Italy: Changing the Face of a Land

That backward and poverty-stricken bottom half of the Italian boot, Il Mezzogiorno, was long considered a good place to be from and a hard place to get to. Economically and physically isolated, a separate and underdeveloped land within a developed nation, the south stood in harsh contrast to Italy’s industrialized north. Now all the old ideas about the south may have to be revised. Last week, with flying banners and ecclesiastical pomp, the Italians opened the last stretch of the 468-mile Milan-to-Salerno Autostrada del Sole, the first modern highway link between north and south.

The “Superhighway of the Sun,” a four-lane expressway that avoids all cities and villages on its course, will move steadily southward and eventually connect with Sicily at the Strait of Messina, serving as a vital economic life line for the entire region. It is only the latest of Italy’s ambitious efforts to help Il Mezzogiorno (which means midday) move, in one great leap, from a medieval society directly into the age of automation.

Many of the 18 million southerners have already skipped centuries, advancing from their primitive agricultural economy into the industrial revolution. In parts, farmers still live in cone-shaped huts more suggestive of the Sudan than of Italy, and peasant women walk three steps behind their husbands. But the south now boasts Italy’s biggest steel mill, its biggest oil refinery and its biggest petrochemical plant. Naples, now Italy’s second biggest seaport (after Genoa), has become so thoroughly industrialized that there is little more room to expand, and Caserta to the north has grown into a mighty concentration of more than 100 plants. The city of Latina, just below Rome, has risen out of a drained marsh to become a bustling center of steel processing, pharmaceuticals and cinema studios. The discovery of methane gas reserves has brought three major petroleum companies to Ferrandina. At Sicily’s port of Augusta, the Esso refinery has attracted so many other industries that Sicilians call the region “piccolo Milano”—little Milan.

Preparing the Way. Government and private enterprise have combined to bring about this transformation. The Italian government has poured in about $9 billion for roads, power, schools and housing since 1950, has also persuaded the U.S., the World Bank and other international agencies to help out with massive loans. With its Cassa per il Mezzogiorno—Fund for the South—the government has lured industry through tax incentives, custom-free importation of plant equipment, easy credit, cash grants, free building sites and worker training programs. Such state-owned enterprises as the holding company I.R.I. and the petroleum company E.N.I. are required to channel their major investments south of Rome; in the Naples area, I.R.I. has built a plant for almost every one of its many industrial lines.

Private corporations also have been moving south, attracted partly by the government incentives, partly by the south’s low-cost labor and the challenge of a relatively untapped market. Such Italian giants as Olivetti, Montecatini and Alfa Romeo have built plants, and several others have decided to shift their headquarters from Milan to Rome to be closer to the south. One after another, U.S. companies have also opened southern plants—American Cyanamid, Esso, Gulf, Goodyear, Litton Industries, Pfizer, Raytheon, Remington Rand and Willys.

City Transformed. The south’s most spectacular new industry is the $500 million steel mill at the old port city of Taranto, which was partly constructed by U.S. Steel. Built by the state-controlled Italsider, a subsidiary of I.R.I., the plant will start its first blast furnace this month, and by early 1965 will be producing steel at the rate of 2,200,000 tons a year and employing 4,500 workers. But the plant’s impact has already transformed Taranto, a once decaying city where not long ago electric lights and running water were still dreams of some far-distant future. A cement plant has risen to serve the steel mill, and the old docks have taken on a new bustle. Workers are buying motor scooters and small cars, thus opening the way for new filling stations and garages; Royal Dutch/Shell already plans to open a new refinery. Taranto’s per capita income has doubled in four years.

The most profound change in Il Mezzogiorno has been the slow development of an “industrial mentality” among people who had never known anything but manual work. At Brindisi, where Caesar’s legions put to sea for Egypt and Syria, Montecatini and Shell have joined to build a $300 million petrochemical complex where nearly every worker has to have some kind of skill. “You should have seen our raw material,” says Mario Natta, the plant manager. “They were agricultural day laborers, peasants, garbage collectors, street sweepers—and we have transformed them into skilled workers in an automated industry.”

As the new mentality deepens and broadens, other companies will have an easier time setting up shop, and the southerners will have more opportunities to earn a decent living without leaving home. In fact, the tide of migration has already started to turn: southerners, hearing of what is happening in the south, are moving back—and bringing with them the valuable skills acquired in the north.