ITALY IN 1943 was little changed, outside of its major cities, since the time of Garibaldi and Cavour. It was still predominantly a peasant country, of great and unspoiled natural beauty, of sleepy provincial cities, of enduring poverty, especially in the South, of rural culture and local dialects. It was also a country in terrible crisis. Mussolini's desire for imperial expansion had led to the invasion of Italy both from the north, by the Germans, and from the south, by the Allies. The very integrity of the nation state, which was less than eighty years old, was called into question. As one British officer in Italy commented at the end of 1943: ‘Collectively, they [the Italians] are to us a beaten people who live in squalor and have made a mess of their country, their administration and their lives.’1
Forty-five years later, Italy has been transformed out of all recognition. It has become one of the most economically powerful nations of the world, with a Gross Domestic Product more or less equal to that of Britain. It has undergone an extraordinary process of enrichment, urbanization and secularization. The peasant cultures of the previous centuries have not disappeared altogether, but they have been replaced overwhelmingly by a single national urban culture. There has been an unprecedented migration of country dwellers to the cities, and of southern Italians to the North. During the years of the Republic, Italy has witnessed the most profound social revolution in the whole of its history. This great transformation is the principal protagonist of this book.
Italy has been transformed, but the continuities in its history are not easily set aside. While charting the country's dramatic passage to modernity,I have tried to keep in mind certain themes and issues which have been constants in Italian history at least since the Risorgimento: the incapacity of the élites to establish their hegemony over the classes that lay below them; the weakness and inefficiency of the state; the strength of the Catholic church in Italian society; the class consciousness of significant sections of Italian urban and rural workers; the special political role of the ceti medi, the middle classes of Italian society; the enduring problem of the South.
There is one other theme upon which I have tried to concentrate in particular. It is that of the relationship between family and society. Attachment to the family has probably been a more constant and less evanescent element in Italian popular consciousness than any other. Yet the question of how this devotion to family has shaped Italian history, or been shaped by it, has rarely been posed.
The few scholars who have ventured on to this terrain have been disparaging in the extreme about the social role of the Italian family. They have placed the emphasis firmly on Italian familism, i.e. the accentuation of exclusive family values and actions. In the late 1950s the American sociologist Edward Banfield achieved notoriety with his denunciation of the ‘amoral familism’ of the peasants he had studied at Chiaramonte in the Basilicata. For Banfield the extreme backwardness of Chiaramonte was due to ‘the inability of the villagers to act together for their common good, or indeed, for any good transcending the immediate, material interest of the nuclear family’.2 More recently the Italian anthropologist, Carlo Tullio-Altan, has extended Banfield's judgement both geographically and chronologically. For Tullio-Altan, the exaltation of the family and the distrust of collective action are to be found in virulent form as far back as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in the family diaries and correspondence of Tuscan writers such as Leon Battista Alberti. Familism, for Tullio-Altan, has been one of the great banes of modern Italy: ‘In most of Italian society, in both the North and South, there prevailed, and there still prevails, the moral viewpoint of the individualistic Albertian family, with its disastrous social consequences. This is the true and profound root of national qualunquismo*.’3
Any visitor to Italy, whether in the 1950s or the 1980s, let alone the 1440s, would immediately recognize what Banfield and Tullio-Altan are trying to describe. Yet I would like to suggest that the relationship between family and collectivity is almost certainly more complex and less one-sided than they would have us believe.
By way of an introduction to this theme, I would like to quote briefly an extraordinary life story recounted to Danilo Dolci in Palermo in 1949. ‘Gino O.’ was an orphan turned pickpocket, who spent his teenage years in various reform institutions, and then joined the Communist Party in 1943. He soon became a leading member of the Palermo Communist federation. He told Dolci of two events in 1949 which epitomize the variable and complex nature of the relationship between family and society. On the first occasion he went to the national congress at Mantua of the Federbraccianti (the rural labourers' trade union). There he was moved to tears by the speech of a woman delegate from the province of Lecce, in the deep south-east of the country. Asking pardon for not being able to speak Italian, she declared: ‘Until they give us the land, and as long as my little ones walk around with bare feet, I won't ever tire of fighting side by side with my woman friend, and I don't give a damn for the beatings we get from the police.’4 In this case, as is obvious, family deprivations were a prime mover to involvement in collective action.
By contrast, ‘Gino O.’ went in the same year to one of the many land occupations of the great estates in Sicily, at Marineo:
Here I received a hard political lesson, from a practical point of view. Because while I, having read about the collective farms in Russia, exhorted the peasants to cultivate the land collectively, they instead proceeded straight away to split it up and work it individually. They concentrated on marking out their portion with a belt or some stones or the reins of a mule, just as when people get on a train they rush to occupy a seat, throwing their hat or bag or newspaper on to it. To me such attitudes seemed strange and I called over a peasant to tell him that it was not the right way to do things. He replied: ‘Excuse me, comrade Gino: if I work my plot with a mule, and next to me there's someone without one, it's only fair that when it comes to harvest time I should have much more to take home than him.’5
Here too, the lesson seems clear: the deep-rooted individualism of southern peasant culture was far stronger than any abstract appeal to families to pool their resources.
Individualism and solidarity, family and collectivity: I have tried to mark out the changing nature of these relationships in the forty-five years of Italian history since the fall of Benito Mussolini.
Lastly, I would like to draw the attention of readers to the geographical divisions which I have used in this work (see the map on p. 427). Following the lead of the sociologist Arnaldo Bagnasco in his book Tre Italie,6 I have tried to trace Italy's social and economic development with reference to three major geographical areas: the North-West; the Centre and North-East (often referred to as the Third Italy); and the South, mainland and islands. These divisions, of course, are far from perfect; in purely historical terms it would be better to talk not of three Italys but of three hundred. None the less, a tripartite division does seem a more effective way of describing the reality of contemporary Italy than the old North–South divide. In the statistical appendix Giulio Ghellini and I have added a fourth dimension, and have treated Lazio as a separate entity because of the special statistical weight of the city of Rome within that region.
Very many people, especially in Italy, have helped me in the preparation of this book. I am deeply grateful to them all, but I must make special mention of those who have read and criticized in detail major parts of the manuscript: Luigi Bobbio, Stephen Gundle, Norman Hampson, Bob Lumley, Luisa Passerini, Claudio Pavone, Anna Rossi-Doria. Each of them has made invaluable comments, but none of them bears any responsibility for the final version. I must also thank the Leverhulme Foundation, the Nuffield Foundation and Churchill College, Cambridge, for financial assistance. I am very grateful to my colleagues in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge for much support and encouragement; I am especially indebted to John Barber and John Dunn. I have to thank Marcello Flores for his constant friendship and for advising me on various problems of historical interpretation. Over the past three years, Ayşe Saraçgil has helped me in innumerable ways; together, an unlikely Anglo-Turkish Italian-speaking team, we have tried to understand something about the country which has become her home. Neil Middleton first encouraged me to write on contemporary Italy; at Penguin, Peter Carson, Caroline Robertson and Esther Sidwell have helped me a very great deal. Finally, I would like to thank Vittorio Foa, who has been the formative influence in the making of this book and to whom I dedicate it, with very great affection.
Churchill College, Cambridge
March 1989