APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200080001-6
the south. The north tended to regard the south as an exasperating millstone around its neck, while the south envied the north and blamed Rome for the difference. Over the years various official inquiries were made into conditions in the south, which produced some valuable information—but no action.
Early in the 20th century, the government in Rome, spurred by the example of a few northern philanthropists, began to take action. Special laws established programs of public works, tax exemptions, and other assistance to the south, but progress was slow. The major public works project, the aqueduct of Puglia, which was designed to bring water from the mountains across to the tableland at the heel of Italy, was begun in 1906 and completed only in 1938. Mussolini launched projects for land reform, drainage, irrigation, and resettlement in various parts of Italy, and these were of some value to a few southern places. Land reclamation projects lagged because of endemic malaria in the lowlands—in 1935 one out of seven workmen draining the Maccarese marshes died of malaria. It was not until the Allied armies arrived with DDT in 1943 that the reclamation of the malarial lowlands became possible.
The Safety Valve
For more than 100 years, emigration has provided a safety valve for the population pressure in the south. The outward flow, to many countries besides the United States, began as a movement of about 120,000 persons a year during the latter part of the 19th century. By the turn of the century the figure had doubled, and between 1901 and 1914 it averaged more than 600,000 (the 873,000 emigrants of 1913 were the high point of the exodus). After World War I emigration was restricted, partly by the receiving countries and partly by the Fascist regime in Italy, which was in the throes of Mussolini's colonial adventure. Much money and energy was wasted in Ethiopia, Libya, and Somalia before the dream of settling in those areas was abandoned. An estimated 25-30 million people left Italy between 1861 and World War II—yet the population in Italy increased by 20 million during the same period.
Called the "hemorrhage of the Mezzogiorno" by the southern press, this outflow recommenced after World War II, but by 1955 it had shifted mostly toward the northern cities of Italy, creating a new social problem there. (To some extent this movement to the north compensates for the high birthrate of the south—double that of the north.) The north already knew southerners, usually in ill-paid official jobs that northerners disdained or did not need; cities like Milan and Torino seemed full of Sicilian and Calabrian policemen, postmen, and tax collectors. But these had been white-collar workers from middle-class southern families. After 1955 it was the really poor, sometimes illiterate, young peasants who swarmed to the north for jobs in industry. By then a city like Milan had recovered from the war; it had got its people housed and its children in school, and had almost forgotten about illiteracy. The intruding southerners found themselves blamed for disease, delinquency, and crime; discriminated against by landlords; and referred to scornfully as "Africans." In many places the municipal officials and the church seemed unable to cope with their plight, but the Communist Party and its labor-union affiliates set up a massive grassroots program to help them just to the unfamiliar life—a policy that has paid off in votes in the elections of the last decade.
Rehabilitation
By the end of World War II the already wretched standards of living in the south had become worse, agrarian riots and peasant seizures of land demonstrated the mood of the southerners, and it had become apparent to the government at Rome that something must really be done. Between 1947 and 1957 at least 340 laws affecting the south were passed by national and regional (on Sicily and Sardinia) parliaments, and many more have been passed since then. The most important was the establishment in March 1950 of the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno (Fund for the South), designed to the be the chief instrument of government policy for the rehabilitation of the south. The Cassa has not replaced the existing government agencies, which have continued their normal activities in the are, but it has specialized in a massive program for economic development and has allocated billions of dollars for land reclamation, land reform, irrigation, and industrialization. In most parts of the south the land reform program operated with relative honesty and efficiency (Sicily being the outstanding exception) and the Cassa did not become the gigantic pork barrel that its opponents had predicted.
Vast areas—sometimes miles square—were the hereditary property of dukes and counts and others, who probably lived in Rome and who seldom, if ever, visited their holding. Some had a sentimental feeling for the ancestral land, but few had any practical interest beyond the revenues. Most owners wanted expenses kept to a minimum, and were not interested in land improvement and modernization of agriculture.
Drastic land reform seemed a logical step in dealing with the south's farm problems; unemployed war veterans wanted land or jobs, and in some places squatters were already settling on neglected lands of
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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200080001-6
