ITALY'S HAUNTED SOUTH

...But the harsh and inescapable truth is that the government in its first twelve years of concentrated activity in the South has hardly begun to overcome the failures of the 100 years since the Southern kingdom's incorporation into Italy...

...Climate, geography, and history have combined to make the lives of the Southerners difficult...

...Despite these reforms many peasants still prefer to live in their own hovels and trudge, or ride by mule or scooter, to their patch of land, rather than live on the new but solitary farms...

...now the empire is gone and the Communists are the second largest party in Italy...

...One is told in the South that under Mussolini some Southerners went happily to fight for an empire in Africa and against the Communists in Spain...

...The hope of resurrection typified by Crotone is strong elsewhere around the Mediterranean...

...The official celebrations that were held after the 1960 Olympics to mark GABRIEt GERSH is a free lance writer who specializes in Mediterranean affairs...

...While the annual per capita income in the South rose from approximately $200 to $302, in the North it increased from approximately $378 to $685...

...Even more discouraging is the fact that in the last twelve years the contribution of the South to total national income has fallen steadily from 23.5 per cent to 20.3 per cent...

...There was a life once at this promontory," wrote Norman Douglas, the greatest of English travel writers on Southern Italy, from a Calabrian cape...

...For to many Southerners, the intense planning, the open-handedness, the tenacity of purpose, and the feeling of national pride displayed by the government in its feverish preparations for the Olympics, constituted precisely those elements of urgency characteristically lacking in its handling of the enduring problems of the South...

...instead, they resign themselves once more to poverty, convinced that, after an abortive gesture by the authorities, nothing has changed...

...It will be for the next generation to go farther, but the natural rate of population increase may by then have made the small farm quite useless unless many peasants either find another way of earning a living or migrate in even greater numbers to the North...

...On the square with its gangs of workmen, one could imagine that he was back in Rome itself, hearing the familiar question: Could this chaos possibly be put in order in time for the Olympic games, only a few months off...

...fountains flowed, and cornfields waved in the genial sun...

...Africa is awakening and Northern Italy has already reached its full stride...

...For some months the unemployed have something to do— making a road, building a block of apartments, digging a reservoir...

...Do not be misled by celebrations or claims of national unity," was the warning sounded in 1960, It is still heard frequently today, for North and South are essentially foreign to each other and are united in name more than in reality...

...earth and sea are only waiting for the enchanter's •Wand...

...On the other hand, the port of Gela, on the south coast, is already the Italian point of entry for oil from North Africa and the Middle East, and the decision to build a bridge over the Straits of Messina between Sicily and the Italian mainland has heartened those Sicilians who envision their island as a highway for trade between Africa and Europe...

...Togliatti took advantage of this new Church attitude by proclaiming that Communism and Catholicism were not incompatible and that Communists and Catholics can work together in harmony for the good of the country...

...The effects of these new factors in the last election are difficult to evaluate with any accuracy although they undoubtedly contributed to the gains of the Communists in the South and elsewhere...

...This is another indication of how retarded is reform in Southern Italy...

...Italy's Haunted South by GABRIEL GERSH Tn the spring of 1960 the Piazza Garibaldi, the vast square in front of the main railroad station at Naples, was a temporary desert, man-made to make way for the new station even then rising from the dust as a challenge to the modern grace of rival Rome's famous terminal...

...A typical example of the South's suffocating economic stagnation is Palma di Montechiaro in Western Sicily, where the peasants live with their animals in hovels unfit for human habitation...

...Many Southerners will admit that conditions have improved, that progress has been made even if it is disappointingly slow, disjointed, and mainly limited to certain areas...

...Despite the pessimistic implications of these statistics, 1962 produced the first signs that industrialization was beginning to take hold in the South, with Taranto, Latina, and Brindisi as the focal points for private and public investment...

...Moreover, in this election the Communists were helped by two elements whose effectiveness have not yet been accurately gauged—television and the new attitude of the Catholic Church towards politics...

...Famous as the background of Giuseppe di Lampedusa's novel, The Leopard, Palma is pervaded by what the author called "the sense of death which even the frantic Sicilian light can never dispel...

...A more ominous possibility, however, is that even if industry should come to the South on a large scale, it might already be too late to have the hoped-for effect of a universal provider, for now the trend is to employ fewer men and more machines...

...Most startling is the contrast between the dollar value of per capita incomes of the two regions during the same period...

...For some time now the Communists have been increasing their efforts in the South...

...The great dream of the impoverished South is the development of industry...

...To a Sicilian peasant outside Marsala, who is unhappily housed without water on a small plot allotted him under the land reform, it means the digging of a well ("Am I supposed to dig it myself...

...Now, the Southerner is aware that his dream of industrialization is realizable only through national government aid on a massive scale...

...The Christian Democrats also suffer from the disadvantage of close identification with the landlords and industrialists, and the public awareness of their party's long history of neglect of the South...

...These figures are disappointing, especially since total investment in the South has been $3.5 billion in the past dozen years...

...Is this just a dream...

...For instance, recent statistics disclosed that from 1951 to 1962 the difference between the per capita income in the South and the rest of the country widened by 1.3 per cent...

...A century ago Southerners fought for Garibaldi while a few took up banditry to harry the newly-forged unity...

...They supplement their meager wages by renting their mules and selling manure...

...Christian Democracy cannot pose as the popular successor to Bourbon rule in a land steeped in historical tradition...

...This was contrary to the expectations of the Communist Party, which had feared the loss of many active members who had migrated to the North...

...To a small town in Lucania it means a cement factory dreamed about for years...

...The major feature of Southern Italy's agriculture is still the vast estates (latifundia) owned by absentee landlords...

...Every village in the South has a television-equipped coffee bar in the piazza, where the population gathers in the evening...

...Given the unemployment, poverty, and backwardness of the South, it is hardly surprising that the Communists have made inroads among the workers and peasants...

...the earth and sea are still awaiting the enchanter...

...It needs to find ways of transforming the South, of enlisting the energies of its people, of seeking new outlets for investment...

...Monarchist or republican, the cry for government help for the South varies only in particulars...

...This loosening of the Church's grip on the voters aided the Communists, for it freed many Italians to cast their votes as their political inclinations, rather than as their consciences, dictated...

...In several of the larger towns in the South the public works projects have given jobs to many of the jobless...

...However, the North's response to this challenge has not been enthusiastic...

...Argosies touched here, leaving priceless gifts...

...The outcome of the recent election in Italy has underlined the anxiety of many Italians for the future of the South...

...Because of constant neglect in the past, the task of coaxing a living from this largely barren terrain is rewarded only with the utmost privation...

...Under Italy's land reform program, poor land from certain large estates has been irrigated and divided into small holdings, each with a small farmhouse...

...Government aid means, too, the resurrection of ancient port cities like Crotone, a Calabrian coastal town, which the local authorities point out was in ancient times a prosperous Greek colony and a commercial and cultural center...

...Doubtless there will be life again...

...the centenary of the end of Bourbon rule in Italy belied the grim political and economic realities facing the country today...

...That fell an immediate victim to political unification under the Northern House of Savoy in 1861, when Italy's industry became based in the Northern triangle formed by Milan, Genoa, and Turin...

...inevitably, the main stimulus of Christian Democracy begins and ends in anti-Communism...

...This struggle dominates affairs beyond the limits of politics and national elections and casts a shadow of distrust and suspicion over the region...

...To another Southerner it means more schools to overcome illiteracy and provide skilled training...

...Various reports on the government's recent years of activity in the South show that a policy of investment, financial incentives, and public works at best has only prevented the gap between Northern and Southern living standards from widening as much as it might if nothing were done...

...Yet the problems are enormous...

...Many do not understand that such public projects bring returns in the long run...

...His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Commonweal, The Christian Century, and many other publications here and abroad...

...Only Southern Italy, lamented a Communist school teacher in a small Southern village, continues to slumber...

...Because of these factors, the North, with its wealth and dynamism, faces an urgent challenge in the South...

...The vision of a substantial role for Southern Italy in a Mediterranean recharged by an African revival is part of the argument which leading members of the Sicilian Regional Government make to back their assertion that within ten years their island will be one of the most industrialized regions of Italy...

...Most of the South is mountainous, and only the coastal area around Naples, the strip along the Adriatic below Mount Gargano, and the Tyrrhenian coast of Calabria possess fertile soil capable of producing olives, grapes, and oranges...

...Nor can Christian Democracy serve as a renewing force born of anti-Fascism because in most of the South the Allied forces arrived relatively early in World War II, and there was no prolonged heroic role for the resistance movement in the area...

...The degree of frustration is reflected in a slogan on the walls of a Lucanian town: "We are Italians, too...

...Why not an equally worthy station for Naples, the Neapolitans insisted, to receive visitors to this former capital of the Southern Italian kingdom, seat of its own kings until Garibaldi came a century ago to make it part of a united Italy...

...Elsewhere in Europe land reform means something different —the accumulation of small holdings into larger ones, so that the best use can be made of mechanization...

...It is a place riddled with politics, as one can see from myriad posters plastered on village walls—manifestoes versus declamations, denunciations against denials, clerical black opposing revolutionary red...

...The Northern industrialist, who prefers to expand his factories in the North rather than open new ones in the South, argues that available labor in the South, plentiful though it may be, is still unskilled and backward...

...Whether the land reform program has had an impact on the South cannot yet be judged...

...One of the causes of this low wheat yield is the shortage of water, which not only prevents the peasants from intensively tilling the soil, but also from living near the land they till...

...During the recent election campaign, millions of Southerners saw the election dramatized on television by Premier Amin-tore Fanfani, Communist leader Palmi-ro Togliatti, and others...

...It can claim little kinship with Garibaldi, for he was an anticlerical, still deprecated by the Church authorities who are the party's mentors...

...It is a belief strongly held in ports such as Naples and Bari which knew greater prosperity during the days of the Fascist empire and can now conceive of improvement from renewed links with Africa...

...In Naples, even though the yachting races were the only Olympic events scheduled to be held there, this uncertainty became such a bitter fixation it persisted even after the terminal was completed—on schedule...

...He also points to the lack of transportation, especially needed to ship raw materials to the South where they are in short supply...

...The Communists were able to exploit the grievances, real and imaginary, of the people, and promised them more than the government offered...

...Of this sum, about $1.8 billion has been spent for permanent military installations, $1.6 billion for industrial development, and the rest for schools and educational projects...

...And today...

...The protagonist and the antagonist in Italian politics, even more in the South than elsewhere, seem to be necessary to each other...

...Vast stretches of treeless plains in Sicily are covered with scrub or wheat—one-seventh of Italy's wheat-growing area is in this historic granary —but the yield is hardly more than half the Italian average and less than one-third that of Lombardy...

...Southerners with a knowledge of their history of the past century know that the Neapolitan kingdom saw the first railroad in Italy, the first steamboat, and one of the first steel mills...

...Many of the peasants in Southern Italy still live in hill towns, originally built for protection against disease, pirates, and invaders, or in villages in the plains, where they till the soil on plots often many miles away from their homes...

...The South today is beginning to display many hopeful signs, from electric generators to elegant, emancipated girls, but it still remains an astonishingly backward place, a place of mules and ignorant priests, of ancient folkways and taboos, of dust, dirt, distrust, and decadence...

...The increase in the Communist vote was registered in every one of the nineteen Italian regions, but it was generally higher in the South than in the North...

...The election has underscored the failure of Christian Democracy to win the support of the masses in the South...

...The town's 20,000 population comprises laborers and peasants who manage to find work only four months a year, earning at most $16 a month...

...The second new element was the Vatican's disengagement from politics...

...Many Southerners believe that a large number of reforms initiated by the government were attributable to the fear of the dominant Christian Democratic Party that inaction would lead to Communist political successes...

...Parish priests were no longer bound by instructions to invoke the sanctions of the Church against those who voted for the Left...

...Some towns of the South greet one with movies and gaudy espresso bars...

...Traveling through these towns, one cannot help being struck by the scale of public building...

...When the work is completed they relapse, more cynical and disgruntled than ever, into unwilling idleness...

...A Doric column attests to its former glory, to say nothing of the memory of Pythagoras...

...Nearly half a century since those words were written, Southern Italy still slumbers...

...They do nof easily adapt to peasant cooperatives which would help them manage their holdings more efficiently...

...Although the South, in its own way, was in the forefront of Italian industrialization, it never acquired the solid base necessary for sustained industrial development...

...To the people of a hilltop town, set back from the Ionian coast of Calabria, government aid means a new road linking their town with the outside world...

...Is the South's claim of neglect by the national government unfair...

...The study of the Olivetti factory near Naples, which was the subject of Ottiero Ottieri's moving sociological novel, Men at the Gate, has shown that Southerners, once given the chance, have the same aptitude for skilled labor as those in the North...

...In some ways it is, because much of the government's effort has not been wasted...

...Since 1956, when Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser was making his own contribution to the awakening of the northern stretches of Africa, traffic in the Adriatic port of Bari has decreased each year, even though it is the site of the Levant Fair, an exposition for the entire Eastern Mediterranean...

...Because of their superior television team and the colorful personality of Togliatti, the Communists were able to project a dynamic image to audiences all over Italy...

...Others remain so barren and vacuous, emanating such an arid sense of rancor and boredom, that when one arrives in their listless squares, searching for accommodations, or a meal, or a lively face, he is reminded of the nightmarish villages of the Egyptian delta...

...However, serious problems arise when a particular project is finished...