Sicilian Culture: The News & Views: Italy Left Rules in THe Land Christ Forgot

Sicilian Culture

The People, The History, The Culture

The News & Views
Italy Left Rules in THe Land Christ Forgot
By Gideon Long
POTENZA, Italy, March 26, 2001 (Reuters) - Christ, according to southern Italian folklore, stopped at Eboli -- a jumble of concrete houses and peeling office blocks scattered across a hillside southeast of Naples. He did not venture further inland into the mountainous region of Basilicata.
But in his absence, the Italian centre-left which dominates politics in the area and expects to win here again in the May 13 general election, claims to have performed miracles of its own.
Unemployment is still high at 15.7 percent but is much lower than in the neighbouring regions of the impoverished south where it is stuck at a crippling 23 percent.
The Mafia, still active in the urban blackspots of Sicily, Campania and Puglia, has been kept at bay in rural Basilicata.
The car giant Fiat and energy group Eni have invested in the area and the European Commission has singled out the regional government for special praise for its prompt and frugal use of EU funds.
The centre-left says Basilicata, once the poorest region in Italy, can serve as an example to the rest of the "Mezzogiorno" (southern Italy) of how to move away from the thoughtless state aid which has characterised investment in the area for 50 years.
"What we need to do now is concentrate on targeting the internal areas of the region with infrastructure projects, improved roads and railways," says Carlo Petrone, regional coordinator for the Democrats of the Left (DS), the largest party in Italy's ruling coalition.
"Our strategy is working -- I don't say perfectly -- but it is taking effect. We will win here again without a doubt, and we plan to press on in the same direction for the next five years."
GOD-FORSAKEN LAND
In "Christ stopped at Eboli," Carlo Levi's classic study of rural Basilicata in the 1930s, the author described a world which was, quite literally, god-forsaken.
Everyone from the ancient Romans and Greeks had shied clear of its rugged mountains, which straddle the area between the heel and toe of boot-shaped Italy.
The area was rife with malaria and mired in what Levi described as "a poverty so dismal and abject that it amounts to slavery without hope of emancipation."
Self-esteem was in short supply.
"We're not Christians," the peasants told Levi. "Christ stopped short of here, at Eboli."
A visit to Basilicata's regional capital Potenza suggests how much things have changed.
Fashion houses Giorgio Armani, Max Mara and Furla have opened along the town's cobbled central shopping street and Potenza gives off an air of modest prosperity not usually associated with the Italian south.
"Last year we won the regional elections with 70 percent of the vote," said Petrone, whose party boasts nine of the region's 14 members of the national parliament.
"If the centre-left wins the May election at a national level and puts its strategy into place, I think we can halve the unemployment level in Basilicata within the next two years."
"TESTA, TERRA, TURISMO"
There appears to be little to choose between the policies of the centre-left, led nationally by former Rome mayor Francesco Rutelli, and the centre-right of Silvio Berlusconi.
Both pledge to improve infrastructure by electrifying the railway network and building a motorway between Potenza and Matera, the only other town of any size in the region.
Both say they want to encourage agriculture, both stress the region's potential for tourism and both say they want to encourage private investment.
"As Berlusconi says, the south needs the three Ts -- testa, terra and turismo (head, land and tourism)," says Nicola Pagliuca, a deputy from Berlusconi's Forza Italia (FI) party.
"By head he means ideas -- new economy initiatives which can give the whole Mezzogiorno, not just Basilicata, a boost."
A boost is certainly what the south needs, as the plight of neighbouring Calabria and Sicily testifies.
Despite modest successes in Basilicata, Molise and Puglia, there is still a yawning gap between the standard of living at opposite ends of the Italian peninsula.
The average family in the Mezzogiorno has a disposable income of $1,604 a month compared to $2,135 in the north. The gap between the two figures has actually widened recently.
Some 17 percent of families in the south own a dishwasher whereas the figure for the north is 35 percent.
Sicily's official jobless rate of 23.4 percent compares to a level of just 5.4 percent in northern Italy, which accounts for a massive 73.7 percent of all Italian exports compared to just 10.1 percent for the south.
EU Commissioner Mario Monti recently estimated that over the past 50 years Brussels and Rome have ploughed 600 trillion lire ($279.8 billion) into the south with little tangible benefit.
While Ireland, Greece and Portugal made huge strides in increasing their per-capita GDP during the 1990s, the Italian south fell further behind the EU average.
The centre-right says this points to a failure of government policy and is vowing to open up the south to the free market.
But the left says the economy of areas like Basilicata is still too fragile to be left to the kind of entrepreneurship for which Berlusconi is famous.
"I know what the south's policy towards the Mezzogiorno is -- privatisation," the DS's Petrone said. "The south cannot survive on privatisation alone. It still needs state help, just not the kind we've seen in the past.
"The idea of the south thrown totally on to the free market frightens us. The economic forces here are not ready for it."
Basilicata is hardly going to swing May's general election one way or another -- the region has an electorate of just 520,000 or about a quarter that of Rome.
And as FI's Pagliuca acknowledges, with a touch of the southern fatalism which struck Levi so forcefully 70 years ago, voting habits are unlikely to change quickly here.
"Outside the two cities (Potenza and Matera), voting according to opinion doesn't exist," he says with a sigh.
"People vote for friends, or out of loyalty, or out of patronage. There's always someone who did someone else's grandfather a favour 80 years ago and that's passed down to the father and then to the son.
"Unfortunately, that's the way it is."

HOME

News & Views || People || History || Region || Language || Food || Cinema || Links || Contact Info