far from playing a minor role in this great era of expansion, became one of its protagonists? The reasons are many, and there is no general consensus amongst economists as to the order in which they should be placed. Certainly, the end of Italy's traditional protectionism must be considered of prime importance. Whereas Franco's Spain, with an economic structure somewhat similar to Italy's in 1945, remained isolated for many years from the main currents of European trade, Italy, as we have seen, was in the forefront of European economic integration. Many Italian businessmen viewed with unjustified foreboding this sudden exposure to the winds of European competition. In fact, Italy's industry had reached a sufficient level of technological development, and had a sufficiently diversified range of products, to be able to respond positively to the creation of the Common Market. The advanced sectors were of modest proportions, but everywhere in them there were entrepreneurs, engineers, designers and skilled craftsmen ready to meet the challenge.7
Even before the ‘miracle’, some areas were expanding dramatically. In 1953 Vittorio Valletta decided to invest heavily in a gigantic production line for FIAT's latest model. Two years later the age of mass motoring in Italy was heralded by a multicoloured procession through the streets of Turin of brand new FIAT 600s. In the same period fierce competition between ENI, Edison and Montecatini resulted in great advances in Italy's petrochemical industry and in the production of synthetic rubber and fertilizers. And, as we have seen, Marshall Aid, with its influx of American machinery and know-how, had also opened up new horizons for many Italian firms.8
The end of protectionism, then, far from signifying catastrophe, revitalized Italy's productive system, forced it to modernize and rewarded those sectors which were already on the move. Italy's capacity to compete was also greatly aided by new sources of energy and the transformation of its steel industry. ENI's discovery of methane gas and hydrocarbons in the Val Padana, and Mattei's importation of cheap liquid fuels (see pp. 1634), afforded an alternative to imported coal and enabled Italian entrepreneurs to cut their costs. So too did Oscar Sinigaglia's insistence on a modern steel industry under the aegis of IRI. His plan for steel involved considerable state investment in modern steel works at Cornigliano, Piombino and Bagnoli. Here steel was produced from raw materials through the use of blast furnaces. Under Sinigaglia's guidance, Finsider went from strength to strength, and in the 1950s was able to provide much cheap steel for Italian firms.9
ENI and IRI thus played a notable role in the origins of the ‘miracle’. And while the Italian state cannot be said in any meaningful sense to have planned the great boom, it certainly contributed to it in many ways. Infrastructural works, such as the construction of autostrade, served as vital ‘external economies’ for the private sector. Monetary stability, the non-taxation of business interests, the maintenance of favourable lending rates by the Bank of Italy, all these served to create the correct conditions for the accumulation of capital and its subsequent investment in industry.10
Last, but far from least, it is quite clear that the ‘miracle’ could not have taken place without the low cost of labour then prevalent in Italy. The high levels of Italian unemployment in the 1950s ensured that demand for work far exceeded supply, with predictable consequences in terms of wage rates. The unions' post-war power had been effectively broken, and the way was now open to increase productivity and exploitation. The external free-trade credo of the EEC found its internal counterpart in the freedom of the employer at the place of work. Between 1953 and 1960, while industrial production rose from a base of 100 to 189, and workers' productivity from 100 to 162, real wages in industry fell very slightly from 100 to 99.4.11 With labour costs as low as these, Italian firms were highly competitive on international markets.
In the period 1951–8, growth in the Italian economy, although considerable, would seem to have been mainly due to internal demand. The rate of increase in the Gross Domestic Product averaged 5.5 per cent per year, but the major investments of the period were less in export industries than in housing, public works and agriculture. International trade had not yet become the motor for the Italian economy.12
This picture changes quite dramatically for the years 1958–63. In the first place, growth rates reached a level never previously attained in the history of the unified state, an average annual increase in G D P of 6.3 per cent. Furthermore, investments in machines and industrial plant grew by an average of 14 per cent per annum, as opposed to 6 per cent per annum in the previous seven years. Industrial production more than doubled in the period 1958–63, with the engineering industry and petrochemicals leading the way. Above all, exports became the driving sector behind expansion, with an average increase of 14.5 per cent per annum. The effect of the Common Market was clear for all to see: the percentage of Italian goods destined for the EEC countries rose from 23 per cent in 1955 to 29.8 per cent in 1960 and 40.2 per cent in 1965.13
The pattern of what Italy produced and exported changed significantly. Textiles and food products gave way to those consumer goods which were much in demand in the advanced industrial countries, and which reflected per capita incomes far higher than Italy's own: Italian fridges, washing-machines, televisions, cars, precision tools, typewriters and plastic goods were all marketed in extraordinary numbers.
Symptomatic of the ‘miracle’ was the extraordinary growth of Italy's domestic electric-appliances industry. In the post-war period nearly all the firms that were later to become well-known names in Europe were little more than artisan concerns: in 1947 Candy produced one washing-machine per day, Ignis had a few dozen workers and even Zanussi had only 250 employees on its books. In 1951 Italy was producing just 18,500 fridges. By 1957 this number had already grown to 370,000; by 1967 it had reached 3,200,000, by which time Italy was the third largest producer of fridges in the world, after the United States and Japan. By the same date Italy had also become the largest producer in Europe of washing-machines and dishwashers; Candy was now producing one washing-machine every fifteen seconds.14
Behind this transformation lay a number of factors: the entrepreneurial skills of the owners of the new Italian firms, their ability to finance themselves in the early 1950s, their willingness to adapt new techniques and to renovate their plant continuously, their exploitation of the low cost of labour and its high productivity, the absence until the late sixties of any significant trade union organization. Often the new factories were located outside the major cities and in the ‘white’ regions of the country. Pordenone, in Friuli, became the company town of Zanussi, and its inhabitants identified the transformation of their own fortunes with those of the firm.15
The domestic electric-appliances industry was the most dramatic example of the boom in Italian industry and its export potential, but it was far from being the only one. Car production, dominated by FIAT, was in many ways the propulsive sector of the economy. It has been estimated that by 1963–4 some 20 per cent of the total volume of investments in Italy derived from the production choices made by FIAT – not only in the smaller firms which supplied parts, but in the areas of rubber production, the construction of roads, the supply of steel, petrol, electrical goods and so on.16
Another major area of expansion was typewriters. With Olivetti in the forefront, and its ‘model’ factory at Ivrea one of the great success stories of the fifties, the number of typewriters produced rose from 151,000 in 1957 to 652,000 in 1961. The production of plastic materials also increased fifteenfold in the period 1951–61, while the volume of their exports multiplied by no less than fifty-five.17
The geographical location of Italy's industrial production expanded beyond the narrow confines of the Industrial Triangle. If Lombardy and Piedmont still remained the epicentres, industrial Italy now spread southwards towards Bologna and eastwards along the whole of the Val Padana, to reach the Adriatic at Porto Marghera and Ravenna. By 1961, the year of the national census, the number of those employed in industry had already reached 38 per cent of the working population, while those in the tertiary, or service, sector had also increased to 32 per cent. The agricultural sector had declined to 30 per cent of the working population.18 The balance had shifted decisively, and the way was open for Italy to join the restricted group of advanced industrial nations.
One of the most striking features of the ‘miracle’ was its autonomous character. Vanoni's scheme of 1954 had laid plans for controlled economic development which would have taken social and geographical factors into consideration. Instead the boom assumed a trajectory all of its own, responding directly to the free play of market forces, and producing as a result a number of grave structural imbalances.
The first of these was what has been called the distortion of consumption patterns. Export-led growth meant an emphasis on private consumer goods, often of a luxury nature, without any corresponding development in public consumption. Schools, hospitals, public transport, low-cost housing, all items of prime necessity, lagged far behind the startling advance in the production of private consumer goods.19 The political responsibility for this state of affairs will be examined in some detail in the next chapter. Suffice it to say here that the pattern which the boom assumed (or was allowed to assume) emphasized individual and familial roads to prosperity while ignoring collective and public responses to everyday needs. As such, the economic ‘miracle’ served once again to emphasize the importance of the individual family unit within Italian civil society.
The boom years of 1958–63 also accentuated the dualism within the Italian economy. On the one hand there was the dynamic sector, consisting of both large and small firms, with high productivity and advanced technology. On the other, there remained the traditional sectors of the economy, labour intensive and with low productivity, which absorbed manpower but acted as an enormous tail to the Italian economic comet.20
Finally, and most dramatically, the ‘miracle’ heightened the already grave disequilibrium between North and South. With very few exceptions, all the sectors of the economy in rapid expansion were situated in the north-west and in some parts of the Centre and north-east of the country. It was there that the capital, resources and professional expertise of the nation had traditionally been concentrated, and it was there that the export firms, both large and small, flourished in unprecedented numbers. The ‘miracle’ was quintessentially a northern phenomenon, and the most active parts of the southern population did not take long to realize it.
Antonio Antonuzzo, born in 1938, was the second of five sons in a peasant family from the village of Bronte in eastern Sicily. The Antonuzzo family was not so poor as some of the villagers. They owned a number of farm animals and cultivated a small piece of land as sharecroppers. When Antonio was still very young, his father, ‘struck by the wandering spirit of the Sicilians’,21 left for Argentina to make his fortune. He worked there as a stable boy and as a shoe-polisher before returning to Bronte two years later, poorer than when he had left.
Then, in 1950, when Antonio was twelve years old, the whole family migrated to Montino, near Massa Marittima in Tuscany. Three landowners from Bronte had bought an estate there, and promised that the land was rich and that they would sell it off in small farms to the peasants who came with them from Sicily. This fact, the possibility of owning land, was the determining one for Antonio's father. His mother, however, resisted bitterly the idea of leaving Bronte: ‘My father then hit my mother twice; that which he had never done in so many years of marriage he did on that occasion. He hit her in the name of Fortune.’22
On 28 September 1950 the Antonuzzo family and that of Antonio's uncle, twenty-one people in all, left for Tuscany. At Grosseto station Antonio remembers that ‘people stopped to stare… not with sympathy or with indifference but with contempt at our caravan of gypsies’.23 The move to Montino was an unmitigated disaster. The land was poor and the five hectares that Antonio's family managed to buy was mainly woodland. The family became practically destitute and scraped a living as charcoal-burners. As soon as he was old enough, Antonio went to work in the mines at Massa. In the same period the family, having experienced the hostility of the local Tuscan peasants, who were all Communists, decided to join the Christian Democrat Party.
In April 1962, after he had done his military service, Antonio Antonuzzo decided to leave the Tuscan countryside and head for the northern cities. He went first to Legnano where his cousins were, and then, a few weeks later, to Milan. Another cousin, Vincenzo, was living in a room at no. 70 Corso Garibaldi, and offered to let Antonio stay there: ‘it was very small, with only one window. The glass had been smashed and there was cardboard in its place. The one electric light was so dim that most of the room was always in darkness.’24 There was a single bed that the two cousins shared. In Milan for the first time, Antonio felt absolutely desolate: ‘it was as if I was in a forest where there was not a single living being’.25 Using a letter of recommendation from the Christian Democrats at Massa, Antonio soon found work at the Coca-Cola factory in Piazza Precotto. After twelve days he gave in his notice. Immediately afterwards, and again with the help of the DC, he found a better-paid job, at the Alfa-Romeo car factory.
At the end of 1962, after he had saved a little money, Antonio moved his family from Montino to Milan, to a two-room flat he had found in Piazza Lega Lombarda:
On 29–30 December of that year, we went to meet my parents at Melegnano, at the exit of the Autostrada del Sole. When I and my brother Giuseppe arrived, we saw a lorry with a Grosseto number plate. He went over to it and inside the driving cabin there were my mother, my father, and my brother Giovannino. They'd travelled all night, four of them huddled up together inside the cabin of the lorry. There was a lot of snow and it was extremely cold. They were frozen because they hadn't enough clothes on. On the back of our lorry there were all our belongings: six chairs, two double beds, and a very old wardrobe.26
Antonio stayed at Alfa-Romeo for the next five years, becoming one of the leading militants at the factory. After that, he left to become a full-time trade unionist in the CISL.
The ‘economic miracle’ meant much more in the history of Italy than a booming economy and rising standards of living. It meant an unparalleled movement of the peninsula's population. Hundreds of thousands of Italians, like the Antonuzzo family, left their places of birth, left their villages where their families had lived for generations, left the unchanging world of rural Italy, and began new lives in the booming cities and towns of the industrial nation.
No proper statistics exist to help us document the waves of migration that took place in these years. The records of residence changes are one of the least unreliable indicators, but even here there are grave problems. A Fascist law of 1939, designed specifically to prevent internal migrations and urbanization, trapped the would-be migrant in a Catch 22 situation: in order to change residence to a town of more than 25,000 inhabitants, the migrant had to show evidence of employment at the new place of abode; however, in order to gain such employment the migrant had first to produce a new residence certificate. This absurd law was only repealed in 1961. By then it was being even more widely ignored than most Italian laws, but it had none the less cost hundreds of thousands of migrants quite unnecessary heartache, had weakened their position vis-à-vis their new employers and landlords, and had placed them in a quite unwarranted position of illegality. It had also, rather more incidentally, falsified all statistics on migration, because many of the pre-1961 migrants only legalized their position after the repeal of the law.27
Bearing this preamble in mind, it can safely be said that in the two decades between 1951 and 1971 the location of Italy's population underwent a revolution. Massive migration took place between 1955 and 1963; migration then halted briefly in the mid-1960s, but resumed strongly in the period 1967–71. In all, between 1955 and 1971, some 9,140,000 Italians were involved in inter-regional migration.28
The patterns of migration are extremely complex, and no comprehensive study of them has yet been written. Their predominant feature is a massive rural exodus in all parts of the peninsula. The figures for immigration to Milan in the decade 1953–63 show for instance that some 70 per cent of the new arrivals were from rural communes. In the north-west the percentage of the working population employed in agriculture fell from 25 per cent in 1951 to 13 per cent in 1964. In the north-east the figures are the most dramatic for the whole country: the percentage of rural workers fell from 47.8 to 26.1 per cent in these same years, 1951–64.29 The number of women employed in northern agriculture plummeted; figures for Lombardy show a drop from 109,000 in 1959 to 36,000 in 1968.30 The cities of the Industrial Triangle obviously exercised the greatest pull upon these migrants, but the provincial cities of the North should not be forgotten. These were boom years for Mestre, Padua, Verona, Bergamo, Brescia, Varese, Ivrea and so on.
The central regions of the country witnessed a rural exodus almost as great as that of the north-east, with their agricultural sector declining from 44.3 per cent of the working population in 1951 to 23.3 per cent in 1964. The number of sharecroppers began to fall very rapidly, from 2,241,000 in 1951 to 1,114,000 in 1964. By 1971 less than 500,000 sharecroppers remained.31 The rural migrants of central Italy tended not to move very far, and to swell the populations of the cities of their own regions rather than those of the North.
The same cannot be said of the southern migrants. The agricultural population of the Mezzogiorno declined slightly less than those of the Centre and the north-east (from 56.7 per cent of the working population in 1951 to 37.1 per cent in 1964), but southern migration was by far the most dramatic because it involved a massive exodus from the Mezzogiorno itself. The migrants were mainly from the poorest agricultural regions, the hill and mountain villages of the South, and the number of small proprietors who left actually outnumbered the labourers.32
For many of the migrants the provincial or regional capitals of the South were a first port of call; for a smaller number, the first move, as with the Antonuzzo family, was to another rural area in the Centre or North. However, the magnet of the North was too strong to be resisted for long. The hopes and plans of the southern migrants were concentrated in two directions: towards the industrial heartlands of northern Europe, especially West Germany, and to the expanding cities of northern Italy.
Between 1958 and 1963, net emigration of Italians to northern Europe totalled 545,000 persons; of these 73.5 per cent came from the South. Germany rapidly overtook Switzerland as the favoured destination for Italian emigrants. By 1963 these two countries alone accounted for 86 per cent of Italian emigration to north Europe.33
However, the greatest flow of all was towards the northern region of Italy. In the five years of the miracle (1958–63), more than 900,000 southerners changed their places of residence from the South to the other regions of Italy. In 1958 the communes of the Industrial Triangle registered 69,000 new residents from the South. In 1962, after the repeal of the anti-urbanization law of 1939, this number leaped to 203,800 and in 1963 remained at the very high level of 183,000. Similar figures for 1958 show 60,100 new migrants from the South in the central and north-eastern regions, increasing to 104,700 in 1963. Puglia, Sicily and Campania were the southern regions which, in absolute terms, suffered the greatest haemor-rhages of population.34
The major cities of Italy were transformed by this sudden influx. The population of Rome, swollen by immigrants from Lazio, Puglia, Sardinia, Campania and the Abruzzi, increased from 1,961,754 in 1951 to 2,188,160 in 1961 and 2,614,156 in 1967. Milan, where 70 per cent of the immigrants were from Lombardy and the Veneto and 30 per cent from the South in the years 1958–63, increased its population from 1,274,245 in 1951 to 1,681,045 in 1967. At the same time the towns of its hinterland grew very rapidly. By 1968 Monza had a population of 105,000, Cinisello Balsamo 70,000, Rho 40,000. Perhaps most striking of all was the case of Turin, which was smaller than Milan and Rome, and which had a very high percentage of southern immigrants, predominantly from the three provinces of Foggia, Bari and Reggio Calabria. The city itself increased its population from 719,300 in 1951 to 1,124, 714 in 1967. Between 1961 and 1967 alone the twenty-three communes of its immediate hinterland grew by over 80 per cent. So great and persistent was the flow from the South that by the end of the sixties Turin had become the third largest ‘southern’ city in Italy, after Naples and Palermo.35
Many of the structural reasons which drove the rural populations from the land have already been highlighted in this and previous chapters: the poor quality of the soil in much of the South, the persistence of chronic underemployment and poverty, the widespread ownership of uneconomic smallholdings, the very limited nature of the agrarian reform of 1950. To these must be added a number of factors which relate specifically to the late 1950s. In 1958–9 the holding policy of the agrarian reform boards with regard to the hill and mountain peasantry underwent, as we have seen (p. 135), a profound change. Credit facilities were severely restricted and the peasant owners found that their plots were no longer viable. In addition, the gradual liberalization of grain markets from 1955 onwards meant a marked fall in grain prices; small owners, with their extensive debts and limited flexibility, were the worst affected.36
The late 1950s also saw a worsening in the conditions of rural labourers. In December 1958, the Constitutional Court declared the imponibile di mano d'opera (see pp. 61 and 114) illegal, and thus removed one of the most important props to rural employment. For example, in the winter of 1956–7 alone, the imponibile had ensured more than 186,000 labourers regularly paid work for more than two and a half months each. Increased mechanization and new technology further worsened the prospects of employment for rural labour. The number of tractors increased from 61,000 in 1949 to 250,000 ten years later, and this was the period in which the labour of the mondine, the women workers in the northern rice fields, was replaced by the use of weed-killers.37
These ‘push’ factors coincided with ‘pull’ ones of a compelling nature. First, and most obvious, higher incomes were a near certainty for those who left the land for the cities. At the end of the 1950s both the marginal small proprietor and the rural labourer could expect at least to double their incomes by transferring to the tertiary or the industrial sector.
Wages were all-important. Domenico Norcia, for instance, was working in 1960 in a small village in the Irpinia on a building site funded by the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno. He was earning 500 lire a day; having insulted the foreman he got the sack and promptly left for Germany: ‘At that time, 500 lire was not much, but if I had found work for 1,000 lire a day in my village, I would never have gone to Germany, I would never have left.’38
However, money was not the only pull. The prospect of regular wages and regular hours of work was deeply attractive to peasants who had always laboured like Trojans at harvest time, but who had little to keep them occupied or in pocket in the winter months. For the young, who were to constitute the majority of the first migrants, the lure of the city was irresistible. In the evenings, in the piazzas of the southern villages, their talk was of nothing else. The television of the local bar transmitted images from the North, images of a consumer world, of Vespas, portable radios, football heroes, new fashions, nylon stockings, mass-produced dresses, houses full of electrical appliances, Sunday excursions in the family FIAT.39
The young men, usually single, were the first to go. They were the most dissatisfied, the most ruthless, the most determined elements in the villages. Kinship networks were used to the full to give them some sort of base once they arrived in the North. Antonio Antonuzzo, as we have seen, went to his cousins, first to Legnano and then in Milan. Help was also enlisted from children's compari, their godfathers, who sometimes belonged to a higher social class, as well as from in-laws and neighbours.
The southern migrants left on the treno del sole, the famous overcrowded train full of suitcases and parcels. It started both from Palermo and Siracusa, linked up at Messina, and travelled slowly northwards through Calabria, Basilicata, Campania, Lazio, Tuscany and Liguria. For the Pugliesi there was the direttissimo from Lecce, for the Sardinians the ferry from Porto Torres and the train from Genoa. The treno del sole arrived at Turin station every morning at 9.50 a.m., and at the peak periods of migration it was followed by another ten minutes later.40
For the immigrants from the rural South the first impressions of the northern cities were bewildering and often frightening. What struck them most were the wide streets full of traffic, the neon lights and advertisement boards, the way the northerners dressed. For those who arrived in the winter, the icy fog which enveloped Turin and Milan was the worst of all; these were cities which seemed not just of another country, but of another planet.41
On arrival, those who could went straight to relatives, friends and acquaintances. Those who could not, and there were many in the first years, found a bed in the small hotels (locande) near the stations, four or five to a room, sometimes as many as ten or fifteen. The locanda usually had a restaurant as well, where the new arrivals could eat, badly, for 250–350 lire. For those who could not afford the locande there were only the waiting-rooms of the stations and the empty compartments of the trains. A ticket of fifty lire for a nearby station was usually enough to ensure being left alone for the night by the station guards.42
Amongst these first southern immigrants there was a clear distinction between the minority who came from the towns and cities, and the majority from the rural communes. The cittadini had more contacts, found jobs immediately, could speak some Italian and were generally less disoriented by city life. They looked down with some contempt at their country cousins, who according to them went around ‘with radios round their necks, holes in their shoes and speaking only in dialect’.43
In the years of the ‘economic miracle’ the balance in the northern labour market tipped for the first time in favour of the workers, as demand slightly exceeded supply. In Lombardy alone the number of metalworkers in industry increased by some 200,000, confirming Milan and its hinterland as one of the great industrial centres of Europe.44 The growth that took place was both in industry and also in the tertiary sector; in fact for Italy as a whole the tertiary sector grew faster than any other part of the national economy.
The southern immigrants did not usually go straight into the engineering factories. Their habitual starting-points in the northern labour market were the building sites. Often whole groups of workers from the same village or province, specializing in a certain trade, would be hired at the same time. Hours were long, turnover extremely high and safety precautions minimal; in Turin in one month alone, July 1961, there were eight fatal accidents on the building sites. At the end of the working day, it was not unusual to go on to another job in the evening: in Turin, as casual labour in the preparation of the centenary exhibition, Italia ‘61; in Milan, in the construction of the Metropolitana, the city's new underground railway. As Montaldi wrote: ‘From the excavations and tunnels of the Metropolitana there came forth the babble of all the dialects of Italy: barbe alpine, massacani, garzoni siciliani.’45
In the late 1950s, many southerners found their first jobs, especially in Turin, through the so-called ‘cooperatives’. The organizers of the ‘cooperatives’, usually bosses of southern origin, provided the northern factories with cheap labour and themselves with lucrative rake-offs. The worker would pay an inscription fee to the ‘cooperative’, and would then begin work without any proper contract, pension provisions or employer's insurance payments. The grateful firm would pay the ‘cooperative’ a certain sum per worker, of which half or less would find its way into the worker's pocket. The system was a classic way of dividing the workforce, for northern workers found their own bargaining power undermined by the ‘terroni’ who were doing the same job for a third of the salary. At their height there were 300 ‘cooperatives’ in Turin alone, organizing as many as 30,000 workers. In October 1960, after widespread protests from the trade unions and the immigrants themselves, the ‘cooperatives’ were declared illegal.46
Conditions in the small and medium-sized factories, even without the ‘cooperatives’, were very harsh. The working day, with overtime, was rarely less than ten to twelve hours long. Contracts were always short-term, for three or six months, and turnover almost as high as in the building trade. Prospects for promotion were minimal, with the mass of southerners confined to the lowest category of workers. The very large firms, like FIAT, seem to have done their best in these years to avoid hiring southern labour, preferring instead the traditional reservoirs of the Piedmontese and Lombard countryside.
When the southern women joined their men in the North, they too found a labour market which offered them new possibilities, even if in conditions of great exploitation. Most married women stayed at home, many of them taking on piece-work of some sort, as seamstresses and the like (see also below, p. 244). Domestic service was generally shunned as being ‘unsafe’, but a significant number of young southern women went to work in factories for the first time. Sometimes this proved a terrible ordeal. Clizia N. from Casoria in the province of Naples went first to work in her aunt's bar at Monza, near Milan, but then got a job making car seats in the Pirelli factory at Brughiero: ‘They were all northerners in the factory, all from the same place, and I was the first southerner to work there… The first days were terrible for me. When it came to them having to teach me the job, it was as if they were afraid to come near me, as if I was contagious in some way… They understood each other and did everything together, and left me out completely. Just as if there was a wall between them and me.’47
In other, smaller factories, the female workforce was prevalently from the South. These were often firms operating at the limits of legality, producing plastic goods, television parts, electric lights, shock absorbers, biros, sweets, beauty products, etc. Wages were approximately half those being paid to men, while safety regulations and insurance payments were non-existent. In spite of these conditions, many young southern women liked the experience of factory work as a form of emancipation. They had escaped the male hierarchies of their families and were earning their own money. One of them told Fofi in Turin: ‘There are a lot of us all together in the factory, and we feel ourselves to be independent. We are not criticized and no one pretends to try and teach us how to behave. They just pay us for the work we do.’48
Of course, the northern labour market did not only offer jobs in factories. Trade and commerce, though we know very little about them, soaked up migrant labour as well, and it was in the shops, bars and restaurants that immigrant children between ten and fifteen years of age found work as errand boys, waiters and cooks' helps. The working day was as long as ten hours, with pay around 3,000 lire a week, one third of what their elder sisters and one sixth of what their elder brothers were making in the factories. Many southerners aspired to open shops or workshops of their own, with southern tailors in particular acquiring a reputation for their reasonable prices and considerable skill. A few became municipal workers, though the ranks of dustmen, postmen, etc., were often the strict preserve of the northerners.49
For some, factory work with its noise and repetitiveness was intolerable. One casual labourer and part-time pimp told Canteri at Porto Palazzo in Turin: ‘The factory is a prison without air… the sun, the fresh air, these are beautiful things, my friend, and when I am dead who will give me back the days that have been stolen from me in the factory?’50 For others, the great journey northwards ended sadly in petty crime and prostitution. In the early 1960s the wide avenues on the periphery of Milan were lined at night with prostitutes from the South.51
As soon as they felt able and had saved enough money, the immigrants in the North would tell their families to come and join them. Often their parents, especially if they were aged, were urged to stay at home in the countryside, to be sent money and visited in August. For the immigrant family there then began the drama of finding somewhere to live. The northern cities were absolutely unprepared for such a massive influx, and immigrant families were forced to live in appalling conditions during the years of the ‘miracle’.
In Turin, the new inhabitants of the city found lodgings in the basements and attics of the centre, in buildings due for demolition, and in disused farmhouses on the extreme periphery. Racist attitudes were in evidence everywhere, with flats available for renting only to non-southerners. Turin's daily newspaper, La Stampa, did nothing to combat this racism, but chose instead to extol the ‘civilizing values’ of the Torinesi. Overcrowding was worst in the attics in the heart of the city. Here there were at least four or five people per room. The ‘rooms’ themselves were often no more than a single space divided by curtains or old blankets. Lavatories and washbasins were in the corridors, each one serving the needs of ten families, or at least forty to fifty people.52
In the towns of the northern hinterland of Milan, immigrants found a different solution to the problem of housing – the construction of ‘coree’. These were groups of houses built at night by the immigrants themselves, without planning permission, on plots of land that they had purchased with their savings. The ‘coree’ took their name, apparently, from their first appearance at the time of the Korean war.
Vito, an immigrant in the mid-fifties from Cavarzere in the Veneto, told Franco Alasia in 1959 how he came to build his house. His story is extraordinary testimony to the individual sacrifices made in the passage from one Italy to the other:
[At Cavarzere] my life was always a tribulation. I have three daughters, there was no work for them, and they remained without hope. I didn't want to send them to become domestic servants. So I alone worked and my wife worked a little in the fields and at harvest time out of ten quintals of maize they gave us three and a half, which was a great help… I was a casual labourer in the building trade, and in 1952-4 I worked all year round, 1,200–1,250 lire a day, from sunrise to dusk: that was the way it was and still is in my part of the world. You work not by the clock but by the sun… I came to Milan on 18 January 1955. It was windy and snowy and in that weather I began to look for work. I tried five or six firms and they all told me to come back in fifteen days: ‘the weather's too bad’. But on the third day I found work with the INGR company of Milan. And there everything went like clockwork, and I was able to send three quarters of my pay back home. I worked eight hours and after that they asked me: ‘Do you want some contract work?’ ‘Certainly,’ I replied, because in any case I was used to working from morning to evening.
I slept in the cellars of the houses I was building. The firm gave me permission and I cooked my meals by myself on a camping stove. For two years my life was like that, and that was how I saved enough to buy this bit of land. At first I hadn't even intended bringing my family here, but then I realized that we could all breathe more freely, and there was the possibility for the girls to go to work. And so I made the effort to buy this piece of land… It took me a year to build the house. When I'd got enough building material together, I began work at 9,10, or 11 o'clock at night, because I worked by moonlight and by the light of a lantern…
As soon as I'd managed to insulate the boiler and make it waterproof, I brought my family here. Here in the kitchen there was no proper floor. For doors I only had table tops with nails in them. As soon as my family arrived in these conditions, the girls went to work and my wife went to help in a market garden, and we all worked together on the house. And so the family V., after twenty-four years of marriage, finally bought some bedroom furniture, because before at home we all slept together, on straw. And so that is how I have come to belong to the nation of workers, because now if I say I live badly I'd be telling a lie. Now if I want a steak or pasta or anything else I have only to ask. Now when I go to work I take biscuits and fruit in my lunch box. To sum up, everything is going normally, and I have nothing else to say.53
In the absence of any programme of council housing, each immigrant family had to cope as best it could. In the coree, as well as in other areas of new construction, observers noted how much every family fended for itself. Even the ground plan of the coree reflected this atomization. Houses were built to avoid facing each other, if possible without overlooking windows, and for one family only.54
Housing was the most dramatic of the problems facing the immigrant, but it was far from being the only one. The health services in the North had been barely adequate even before the immigrant influx; in the early 1960s they were quite unable to cope. Hospitals had insufficient nurses and doctors, with beds spilling out from the wards and down corridors. In Turin there was a sharp rise in the number of cases of infant mortality. The major cities had no structure of social services to speak of; immigrants in need of material and psychological assistance were left in the hands of private and church charities.
The schools became the filter through which a generation of southern children learned Italian and became northerners. Teachers faced a myriad of problems. There were insufficient classrooms for the number of children, and teaching had to take place in two or sometimes three shifts during the day. New immigrant children arrived throughout the school year. At first they understood little of what was being said to them and could express themselves only in strong local dialect. Often they responded with mute hostility to attempts at integration. So great was the difference in standards between North and South that even those who had attended school regularly in the South had to go down one or two classes on arrival in the North. Many southern peasants thought that it was quite unnecessary to send their daughters to school. All missed the ‘collective education’ of the southern villages and towns. As Fofi wrote, ‘The streets and courtyards of Turin were not those of Lucera or Piazza Armerina, and the problems and inadequacies that derived from these environmental and familial shortcomings were not to be underestimated.’55
Slowly, and it was a question of years not months, the conditions of the immigrants improved. By the mid to late 1960s private firms had built sufficient tower blocks on the peripheries of the northern cities to allow a majority of immigrants to move into a flat of their own. These new working-class quarters were very ugly and often lacked all the basic amenities – shops, libraries, post offices, public transport, parks and facilities for old people. However, compared to what had gone before they were paradise. The new flats had central heating, bathrooms, proper windows and floors; soon their occupants could afford to install televisions, fridges and eventually washing-machines.56 The terrible period of uprooting and transition seemed to have been worth it; a new life had begun.
No chapter on Italian emigration in the years of the ‘miracle’ can hope to be complete without a section, albeit too brief, on Italian emigrants in northern Europe. West Germany, with economic growth rates even more startling than Italy's, became very swiftly the country with the largest flow of Italian immigrants. In June 1963, of 800,000 foreign workers in the Federal Republic, 297,000 were Italians, 114,000 Spaniards, 103,000 Greeks and 26,000 Turks. Thirty-seven per cent of the Italians were working on building sites, 25 per cent in metalworking factories, and another 18 per cent in factories of other sorts.57
In contrast to the migrants to northern Italy, most Italians in Germany and Switzerland regarded their stay as temporary. They rarely remained more than a year at a time, and even more rarely did their families leave to join them. Indeed, while German managers were full of praise for the adaptability of the southern Italians to factory conditions, and the way they saved their money, they disliked the frequency with which the Italians changed their jobs and returned to their villages, ‘for the elections, for earthquakes, for saint days’.58
In 1963 the journalist Giovanni Russo visited the village of Castelluccio, in the province of Foggia, in Puglia. Of the 4,000 inhabitants of the village, 2,000 had left in the preceding four years. The majority of these had made their way to Germany. The local doctor told Russo how and why they had left:
First a young building worker went to Germany because he'd got a contract as a skilled worker. It was he who told the others to come. As very few of them were skilled men they had to organize their own departures. Here there have never been training courses or any assistance from the organs of the state. Nearly all the emigrants left on tourist passports and paid their own way to the North or abroad… they had to go because we had no work for them, but they felt on leaving the disinterest and absenteeism of the state.59
One of those who left was Donato. Fifty years old in 1963, he had found a job working in the giant Volkswagen factory in Lower Saxony. He was living with twenty-five other Italians in a barrack hut:
I have four sons, a wife and a father to keep. At Castelluccio my land was worth at most 120,000 lire net per year. I had a tiny olive orchard which wasn't worth the blood and sweat that I lost on it. Now I'm earning 96,000 lire net per month. I send 60,000 of this to Italy and I keep the rest for myself… The working day is thirteen hours long because we're on piece-work… I was treated well when I started in the factory. They took me on as a labourer and began by putting me in the spray shop. I was a peasant and I didn't know anything about anything. My German instructor taught me by sign language and every time I made a mistake he marked an X on a blackboard… We Italians spend all our time with each other, without any forms of entertainment, and in the evening after work we go for a walk. But what's the choice? My family must have enough to eat…; now I'm working on the first stages of making carburettors.60
The Italian emigrants to northern Europe undoubtedly suffered most. For ten months of the year they did little but work very long hours, living in isolation far away from their homes and those they loved. For married men, the strains imposed upon them and their wives were very great, and fathers saw very little of their children as they were growing up. In 1964 and 1965 Don Antonio Riboldi, of the village of Santa Ninfa in the Belice (western Sicily), went to visit his parishioners who had gone to work in Switzerland. There were more than 500 of them. At the entrance to a public park in a Swiss city he saw the notice, ‘No entry for dogs and Italians’: ‘In those meetings with our emigrants they made me understand the depth of their nostalgia for their villages and their families; many times these feelings were expressed to me in anguishing scenes, but most often simply by the shedding of pent-up tears.’61 All accounts confirm the bitterness of the Italians in northern Europe. For them the ‘miracle’ was as much tragedy as liberation.
In 1962 Pasquale Saraceno, one of Italy's leading economists, commented: ‘We feel that we are resolving the southern problem more than in any other moment of the history of the unified state.’62 To some it must have seemed that with mass emigration the problem was not being resolved but liquidated. However, this was not Saraceno's point. He emphasized, rather, that a great deal of investment and income was flowing into the South, with the result that growth rates there (5.7 per cent per annum in the decade 1951–61) were higher than ever before.
What were these new sources of wealth? The Cassa del Mezzogiorno was continuing to invest very significant sums in agriculture, in road-building, in aqueducts and in drainage. In the five years between 1961 and 1965 it also, for the first time, began to spend significantly on industry – some 30 bn lire or 12 per cent of its total budget. By 1973, this figure had risen to 230 bn annually, which made industry, with 30 per cent of the budget, the largest single sector of the Cassa's activities.63
Secondly, in 1957 the Council of Ministers announced a decision of great importance: in order to aid the South, 40 per cent of IRI's total investments and 60 per cent of its investment in industrial plant would henceforth be concentrated in the Mezzogiorno. Behind the government's decision lay the pressure of a number of leading southern Christian Democrats, as well as the initiative of Giulio Pastore, who was at that time Minister for the South. For men like Emilio Colombo, the undisputed leader of the D C in the Basilicata, the infrastructural works of the Cassa were no longer enough. It was time for technocratic values to be applied to the South, time for modern industry to disturb the stagnant waters.64
Furthermore, certain priority areas of the South (Bari, Brindisi, Cagliari, Salerno, Taranto) were henceforth to be earmarked as ‘development zones’ (poli di sviluppo), while others, smaller and of lesser importance, were to be designated as ‘industrial nuclei’ (nuclei di industrializzazione). Private industry was to be attracted to them by very generous financial concessions offered by the state: 20 per cent of the entire initial investment was to be made available in the form of a non-repayable grant, while 70 per cent could be obtained in a loan repayable over fifteen years with interest of 4 per cent.65
Finally, the money sent home by the emigrants constituted an enormous influx of funds into the South. The local doctor of Castelluccio told Russo that at least 800m lire had been sent back to the village in the last five years. Standards of living had improved greatly; sugar and meat were being consumed in much greater quantities, and the number of children afflicted by serious illness had declined markedly. As for public holidays, ‘you should see what Easter and Christmas and the feast day of San Giovanni, the saint of the village, are like now, when all the emigrants return en masse. It's what we call “la calata dei tedeschi” (the descent of the Germans).’66
Money from emigrants, public investment in the South and the designation of new development zones were certainly provoking profound changes. At Taranto and Bagnoli near Naples Finsider developed its massive steelworks; at Gela in southern Sicily ANIC, a subsidiary of ENI, built a petrochemical works which by 1967 had a workforce of more than 2,500; Alfa-Romeo, another state-owned company, opened a new factory at Pomigliano d'Arco near Naples (see below, pp. 289). As for private industry, amongst the most noteworthy new developments were SIR's petrochemical works in Sardinia, at Porto Torres and Cagliari; the Olivetti factory at Pozzuoli near Naples; that of FIAT at Poggioreale in Sicily; and the opening of the giant Montecatini chemical works at Brindisi, an event so different from anything else that had ever happened to the city that it was likened by its inhabitants to the arrival of the Martians.67 With so much investment and diversification in the southern economy, and with rising standards of living, it looked as if Saraceno's optimism was justified.
However, all was far from well. The siting of some of the development zones was widely criticized, as they seemed to be the result more of successful clientelistic pressure than of rational economic planning. Worse still, the major new industrial plants soon earned the epithet of ‘cathedrals in the desert’. They were nearly all in capital- rather than labour-intensive industries, and as such made a limited contribution to the enduring problem of southern unemployment. They also had a limited effect in stimulating the local economies around them. Throughout the 1960s new factories, petrochemical and steelworks, the most dramatic symbols of the ‘miracle’ in the South, remained in splendid isolation. The Martians might have landed in Brindisi, but they had not got much further than the outskirts of the city; in the 1960s the traveller in the South passed very quickly from a landscape of factory chimneys to one of semi-abandoned villages.68
The major southern cities – Naples, Palermo, Catania, Bari – underwent a marked transformation, but not of the same intensity as that of Rome or of the corresponding cities of the North. If from 1951–61 they had served as magnets for the rural population, in the following decade their population increase was very much less marked.69
Naples acquired some elements of a new working class, but industrial development was geographically dispersed over a very wide area. So too was the labour force, which was recruited from the many communes of the Neapolitan hinterland. The new industrial proletariat, above all metal, chemical and electricity workers, was thus much diluted as a political and economic force.70
The heart of the city remained much as before. In the early sixties an estimated 800,000 of the population (out of a total of 1,170,000) had no fixed income, and more than 67,000 families (280,000 persons) were officially described as destitute. The long undulating narrow streets of the centre were lined with improvised stalls or tables selling all manner of contraband and other goods – radios, cigarettes, sweets, chewing-gum, lighters, vegetables, clothing and so on. The bassi (see p. 36) continued to house a significant proportion of the city's population. Conditions had not improved, but even here the television set, the indispensable vade mecum of the ‘miracle’, had made its appearance.71
In both Palermo and Naples small firms in traditional industries like textiles, food, leather and wood collapsed in the face of mass-produced goods from the North. Both cities grew outwards in unplanned sprawls, the victims of unfettered building speculation and the collusion of the municipal authorities (see below, pp. 287–8).
Much of the emigration that had taken place from the agricultural zones of the South was unavoidable. The soil was too poor, and the number of mouths it had to support too many, for there to have been any other solution. Even if a proper agrarian reform had been carried through, with widespread land redistribution on a more rational basis, with improvement of agrarian contracts and with extensive state aid to the new landowners, the ‘bone’ of the rural South would still have had to shed a significant proportion of its population. In 1967, during a conference organized by the Einaudi Foundation, Manlio Rossi-Doria rejoiced in the fact that at long last an alternative had been opened for the peasants of the South: ‘We must not lament the fact that they are abandoning agriculture and leaving their villages; on the contrary, we must celebrate, because this means that finally the men of the South will find a way of living worthy of human beings, and not of non-humans as they were in the past.’72
There were two problems with this position. The first was that pointed out at the same conference by the Communist Pietro Grifone, Gullo's close collaborator in the late 1940s: ‘The southern peasant who left Melissa or Torremaggiore to go to Stuttgart has not gone voluntarily. I have visited them at Stuttgart, these emigrants of ours; they have been constrained and obliged to leave their homes. This is the human, social and economic dimension of the problem.’73
The second was that the numbers of those leaving had, by the later 1960s, far exceeded what anyone who cared about the South thought was advisable or necessary. With so many young people leaving, the southern villages risked irreversible decline and degradation. Rossi-Doria himself recognized this, and argued that every effort should be made to stop the haemorrhage of population at a certain point. For the latifondo areas of extensive grain cultivation, he proposed the constitution of large peasant cooperatives, each with responsibility for between 600 and 1,000 hectares of land. Such a scheme was no pipe-dream, he argued, because it could be based on the affittanze collecttive, the tradition of collective renting which had existed in certain parts of the South. Rossi-Doria was convinced that the peasants in these zones, if given sufficient technical assistance and access to modern machinery, would welcome such a solution.
It was too late.74 The flight from the southern countryside continued unabated, with a higher percentage of small proprietors leaving than any other group. As a result, the number of landless labourers, while declining in overall terms, increased as a percentage of the total rural labour force, as did the number of casual labourers within this group. Thus the growth of a peasant proprietor class, which since the 1920s had made much progress against all the odds, was abruptly halted. Instead, the most dependent stratum of rural workers – casual wage labourers, amongst whom were a large number of older men, women and children – increased its relative weight.75
Government legislation in these years did little to confront the dramatic crisis of the rural South. On the contrary, the two ‘Green Plans’ of 1961 and 1966, especially the second, channelled public spending increasingly towards the capitalist farms of the most fertile regions, and left the hills and mountains to their fate. The results of such policies became clear in the national agrarian census of 1970. For the first time since the war, a significant amount of arable land, and not only in the South, had been abandoned; between 1961 and 1970 the total cultivated land surface in Italy declined by 1½ million hectares.76
Common Market agricultural policy further emphasized these trends. In the early years of the EEC, the Italian government and its representatives at Brussels, more than content with the industrial benefits of the Common Market, were willing to compromise on agricultural issues. The Six's rural Europe was born a world of milk, butter, sugar, meat and grain; southern Italy's fruit, vegetables, olives and wine had little place in it. By means of the complicated price-fixing mechanisms of the EAGGF (European Agricultural Guarantee and Guidance Fund), Europe's richest farmers became richer still. Every year the Common Market countries, through the EAGGF, spent $700 for every Dutch farmer, $330 for every French farmer, $220 for every German, but only $70 for every Italian. Of southern Italian products, only olive oil was subsidized on a scale comparable to that accorded the products of northern European farms.77
In the Centre and north-east of Italy social and economic developments differed quite radically from those in the Industrial Triangle and the South. The dramatic and sudden end of the centuries-old system of sharecropping has not yet been studied in any detail. What is clear, though, is that the sharecropping families who acquired land in the 1950s did not, for the most part, find that it brought them prosperity. On the contrary. Often their small farms were not viable economic entities, and they lacked the capital to make essential improvements. Faced with these problems, the ex-sharecropping families did not abandon their new properties. Instead they sought to diversify their sources of income. The older generation was left in charge of the land, which was worked more to meet family needs than to produce for the market. The young went off to seek their fortunes elsewhere, in the towns or cities.78
Initially, there was a marked difference between the movements of population in the north-east and the Centre. In the period 1955–61, the Veneto lost over 237,000 of its inhabitants, mainly to the industrial cities of Lombardy and Piedmont. No other region, not even those of the South, suffered so great an exodus in these years. By contrast, those who left the land in the central regions did not, by and large, travel very far. If the Marches and Umbria shed over 100,000 inhabitants between them, Emilia-Romagna's population remained stable, and Tuscany had a net immigration of 47,300 inhabitants. In the following period, 1962–71, the patterns in the Centre and the north-east are much more similar. The Veneto lost only 47,300 inhabitants, much the same as Umbria and the Marches, while both Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna attracted immigrants, in the most part from the South.79
If initial immigration patterns differed sharply, those of industrialization did not. Both in the Centre and the north-east the decade 1951–61 saw a very marked increase in the number of those employed in industry: in the Veneto, from 32.8 per cent of the working population to 44.0 per cent; in Tuscany from 34.0 to 44.0 per cent. The next decade saw continued growth in these regions, though at a slower rate. In this second period, it was the turn of Umbria and the Marches to increase their industrial employment very rapidly.80
The industrialization of the Third Italy was very distinct from that taking place in the great centres of Lombardy and Piedmont. With one or two notable exceptions, like Porto Marghera and Ravenna, it was characterized by small firms employing less than fifty people – and often less than twenty. These firms flourished in traditional sectors like clothing, shoe-making, furniture production, ceramics and leather goods. A significant minority of them were also to be found in the more modern sectors of machine tools and the production of parts for larger metalworking companies. Nearly all of them were highly flexible, adapting swiftly to the market, and increasingly export-oriented.
Geographically, their development also followed a distinctive pattern. The many small and distinguished cities of the Third Italy, once so economically dynamic in the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, became the focal points for a new age of prosperity. The merchants of Prato stirred from their slumbers, with remarkable results.81 Industrial growth was not concentrated in the major cities, but spread amongst these smaller centres and in the countryside around them. The terms ‘diffused industrialization’ (industrializzazione diffusa) and the ‘urbanized countryside’ (la campagna urbanizzata) became widely employed to describe this model of economic growth. City and countryside were linked in industrial districts, usually specializing in a single field of production: textiles at Prato, ceramics at Sassuolo, hosiery at Carpi, footwear at Ascoli Piceno, and so on. The dynamic growth of these districts began with the ‘economic miracle’, but was only to reach its apogee in the 1970s.82
If we return now to the ex-sharecropping families, it is possible to suggest (though much more work needs to be done) that they played a significant role in this remarkable transition. The young men who left the land found work initially as manual labourers in the towns or cities. Soon they decided to try to set up on their own (mettersi in proprio). They did so with remarkable success. In 1982–3 a survey was carried out in Bassano (Veneto) and the Valdelsa (Tuscany), both typical areas of diffused industrialization; 50 per cent of the entrepreneurs interviewed had begun their working lives as manual labourers; the great majority of them were first-generation entrepreneurs, around forty-five years old and with no schooling beyond the age of fourteen.83
In order to survive and prosper in the early sixties, these entrepreneurs relied heavily on the experience and resources of their families. Although the size of families and their extended character were in rapid decline in these regions, a significant majority of large families remained. In 1961 26.9 per cent of families in the Third Italy were extended ones, while 28.1 per cent had five or more members. If the older generation could be left to look after the land, wives, brothers, sisters and cousins could be brought in to work in the new businesses. Even as late as 1982–3, more than 60 per cent of businesses in Bassano and the Valdelsa were family concerns. Work and family were thus tied closely together, in a climate of economic dynamism, self-sacrifice and rapid social mobility.84
Finally, it is worth considering what role, if any, central and local government played in this process. Public industry did not undertake a major investment programme as it did in the South. Central government seems to have taken a permissive rather than a propulsive role. Taxation of the new firms was kept to a minimum and casually enforced. Bureaucratic norms governing firms' activities were widely ignored, as were the social-insurance contributions which they were supposed to pay.
At a local level, the Christian Democrat and Communist administrations which dominated these regions did their best, within the limited powers of local government, to aid the new businesses. For the Communists the decline of the sharecroppers as a political force was certainly not to be welcomed, nor was encouragement of the new entrepreneurs easily reconcilable with the collective socialist values preached in the farmhouse kitchens in the 1940s. However, recourse could always be made to the party's alliance strategy. Small industry continued to be represented as ‘healthy’ and ‘progressive’, as a potential ally in the face of the all-powerful monopolies. As for the Christian Democrats, family capitalism of this sort presented them with few ideological problems. Indeed its development closely resembled their ideal picture of the modern world. The ‘urbanized countryside’, with its strong local identities, offered far fewer perils than the streets of Milan.85
The years of the ‘economic miracle’ saw, as was only to be expected, some radical changes in the employment patterns and class composition of Italian society. Paradoxically, the most notable change on a general level was the sharp decline in the active workforce as a percentage of the total population. In 1951 the active workforce was 42 per cent of the total population; this figure fell to 41.6 per cent in 1961, and 36.3 per cent in 1971. Even allowing for a general tendency to a diminishing workforce in advanced capitalist countries, these figures still compare poorly to those of other European nations: in Great Britain the active workforce was 45.7 per cent of the total population in 1966, in France 40.9 per cent in 1968.86
There appear to be two principal reasons why the Italian figures were so low in spite of booming employment prospects in the North and Centre. The first of these relates to the position of women in the Italian labour market. The majority of the women who had been registered as active in agriculture before the rural exodus did not find full employment in their new urban environment. Some, as we have seen, especially the young and single, did go into the factories of the North; most, however, remained at home, and became officially classed as housewives even if they did part-time or piece-work at home.87
Secondly, employment prospects in southern Italy continued to be worse than in any other area in the Common Market. As we have seen, the ‘cathedrals in the desert’ did not create enough new jobs, and the cities teemed with unemployed or those employed on the most precarious of bases. In addition, traditional high birth-rates in the southern cities showed little signs of decreasing. Even if some of the men found work through emigration to northern Europe, large numbers of women and children stayed at home. The employment figures for the South were appalling: the active workforce was 37.5 per cent of the total population in 1951, 34.2 per cent in 1961, and only 31.2 per cent by 1971.88
Turning now to the different sections of Italian society, it is evident that the Italian business class underwent considerable transformation. The Confindustria continued as its mouthpiece, dominated by the electrical trusts, suspicious of the Common Market, resentful of the power of state industry, hostile even to the growing independence of the CISL. Beneath this conservative carapace, we know little as yet about the relative weight of the different factions of Italian capital and the changing relationship between them. Some sections which had benefited from the great boom, such as building speculators and dealers in petroleum, shared the ideology of the leaders of Confindustria. Others, amongst them FIAT and the most successful export companies, were perforce more European in outlook, more open to new ideas, more receptive to American influences.89
In both private and public industry, the number of managers increased markedly. These were the young lions of the ‘miracle’, sometimes trained at Harvard or MIT, speaking more than one foreign language, enthusiastic proponents of East Coast ideas of marketing, publicity and the organization of the firm. Mattei's ENI was full of them; so too was the new public industry in the South.90
At a small-firm level, and not only in the Third Italy, a whole new generation of Italian businessmen was born. These were men of limited culture and education, but determined and audacious, and they were prepared to travel all over the world in order to build up markets for their products. They were the nouveaux riches not only of the major cities, but perhaps above all of the provinces – of Brescia and Bergamo, of Verona and Treviso, of Modena and Ravenna, of Prato and Pistoia. In Vigevano, to take just one example of a smallish town near Milan, Bocca reported in 1962 that there were 900 workshops and factories making shoes; one quarter of all Italy's shoe exports came from Vigevano. The entrepreneurs there talked of their markets in the Congo and in Burma; one had taken his holidays go-karting in the Bahamas, ‘whereas his father had gone by bicycle to Casalpusterlengo or Sartisana’.91
Of the professional classes, we know next to nothing. In the rapidly expanding Italy of the early 1960s, certain categories of the liberi professionisti – engineers, architects, designers and lawyers – undoubtedly increased both their weight in society and their own well-being. So too did new groups which came to the fore at this time: researchers and the upper ranks of technicians in industry, those working in public relations, in advertising and the mass media.
On the other hand, in the absence of social and educational reform, professional jobs in the state sector remained at modest levels. The numbers of teachers, for instance, did not increase significantly before 1964. The myriad of professional jobs associated with an active welfare state – from administrators in the health service to town planners and social workers – was conspicuously absent in Italy. As a result, large numbers of graduates in the humanities continued to have great difficulty in finding jobs which corresponded to their status.92
The fastest growing sector of the Italian workforce was the white-collar one. In 1951 there were 1,970,000 Italian white-collar workers, in 1961 2,650,000 and in 1971 3,330,000. In these twenty years, according to Sylos Labini's figures, the white-collar sector increased from 9.8 to 17.1 per cent of the total workforce. Such a growth was in line with developments in all advanced countries, and it was noteworthy that in the private sector Italy's increase in white-collar workers was very modest by international standards (8.9 per cent of the workforce in 1971 compared to 19.3 per cent in France in 1968 and 23.4 per cent in Britain in 1966).
At the top end of the private sector were an increasing number of technical workers employed in the dynamic sectors of the Italian economy – in petrochemicals, in typewriters, in car production. Between 1958 and 1965 in Olivetti the first grade of white-collar workers (which was dominated by technicians) increased its share of the white-collar workforce from 20.5 to 32.8 per cent, while the lowest grades fell from 43.8 to 29.7 per cent.93 Atthe lower end of the private sector, the increasingly mechanical and repetitive work of the clerks, as well as their surveillance in typing pools and large offices, increased their sense of alienation and decreased their status. The world of the Italian petty clerk in the 1960s, its routines, petty rivalries and frustrations, was immortalized in Ermanno Olmi's film Il Posto (1961).
As for the public sector, much play has been made of its excessively bloated nature. Care must be taken not to exaggerate this phenomenon. In 1951 public white-collar employees were only 4.6 per cent of the active workforce, increasing to 6.2 per cent in 1961 and 8.2 per cent in 1971. Comparative figures for France were 7.3 per cent in 1968 and for Britain 11.2 per cent in 1966. What is striking about the Italian case is the rough numerical parity between the private and public sectors, in contrast with her European neighbours, whose private sectors were numerically much stronger.94
In the traditional sectors of the lower middle class, the number of artisans remained much the same over the two decades 1951–71. There was a distinct decline in workshops in traditional sectors, but this was compensated for by the rapid growth of new trades, such as car mechanics and electricians.
The anomalous position of Italian shopkeepers deserves special mention. This sector of the Italian petty bourgeoisie remained a much higher percentage of the workforce than in other European countries – 8.7 per cent of the Italian workforce in 1971, compared to 6.1 per cent in France in 1968 and only 2.2 per cent in Britain in 1966. We have already seen how protective measures passed by successive Christian Democrat governments restricted the growth of supermarkets and subsidized family shops. In the period 1951–71 the numbers of shopkeepers actually increased in Italy from 1,350,000 to 1,700,000, with 150,000 new shops opening in the South, compared to only 80,000 in the Centre, and 120,000 in the North.95
As for the industrial working class, their numbers increased steadily, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the workforce: from 3,410,000 in 1951 to 4,190,000 in 1961 and 4,800,000 in 1971. Building workers increased their numbers by half a million in this same period, and transport workers by 280,000. Industrial and building workers taken together accounted for 22.9 per cent of the workforce in 1951, 29 per cent in 1961, and 33 per cent in 1971. The last figure compared favourably with France's 27.8 per cent in 1968 and Britain's 31.6 per cent in 1966. However, the small-firm nature of much of Italy's industrialization was very clear. By 1971 little more than one fifth of the industrial workforce was employed in firms with more than one hundred employees.96
At the bottom of the social scale came the casual labourers, the underemployed and unemployed. Their total numbers, though not their relative weight, declined markedly in the countryside. No longer was there a massive rural reserve army of labour, each member of which could expect to work little more than a third of the year. On the other hand, the problem was far from solved, because much of it had been transferred to the peripheries of the major cities. In the shanty towns of Palermo and Naples, in the borgate of Rome and on the squalid outskirts of Milan and Turin, hundreds of thousands of families continued to live in abysmal conditions. Some money was to be gained in the building trade, some from small dealings of every sort, some from petty crime. By the end of the 1960s this section of the Italian population was estimated at 4 million out of a total population of 54½ million. For them the ‘economic miracle’ might have meant a television set but precious little else.97
The years of the ‘miracle’ were the key period in an extraordinary process of transformation that was taking place in the everyday life of Italians – in their culture, family life, leisure-time activities, consumption habits, even the language they spoke and their sexual mores. The transformation, of course, was not instantaneous or in any way uniform. As Stephen Gundle has written, ‘If cultural unification in accordance with the myths and models of consumer capitalism was the dominant feature of this period, it is important to remember that this process was as much one of superimposition, grafting new habits and practices on to pre-existing forms of consciousness, as one of profound mutations.’98
In the twenty years from 1950 to 1970 per capita income in Italy grew more rapidly than in any other European country: from a base of 100 in 1950 to 234.1 in 1970, compared to France's increase from 100 to 136 in the same period, and Britain's 100 to 132. By 1970 Italian per capita income, which in 1945 had lagged far behind that of the northern European countries, had reached 60 per cent of that in France and 82 per cent of that in Britain.99
Urged on by the unprecedented expansion of advertising, Italian families, above all in the North and Centre of the country, used their new wealth to acquire consumer durables for the first time. Whereas in 1958 only 12 per cent of Italian families owned a television, by 1965 the number had risen to 49 per cent. In the same period the number owning fridges increased from 13 to 55 per cent, and washing-machines from 3 to 23 per cent.100 Between 1950 and 1964 the number of private cars in Italy rose from 342,000 to 4.67 million, and motorcycles from 700,000 to 4.3 million.101 Eating habits changed radically, with more money being spent on meat and dairy products than ever before. In 1962 the sharp-eyed Bocca noticed that even as far south as Foggia most of the food shops had gone over to refrigerated cabinets.102 The way in which Italians dressed also changed, with women rapidly abandoning the traditional black of the South for mass-produced coats, dresses and stockings. For the first time the majority of Italians were able to afford proper shoes.
These improvements in the standard of living were enormously welcome. However, it must be noted that the Italian model of development, like so many others, lacked the dimension of collective responsibility. The state had played an important role in stimulating rapid economic development, but it then defaulted on governing the social consequences. In the absence of planning, of civic education, of elementary public services, the individual family, particularly of the ceti medi, sought salvation in private spending and consumption: on using a car to go to work, on private medicine and on private nursery schools in the absence of state ones.103 The ‘miracle’ was thus an exquisitely private affair, which reinforced the historic tendency of each Italian family to fend for itself as best it could.
No innovation of these years had a greater effect on everyday life than television. In 1954, in the first year of its introduction, there were 88,000 licence holders, a number which increased to one million in 1958. By 1965 49 per cent of Italian families owned a television set.104
Television, as elsewhere in Europe, was a state monopoly. In Italy this meant that it was controlled by the Christian Democrats and heavily influenced by the church. In the years 1954–6, Filiberto Guala, the candidate of Catholic Action, was the president of RAI and he imposed a severe code of conduct on the nascent television service. Programmes were not to ‘bring discredit on or undermine the institution of the family’; nor were they to portray ‘attitudes, poses or particulars which might arouse base instincts’.105 There were regular religious-education programmes, while news and current affairs had a heavily anti-Communist bias. Light music, variety, quiz shows and sports events made up the great majority of RAI's broadcasting time. Typical of this fare was the enormously popular quiz show, ‘Lascia o Raddoppia?’. Compered by Mike Bongiorno, it was the Italian equivalent of ‘The 64,000 Dollar Question’.
Attempts to control television's content were nowhere clearer than in the field of advertising. Forced to choose between America's laissez-faire inundations and the BBC's total ban, RAI came out with a uniquely Italian form of advertising. Advertisements were grouped together into a half-hour programme called ‘Carosello’, which was transmitted at peak viewing time, just before the nine o'clock news. In each spot, which lasted all of 110 seconds, the product could be mentioned only at the beginning and for five seconds at the end. The rest of the time had to be filled with little stories, cartoons or fairy-tales. As such, ‘Carosello’ exercised a great appeal for children, who were introduced in this familial, homely and seemingly innocuous way to the delights of consumerism. Parents became accustomed to sending their children to bed ‘after “Carosello”. By 1960, three years after its introduction, ‘Carosello’ was the most watched television programme in Italy.106
Television, as it became a mass phenomenon in the late 1950s, was a potent weapon in the hands of the Christian Democrats. It was rather more of a two-edged sword for the Catholic church. ‘Carosello’ seemed innocuous enough, but the values of the consumer ‘miracle’ were not consonant with those of the church of Pius XII. In a telegram of 1957 to the Coldiretti, the Pope implored the organization to save the ‘traditional Christian aspect’ of the rural population, which was being undermined by ‘changing times, materialist propaganda and audiovisual communications’.107 Pier Paolo Pasolini made the same point rather more wickedly:
the Vatican never understood what it should or should not have censored. For example, it should have censored ‘Carosello’ because it is in the all-powerful ‘Carosello’ that the new type of life which the Italians ‘must’ lead explodes on to our screens with absolute, peremptory clarity. And nobody can tell me we're talking about a way of life in which religion counts for very much. On the other hand, the purely religious broadcasts are so tedious and so repressive in spirit that the Vatican would have done well to have censored the lot.108
Initially, the watching of television in Italy was a collective form of entertainment. With private television sets still the privilege of the rich, the televisions of the bars and cafés, especially in rural Italy, became a focal point of social reunion. In an article in L'Espresso of January 1959, M. Calamandrei recounted the experience of the village of Scarperia in the Mugello, north of Florence. Although there were only eleven television sets in the whole village, 91 per cent of the population had watched television at least once: ‘Interviewers tell of seeing in the evening (specially on Thursdays at the time of “Lascia o Raddoppia?”) peasants, sometimes poorly dressed, come down steep mountain paths, bringing a chair with them and perhaps through the rain, just to watch a television programme.’109
In another part of Tuscany, in 1954, the local Christian Democrat authorities gave the Antonuzzo family a television set for the section headquarters that they had founded at Accesa. Antonuzzo recounts how the installation of this set in the village split the local Communists: one half of them, ‘the more Stalinist’, denounced the new apparatus as ‘priest's garbage’ and would have nothing to do with it. The other half, in spite of strict prohibitions, went along to watch.110
Gradually, the essentially atomizing nature of television asserted itself. As more and more families bought their own sets, the habit of watching television in bars or at neighbours' houses died out. In the new palazzi (blocks of flats) on the peripheries of the cities, each family watched television in its own flat. This startling development obviously increased the tendency towards passive and familial use of leisure time, and decreased other more participatory and collective pastimes.
As television audiences grew, the cinemas entered their long and seemingly unavoidable decline. None the less, cinema-going, especially on Sundays, continued to be a favoured pastime for the Italians. The Italian film industry was extremely productive and attractive in this period; 1960 was the year both of Fellini's La Dolce Vita and Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers. The first, with its denunciation of the life-style of Rome's nouveaux riches, marked a watershed in public statements on Italian society. It provoked furious polemics, earned the condemnation of the church, and was a smash hit at the box office. The second, with its deeply moving and dramatic account of the fate of a southern family in Milan, gave the world an unequalled portrait of Italy in the years of its great transition.
No works of literature rivalled Visconti's Rocco. The novel of the period which made the most impact was Tommaso Di Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo, set in Sicily during the Risorgimento. In the first twelve months after its publication it sold over 100,000 copies. However, the reading public continued to be much smaller than in Britain or in France, and it was to take some time for the increased literacy of the population to be reflected in book sales. The paperback boom can only really be said to have begun in 1965, the year Mondadori launched its Oscar series.111 Popular reading matter continued to be dominated by the rotocalchi (illustrated magazines), with a marked increase in the number and sales of women's magazines. Amica, Annabella and Grazia, with their new emphasis on consumerism, rapidly achieved mass circulations.
Along with the advent of television, increased mobility was probably the greatest innovation in leisure-time activity. The FIAT 600 was quickly followed by the smaller and even more economical 500. For the ceti medi and the upper echelons of the northern working class, Sunday outings by car became a possibility for the first time. Gone for ever were the Sunday trips on the backs of Turin trams of the early 1940s. Instead families travelled by car into the countryside, to the mountains and in the summer to the sea. The amount of paid holidays they took increased slowly but significantly, as did the tendency to travel further afield during them. Italian regionalism, so strong and enduring, began to break down a little as the motorized armies of the ‘miracle’ hurtled along the new arteries of the peninsula.
What was happening to the family, that pivotal institution of Italian civil society, in these years? The little research that has so far been done shows us that the size of Italian families was declining everywhere, but that types of family were changing only slowly. In Italy as a whole the average size of the family had declined from four members in 1951 to 3.3 in 1971. The decline, as was to be expected, was most marked in the heavily urbanized north-west, and least in the South. On the other hand, types of family remained little changed. In 1951 nuclear families, composed only of husband, wife and children, formed 55.7 per cent of the total number of Italian families; twenty years later they formed 54.1 per cent. In the same period extended families declined slowly from 22.5 per cent to 16.9 per cent of the total, with percentages for the Third Italy being much higher. Marginal increases in the number of families composed of only one or two persons were also to be noted.112
What was certainly true, but hardly quantifiable, was the increased isolation that urbanization brought to each family. For southern emigrants in particular, the absence of collective festivals, of the piazza as a meeting point, of street living and of inter-family visits marked a profound transformation. This privatization in smaller family units seems to have had both positive and negative aspects: on the one hand, as Pizzorno recounts for Rho, near Milan, families were glad to escape from prying neighbours and from the stifling atmosphere of rural courtyards. The privacy afforded by northern urban structures was thus an enormous relief. On the other hand, each nuclear family unit tended to be more closed in upon itself, and less open to community life or to forms of inter-family solidarity.113
For the young, urban life offered many opportunities not previously available. If the nuclear family became more sharply and exclusively defined vis-à-vis society as a whole, the young found that they enjoyed greater freedoms than previously, both inside and outside the family. Authority structures within the family became less rigid, as did paternal control over the family's finances. At Rho in 1959, a twenty-year-old female clerk recounted how she had dared, after many hesitations, to propose to her father a radical change in family organization. Instead of giving him all her wages (45,000 lire a month), and receiving in return 1,000 lire pocket-money per week, she decided to keep all her earnings and pay only her part in the upkeep of the house.114
Outside the home, the young found the constrictions of rural life falling away. There were new freedoms, pastimes and ambitions. Bars equipped with billiard-tables and juke-boxes were important meeting-places; so too were the hundreds of new dance halls. Young men went to football matches; young women went shopping. Together (and there was no higher ambition), they rode the city streets on their Vespas and Lambrettas.
The 1960s also saw a distinct shift in the woman's role within the family. With the new emphasis on house-based living and consumption, more Italian women than ever before became full-time housewives. In the North, it was their responsibility to care for children, who were staying on at school longer than ever before; theirs too was the task of looking after the needs of a husband whose day's work, with overtime and commuting, often amounted to between twelve and fourteen hours. The women's magazines and the television advertisements of the time exalted this new figure of the modern Italian woman, ‘tutta casa efamiglia’, smartly dressed, with well-turned-out children and a sparkling house full of consumer durables.
The percentage of women in the Italian workforce, as we have seen, continued to fall, and was confirmed as one of the lowest in western Europe. This was particularly true for the age group 30–49, who, unlike their counterparts in Britain or the United States, rarely returned to the registered workforce after marriage and child-rearing. Italian women of this age often found part-time jobs, but they tended to be piece-work done at home or in the informal sector (lavoro nero), and thus never reached the official statistics.
In the absence of any social history of Italian women in this period, it would be foolhardy to pass categorical judgement on these changes in women's lives. The transfer to the cities undoubtedly gave women greater freedom from traditional family hierarchies and a greater autonomy in a whole number of ways. This was especially true for younger women in the North who were in full-time work. However, the idealized confinement of women to the home in the 1960s served to enclose them in a purely private dimension, and to remove them even more than previously from the political and public life of the nation.115
Finally, a word about sexual attitudes. The Italy of the boom was still a society full of taboos about sexual behaviour. The restrictive codes of official morality were deeply intertwined in the South with codes of honour. Sexual mores were to change almost more slowly than anything else in Italy. However, in the early 1960s there were a few signs of a more open approach. Timid discussions of pre-marital sex appeared in some women's magazines, Oggi ran a survey on sex education and the radical weekly L'Espresso (founded in 1955) even dared to publish an investigation of infidelity levels amongst Italian wives (the infidelity of men seems to have been taken for granted). The first cracks in the official morality had appeared, but it was to be another decade at least before sexual mores underwent any major change.116
One of the most significant consequences of rural exodus and urbanization was a dramatic decline in the influence of the church. Church attendance had always been strongest in the rural areas and amongst women, especially in the Trentino-Alto Adige, in the Veneto and in some regions of the South. As we have seen, a survey had found that 69 per cent of Italians went regularly to Sunday mass in 1956. By 1962 this number had dropped to 53 per cent. Six years later the Catholic sociologist Silvano Burgalassi found that only some 40 per cent of Italians were regular church attenders. Of these just 6 per cent could be classified as ‘devoti’, in the sense of following closely the church's teachings.117
Behind these figures lay other trends which were even more disturbing. Recruitment to the priesthood had fallen off drastically; the diocesan clergy was becoming an ageing body ever less able to cope with a growing and changing population. Worst of all, on the peripheries of the great cities, where the new urban population was most concentrated, church-going had plummeted. In 1968, on the peripheries of cities with more than 300,000 inhabitants, only some 11 per cent of men and 26 per cent of women were attending mass on Sundays.118 Pasolini's dire warnings of the insidious effects of the new consumer values seemed more than justified.
Another major reason for the emptying churches was the difference between northern and southern Catholicism. In Turin, Fofi found that the southern migrants missed the local customs, patron saints and feste of their village churches and could not reconcile themselves to the somewhat barren and arid life of the northern churches. One parish priest in Milan denounced the southerners who ‘had been used to living their religion in a totally superficial way, more as magic and bigotry than in a truly Christian manner’.119 This may well have been the case, but doctrinal purity was hardly likely to attract the migrants back to the fold. In 1957 the radical priest Don Lorenzo Milani lamented the imminent end of popular religion:
For a priest, what greater tragedy than this could ever have taken place? To be free, to have the sacraments, to control the House of Deputies, the Senate, the press, the radio, the bell-towers, the pulpits, the schools; and with all this abundance of means, both human and divine, to gather only the bitter fruit of being scorned by the poor, hated by the weakest, loved by the strongest. To have our churches empty. To see them getting emptier day by day. To know that soon the faith of the poor will be a thing of the past. Does it not occur to you to ask if the persecution of the church could really be worse than all this?120
The thirty years between 1950 and 1980 saw a catastrophic change in the landscape and cityscape of the Italian peninsula. Many of the historic centres of the Italian cities and towns were modified irreversibly, and their suburbs grew as unplanned jungles of cement. Thousands of kilometres of coastline were ruined as hotels and second houses were constructed without any restraints upon their siting or their density. Woods, alpine valleys, fishing villages, lagoons and islands were polluted, destroyed or transformed beyond recognition. Urban Italy sprawled outwards, unchecked and unplanned. The new face of the peninsula was represented by the suburbs of Rome, Naples and Palermo, by the periphery of Milan, by skiing resorts like Cervinia and seaside towns like Viareggio. All this earned the Italians the reputation of being a nation both incapable of protecting its heritage, natural and man-made, and unable to govern its future.
It is essential to understand that this lamentable state of affairs was not inevitable, but arose from precise political choices. The governments of the 1950s and 1960s decided to allow the maximum degree of freedom to private initiative and speculation in the building sector. This was in line with their actions in every other part of the ‘miracle’, with the exception of broadcasting, which of course they were only too anxious to control. The ruling parties' point of departure was the town-planning law of 1942, which safeguarded the rights of landowners, made no attempt to tax profits deriving from land speculation and abandoned the idea of any serious government intervention. The law of 1942 made provision for piani regolatori particolareggiati (local development plans) to be drawn up and enforced by local communes. The plans would have been an important step forward, but the communes were never granted the resources or powers to put them into operation. As a result they were either never formulated or else remained dead letters.121
The building speculators, with money to spend and to corrupt, were left with a free hand. Houses were built, and built fast: 73,400 in 1950, 273,500 in 1957, 450,000 in 1964. But they were built how and where private interest dictated. No provision was made for town-planning, none for parks, landscaping or even adequate parking facilities. Often the palazzi were constructed without regard for building norms or safety regulations. The newspapers dutifully chronicled the doleful stories of whole families destroyed by collapsing apartment blocks, of hospitals built without anti-seismic foundations in earthquake zones.122
Other aspects of housing policy reflected these same emphases on private rather than public initiative. Very little attempt was made to safeguard the needs of the poorest sections of the community by the creation of a public- or council-housing sector like those of Britain, Holland or West Germany. Between 1948 and 1963 public housing schemes accounted for only 16 per cent of total investment in the construction of houses.
The most notable public initiative was that of the INA-Casa (INA = Istituto Nazionale Abitazioni), a scheme launched by Fanfani in 1949. In the fourteen years of its existence one thousand billion lire was spent, and the scheme constituted a small but significant example of what could have been achieved had government policy been different. In 1963 the INA-Casa scheme was replaced by the GESCAL (Gestione Casa Lavoratori), which became notorious not for building houses but for the corrupt and clientelistic use of its funds. GESCAL was mercifully wound up in the early 1970s. The only other public intervention of note was the IACP (Istituto Autonomo Case Popolari), a scheme which was allowed slightly more local autonomy than the INA-Casa, but which was crippled by its shortage of funds.123
Throughout the great building boom of 1953–63, there was often open collusion between the municipal authorities and the building speculators. The ‘sack’ of Rome, as it came to be called, was dramatic testimony to this. Property developers like the giant Società Generale Immobiliari, whose principal shareholder is the Vatican, were allowed to fill up every available space in the city itself, and then to cover the periphery with apartment blocks of poor construction and even poorer aesthetics. In 1956 the magazine L'Espresso launched a famous inquest entitled ‘Capitale corrotto: nazione infetta’. Manlio Cancogni described a visit to the housing department: ‘In the offices there are tables, telephones, containers full of files, but no clerks. The clerks who are supposed to work there are hardly ever there. In their place are private citizens who have come to see how their files are getting along. They sit at tables, leaf through registers, take out and put back files as if they were in their own homes.’124 It was not surprising that by 1970 one house in every six in Rome was ‘abusive’, i.e. it had been built without any proper permit, and that 400,000 people were living in habitations which officially did not exist.125
In October 1947 Marshall McLuhan, writing on American advertising, noted that an American officer in Italy, who was also the correspondent for Printer's Ink, was rather perturbed by what he found there:
the Italians can tell you the names of the ministers in the government but not the names of the favourite products of the celebrities of their country. In addition, the walls of the Italian cities are plastered more with political slogans than with commercial ones. According to the opinion of this officer there is little hope that the Italians will achieve a state of prosperity and internal calm until they start to be more interested in the respective merits of different types of cornflakes and cigarettes rather than the relative abilities of their political leaders.126
Put crudely but effectively, this was the majority American view of the social and political consequences of the consumer revolution. Modernization led to increased material prosperity, to an overriding interest in consumer products, to greater individualism. It decreased active interest in politics and excluded the possibility of collective action against the existing order.127 How far had Italy travelled down this particular road by 1963?
There seems little doubt, as has become clear from the sections above, that the social dynamic of the ‘economic miracle’ worked to increase the atomization of Italian civil society. The role of the individual nuclear family became even more important than previously. The new urban structures served to isolate families, which were decreasing in size, in small but comfortable living-quarters, and provided few spaces for collective gatherings or community life.128 Women became the principal target of the new consumerism, and the increased emphasis on their service role within the home intensified their isolation. Cars and television further encouraged an essentially privatized and familial use of leisure time. Thus the ‘economic miracle’, by linking rising living standards with accentuated individualism, seemed to fulfil the American dream. It had introduced a new model of social integration to Italy.
Such developments were not much to the liking of either of the dominant ideologies in Italy at that time. It was very hard for the Catholics, as we have seen, to escape the conclusion that urbanization equalled secularization. Their traditional bases in the countryside were being destroyed. A declining number of young men wanted to be priests. Worst of all, the Catholic family was under dire attack. It was being undermined, but not by the ‘old enemy’, the atheists and materialists, the swirling communist snakes of ‘free love’ depicted on the DC posters in 1948. Rather, it was the American model of consumer society that had revealed itself as the Trojan horse within the citadel of Catholic values. In 1954 Cardinal Siri of Genoa warned of what was to come: ‘The mass of goods being produced or being coveted has often put into the shade the good that goes by the name of the “family”.’129 Mariano Rumor, the new secretary of the DC, told the party at its ninth congress in 1964 that ‘the family finds itself at the centre of the decomposition of the traditional structures of Italian society’.130 The ACLI were appalled that the ‘family is being bombarded by the insistent hammer blows of advertising pressure, which seeks to transform it into a mere appendix of the distribution chain of industrial products’.131
The Communists were hardly more content. The younger generation had little time for the traditional collective pastimes and activities of the Case del Popolo. Participation in the various organizations of the party diminished drastically in the early sixties. Attendance at section meetings fell off; UDI began a rapid decline.132 Television, consumerism and home-based living were blamed for the new isolationist trends. The values of the ‘miracle’ were roundly denounced. ‘Lascia o Raddoppia?’ was dismissed as ‘a cruel game… far distant from the life of ordinary people, from the tastes and intelligence of the Italians’.133 Tullio Seppilli, in an impassioned speech at the 1964 conference on ‘Family and Society’, urged the party to find the moral force to combat the new, insidious values of neo-capitalism.134
It was Pasolini, at a later date, who provided the strongest image of an Italy that was changing for the worse, an Italy where the old values, dialects and traditions were being destroyed for ever. The fireflies, wrote Pasolini, had disappeared: ‘In the early 60s, with the pollution of the air, and above all in the countryside with the pollution of the water (the blue streams and the transparent sunbeams), the fireflies began to disappear. The phenomenon was as rapid as lightning. After a few years they were not there any more…’135
Yet the transformations of the years 1958–63 do not point so categorically in one direction. For millions of Italians the ‘miracle’ offered a transformation which can only be called a profound liberation. For the first time the majority of the population had the possibility of living decently, of being warm and well clothed, of eating good food, and could bring up their children without fear of their being malformed or malnourished. ‘Vito’ from Cavarzere (see p. 226) had good reason to celebrate the fact that he and his family had finally joined the ‘nazionalità operaia’ (the nation of workers). The wall which had separated town and countryside, South and North, mass deprivation and relative prosperity, had been breached – not in the way that the Communists or even the Catholics would have liked, but breached it had been.
Furthermore, the processes at work in the ‘miracle’ were not all atomizing or integrative. Within the family, the old patterns of authority and dominance were rapidly breaking down, if not between men and women, at least between old and young. Urban youth, in particular, was freer than ever before, with the chance to find jobs of their own, to spend their own money, to break out of the tight circles of family lives. This new generation of youth found itself growing up in the great metropolises of the North, at the centre of national life, not in the forgotten villages of the Crotone or the Sicilian interior.
Finally, it was in the factories that the Italian model of modernization most belied any facile expectation of immediate social integration. Whereas in West Germany the workforce of the ‘miracle’ was deeply divided between German and foreign workers, in Italy the southern immigrants were of the same nationality and enjoyed the same rights as their northern counterparts. Their entry into the northern factories did not produce, as many observers expected, a new era of social peace. On the contrary. A new era of collective action, which was to last nearly twenty years, had begun, and the immigrants were to play the leading role in it.
There were many reasons for the new militancy in the northern factories. In the first place, the conditions of near full employment in the North gave the workers a self-confidence which they had lacked since the mid-1940s. Immigrant workers in particular soon discovered that in order to be sure of a job it was not necessary to keep one's head down at all costs. Protest often led to improved conditions. When it did not, and the employer reacted with reprisals, then there was nearly always the possibility of finding a job in another factory.
Secondly, the technological changes of the ‘miracle’ had transformed the organization of work in the northern factories. In the early 1960s mass production took the form of mechanical, repetitive work executed at high speed with few breaks throughout a very long working day. The ‘operai comuni, the new mass of semi-skilled workers, reacted strongly against these conditions. As their confidence grew, they demanded changes in work rhythms and pay, and eventually greater control of the work process as a means of combating their alienation.136
In addition, the southerners brought particular qualities of dissatisfaction and protest into the northern factories. One foreman in a Turin factory told Fofi: ‘the most difficult to deal with are the southerners, because they are the ones who get angry most often and who protest the most; the Piedmontese hold it against me that I've become a foreman, but they are the more tranquil and conscientious workers’.137 Within a very few years, the initial climate created by the so-called ‘cooperatives’, with the southerners acting as a bulwark against strike action, had totally changed. Immigrant workers found in the factory a focus for collective action which was denied them in the community. They brought into the factory all their resentment at the conditions which they found outside it, where so little provision had been made in terms of housing, social services, schooling and transport. Far from being the grateful ‘guests of the city’ as La Stampa would have liked, they were highly critical of a society which had forced them to migrate and which gave them so little at a time of self-evident economic plenty. As Michele Dimanico, a worker at FIAT-Spa in Turin, told Lanzardo: ‘the Piedmontese have never had the anger which these uprooted southerners have got’.138
In 1962 the national contract of the metalworkers came up for renewal. The unions demanded a reduction in the working week from forty-four to forty hours, and a five-rather than a six-day week. They also sought a lessening of pay differentials, and more freedom for trade union representatives within the factory. The focal point of agitation was Turin. Here over the previous two years a large number of small engineering factories, with predominantly immigrant workforces, had witnessed strikes of differing duration and outcome. Very often there had been no trade union organization in the factories; young southerners had taken the lead spontaneously, gradually persuading the rest of the workers to follow them. Here too there was a new interest amongst young Marxist intellectuals in the transformations which the working class was undergoing, and the possibilities which these offered for a new cycle of workers' struggle. In 1960 the review Quaderni Rossi began publication. Its analyses of the new realities of the northern cities, and its attempt to link theory with empirical inquiry, were to have a seminal influence.
The great stumbling-block in Turin was FIAT. Its workforce was the best paid in the city, it contained relatively few southerners, and the workers enjoyed the privileges of the company's efficient social assistance policies. Throughout the fifties troublemakers at FIAT had been isolated and sacked. In 1959 eleven strikes had been called in the different parts of the company, but not one had succeeded. The metalworkers' union desperately needed the FIAT workers to join the agitations, but it seemed impossible to break management's hold over them.
At the beginning of 1962 two fierce trade union struggles took place at the Lancia and Michelin factories in Turin. At Lancia, 2,000 new workers had been taken on in the previous three years, and half of the 5,500-strong workforce were southerners. Amongst the local demands were an end to short-term contract working and a third week's paid holiday. After a month of demonstrations, both inside and outside the factory, intermittent strikes, and sympathetic action from the inhabitants of Borgo San Paolo, the Lancia workers won a substantial victory.
At Michelin the workers waged a bitter and often violent struggle. There were frequent clashes with the police, the occupation of the railway station at Porta Nuova and even a march to the Turin home of the French managing director, Doubrée. Alarming episodes took place of pickets beating up foremen, white-collar workers and scabs. The strike ended after ninety days with no substantial concessions from management.139
After these two strikes, the fate of the movement in Turin depended on how the FIAT workers would react to national calls for action. On 13 June 1962, the first day of national strike action, the 93,000 FIAT workers clocked in as usual, in spite of the insults of the 100,000 workers who were on strike at other factories in Turin. Then nine days later, in response to another strike call, the trade union vanguard of FIAT workers, some 7,000 in all, came out; on 23 June, for the first time, the majority, some 60,000, stayed out. A mass strike at FIAT had finally been achieved, and with it the dawn of a new turbulent era in Italian labour relations.140
Two weeks later, the FIOM and FIM, the metalworkers' sections of the CGIL and CISL, called a general strike of all metalworkers in Turin. On 7 July the strike was a great success, but outside FIAT Mirafiori and other factories there were violent clashes as pickets blocked off the entrances to the factories, turned over cars and beat up some of the managers. During that morning, however, it was announced that the UIL and SIDA, the FIAT company union, had reached a separate agreement with FIAT management. Incensed by this news, some 6,000-7,000 workers assembled in the afternoon outside the UIL offices in Piazza Statuto, in the heart of the city.
For the next two and a half days, Piazza Statuto became the site of an extended urban riot. An extraordinary series of running battles took place between demonstrators and police. The demonstrators broke windows, threw stones, set up rudimentary barricades and repeatedly charged the police lines. They were armed with slings, sticks and chains. The police replied by driving their jeeps at the crowd, filling the piazza with tear gas and using the butts of their rifles on the demonstrators. The clashes went on late into the night both on Saturday 7 July and Monday 9 July. Pajetta of the PCI and Sergio Garavini of the CGIL tried to persuade the crowds to disperse, but they were ignored and manhandled. Over a thousand demonstrators were arrested by the police, though the numbers charged were far fewer.
When the city had recovered its calm, La Stampa denounced the demonstrators indignantly. The trade unions, the PSI and the PCI all argued that the violent clashes had been the work of agents provocateurs. Diego Novelli, the future Communist mayor of Turin, produced evidence that youths had been given 1,500 lire each and cigarettes in order to go and make trouble in the piazza. However, when those who had been charged came to trial, it was difficult to escape from the disconcerting truth: the great majority of those who had taken part in the riots of Piazza Statuto were young workers, and at least half of them came from the South. Lanzardo's collection of eye-witness testimonies, published in 1979, further confirms this picture. The piazza had been full of young and very young workers, and there had been more than one Communist ex-partisan there as well, helping to organize the crowd.141
The trade union battles of 1962 and the events in Piazza Statuto gave notice that any dreams of social harmony developing as a result of the ‘miracle’ were profoundly misplaced. If on the one hand the boom produced a much greater individualism in Italian society, it was also responsible for the explosive meeting of southern youth with northern labour and Resistance traditions. The subversive tendencies of the Italian popular classes were far from dead.