Italy Today
Where it is Always Noon
By BRIAN INGLIS THEY wanted to show us what Italian industry has been doing; the ten-day tour included a glimpse of everything from offshoots of Monte- catini, the Italian ICI, to the humblest road im- provement project in the South. But chiefly, I suspect, they wanted us to admire ENI. ENI- Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi—is a Regional Gas Board gone native; a minor State Corporation which, under the direction of Enrico Mattei, has become probably • the most influential and certainly the most controversial industrial enterprise in the country; blessed by motorists, detested by the General Confederation of In- dustry, and regarded by the Government with the awed indulgence which parents give to an unmanageable but highly profitable infant prodigy.
But we began with conventional private enter- prise : appropriately, Fiat. Fiat held an early place in my affections; our first family car, or at least the first I can remember, was that Fiat model with lines like an old-fashioned bath tub, floating on the then fashionable Michelin 'balloon' tyres. For me, Fiat became for Italy what Guinness still is for Ireland, a kind of national symbol; and until Olivetti broke into the British market most of us would have been hard put to name, off-hand, any other Italian firm. Fiat may no longer be as dominant as it once was in Italian industry, but it is even more all-pervading; the firm puts out nearly four- fifths of the road vehicles produced in the country, and it not unusual at the time of year we were there, after the tourist season, to see a whole streetful of cars parked, or jammed, all Fiats.
But I looked forward with no pleasure to seeing round the Fiat factory. We had arrived in Turin the evening before, too late to take a proper look; but it happens to be one of those places which immediately engage affection, and 1 would have preferred to walk around the town, rather than along a production line not signifi- cantly different from those which can be seen in Cowley or Detroit. But Fiat have found the solu- tion to the problem of entertaining journalists who have come from duty rather than interest: an elongated bubble car, looking like a mobile CPR Observation Dome, which they put us into at the factory gates, and in which they brought us not merely to the production line—the most we had expected—but up and down the produc- tion line, so that we had no need to move from our seats throughout the interminable miles which separate the first process, whatever it may be, to that moment when the completed car, fitted together by what seems to be an inconsequential union of engine, chassis and body, is driven away to be tested on a miniature racing circuit.
Apart from the comfort, this is a method which minimises the hazard of that menace, the avid seeker-after-information. The pace of a party of journalists—there were six of us—is the pace not of its slowest but of its keenest mem- ber; and there is always one compulsive ques- tioner. Our party, I was to find, was not the worst—as we were to realise when we met the worst, later in the tour; an American journalist who wrote down not only everything she was told by her hosts, but everything, that we. the other journalists, said. Fiat entertained us afterwards at the Carnht°' opposite the old Turin parliament house-145! the parliament of Piedmont, then for a time a' Italy, until Piedmont stepped down, after ° brief Florentine interlude, in favour of Roma i They gave us fonduta con tartufi, the local speciality which my neighbour unkindly tran1 lated µs trailed welsh rarebit; and at the ell they offered to bring us into another part of the restaurant to meet a visiting Hollywood celebrity' Hitchcock. He would be doing the produetil line that afternoon, he told us; and I thought detected relief when he heard of the existeocc of the bubble bus. The prospect reminded him that he had once had an idea for a film in which the cameras would take viewers along a car production line A conversation on this and that, elaborately casual, would be heard over the film. FinallY tht fitted-together car would roll off the asselab.t line; a man would open the door to drive away; and a body would fall out. Hitchcock had suggested the idea, he told to automobile manufacturers in Detroit. They did not seem to care for it.
South do not like working in the heat of the —or, indeed, at other times. In Sicily we heard many complaints frorn technicians brought down from the Indus North North as managers and instructors: that the Sicilians are obstinately uncivilised — to dwellers and loungers who do not want better themselves. We had plenty of first-hang evidence that this was to outward appearalle,e, true—and not merely the rancour of disc gruntled exiles from Milan. As we drific9 through the Sicilian countryside, which look more North African than European, we silty cottage after cottage, newly built. lying el/1Po because the owners — former agriculiit labourers who have qualified for small farms under the post-war redistribution schemes refuse to live in them, preferring to stay in the town hovels, or their caves.
Cassa per it Mezzogiorno
The best publicised of the Italian Govern ,; ment's post-war projects are the relief works fat the South, designed to reduce unemploYraenit , and settle families on redistributed and rehab. litated agricultural land. But for all the Oilhliciti they have received, the organisation that ca' s ordinates them, the Cassa per 11 Mezzogiorn°' it little known outside Italy : possibly because has lacked a 'Mattel to give it an impact. Free it translated it means 'Fund for the Land whcrf.ii is Always Noon'; and its name indicates one °I. chief difficulties: the fact that people in t",' But why should they move? The cave- dweller in Sicily is not such an obstinate savage as he appears. A cave—he can argue—is pre- ferable to the ordinary Sicilian shack : cooler in hot weather, warmer in cold; the absence of light is no disadvantage, as Italians of all classes tend to build to exclude the sun; and if caves lack plumbing, so does most accommodation in the Mezzogiorno. The new farmer has spent all his life as a town-dweller : without company he is lonely, lost. He looks upon his holding exactly as city-dwellers in Britain look upon their allot- ments; he uses the cottage which the Govern- ment has provided for him as a lock-up, in which he can store his seed and tools; often, he does not even bother to open the shutters, so that their paint still seals them down. As for taking jobs in industry, the ambitious have al- ready gone North, leaving behind men who are content with a scraped living, and who do not like the prospect of working regular and long hours in that climate.
The Sicilian is not lazy; remove him from his indolent environment and he works as hard as the next man. And if he lives in primitive condi- tions it is because he happens to enjoy company a lot and to value privacy not at all. In the past the temptation has been to let him lie. But the Government does not want a rural slum on its conscience; and it knows that the Communists would exploit the Mezzogiorno's poverty. The Communists can offer the promise of greater luxury without greater effort, by arguing that if landlords and bloodsucking middlemen are liquidated, the profits from the land will be available for all without extra effort. Nor do the Communists have to worry, as the other parties do, about having to implement their promises, because if they were to achieve power there would be no further elections in which the voter could throw them out again. So the Christian Democrats have to compete with the promises, but also to produce results. Hence the Cassa per ii Mezzogiorno. The Cassa is directed by Gabriele Pescatore, a heavily built man with the air of a boxer turned promoter, not unlike a tough, rather melancholy- looking Richard Nixon. The Cassa is often re- ferred to patronisingly in Italy as if it were simply a front, a kind of industrial baroque to impress visitors, and it was about this that we chiefly wanted to question him; but he was easily able to counter our inquisition with the help of the argument that the Cassa could not have been expected in its short life to have pro- duced striking results—its chief purpose, so far, having been to produce `Infrastructure.'
'Infrastructure' has become a mode word in Italy; and particularly in connection with the Cassa. Briefly, the argument is that if industrialists are to be lured to the South, they must be pro- mised not merely tax concessions and other such inducements; they must also be provided with Infrastructure — roads, railways, water supply, bridges, drains, sewage, and the rest. To say that the Cassa has little to show for itself in the way of industrial development is not, Pescatore in- sisted, a criticism : - on the contrary, it in- dicates that the Government has put first things first, devoting most of the available funds from the World Bank and other sources to producing the conditions in which industry will eventually flourish, and without which industrialists would not contemplate going to the Mezzogiorno at all.
And this, of course, is something that cannot be disputed; certainly not on the strength of a brief visit. What we saw often appeared to con- firm the 'front' accusation : some of the fac- tories planted near Syracuse, for example, looked like full-scale working models planted incongruously in that aged landscape, having so little to do with Sicily that if the inhabitants had woken up one morning to find that one of the factories had been dismantled and transported overnight to the mainland, it would have occa- sioned them no surprise.
Yet it is hard to believe that this Infrastruc- ture will not, in time, take effect. Often the value . . In June The. moon Shines on our commune.. .
SPECTATOR, NOVEMBER 4 1960 of what is being done cannot be estimated: where a grant is given by the Cassa to 'refurbish a grotto as a tourist attraction, it may be possible to assess its value in terms of increased takings, but there is no way of telling how much the tourist trade is improved by, say, the opening of a new scenic road. Significantly, though. the Cassa appears to have won the blessing of the Confederation of Italian Industries, who would hardly approve of such expenditure unless tbeY were convinced it was producing results. And the discovery of natural gas reserves in the South may prove decisive. But development will not be easy—particularly in Sicily. Driving from Catania to Gela, and bac/ to Syracuse—about six hours on the road-44 passed through town after town in which the main street or piazza was full of men: standing around casually, unsympathetic rather than hostile to strangers, with that air of elaborate unconcern one used to see in groups around labour exchanges, though with none of the employed strain on their faces; men who have adopted sporadic employment as a way of life" No women : they could be seen in doorways' but rarely in the streets. Factories, we were tole' find it hard to persuade the Sicilian men that there are jobs which the women ought to d(/' Though the Church is in theory sympathetic to development projects, individual priests are often hostile, feeling that the changes will undermine the established pattern of morality—as of course they do. There are still few signs in Sicily On the mainland, we were assured, there has been less difficulty) that the attempt to transplant the benefits of the North's prosperity has tine trated to any depth. But at least it can be sal that they have not been a demonstrable failure' Perhaps it was a sign of the times that ti; stay in Syracuse coincided with the visit uf:' travelling fashion show, staged in the Politi before an enthusiastic crowd. We sat In the lobby drinking Sicilian wine (which, (hour, maybe we were just unlucky, invariably tasted like export-reject Marsala) while elaborately decorative models minced before us on their way to the packed ballroom. The Scots line was much l in evidence with the girls showing tartan dresses and tams, and a single male model, who aP; peared in a variety of sports jackets (padded at elbow or on shoulder), check suits, raincoats, tweeds, even a tweed trilby—and this, with the temperature in the humid middle seventies. e But this was no hick parade: it might I13v surprised but it would not have disgraced . London fashion house. Admittedly the sponsore appeared pessimistic: Sicilian housewives, *i were told, flock to such shows, not to buy, b,1.1 simply to memorise fashions they like in order to get imitations run up the next week by their sang; dressmakers. Yet I could not imagine the interest—or the same style—in an equivalen English country town.
Next week: The Land of the Six-legged Dog
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