APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200080001-6
and hot summers and reasonable rainfall all year long—a rich land with a modern, varied agriculture. The south is the brilliantly sunny Mediterranean land, where the summers are hot and so dry that except where the land is irrigated only drought-resistant vegetation can survive—particularly the classical olives, wheat, and grapes. The pale green fields of spring soon become arid and tawny, and sometimes they are further burned by the dry sirocco (hot, dust-laden winds that blow from Africa). Most stream beds are dry in summer, making irrigation difficult even for large landowners; big dams and government money are needed. Rain comes to the south in autumn and winter, often as violent storms that fill dry beds with raging torrents that erode and destroy.
The differences are historic as well as geographic. The self-governing cities of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the centers of wealth and civilization, were in the north. The south was perpetually a colony (in the sense of being exploited); first of the Greeks; then of the Romans, who almost obliterated its thriving culture; and when Rome fell, of Arabs, Normans, Spaniards, and French in turn. The unprotected peasants retreated to hilltop villages for safety from such marauders as the Vikings and later the Barbary pirates, and the coastal lowlands that had been the granary of the Greek and Roman empires became deserted marshes. Ancient drainage and irrigation systems went out of use; neglected lowlands became malarial and shunned, and the peasants worked the dry slopes and highlands with effort and ingenuity, usually for absentee landlords.
Partly as a result of this history, the people themselves are different. Bustling, cosmopolitan northern Italy contains most of the physical types of western and central Europe; in fact, there are probably as many blonds there as in some regions of Germany. The people of the south are more uniform, the majority being what many Americans assume to be the Italian type—with dark hair and eyes and olive skin.
From the beginning, the unification of Italy seemed to bring growing prosperity to the north and nothing to
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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200080001-6
