The war had further exacerbated the historical division of Italy: whereas the North, beginning in September 1943, had experienced nearly two years of German rule and political resistance, followed by Allied military occupation of its radicalized cities, the South of Italy had been effectively taken out of the war by the arrival of the Western Allied troops. In the Mezzogiorno the social and administrative structures inherited from the Fascists thus survived unscathed the bloodless coup that replaced Mussolini by one of his generals. To the longstanding political and economic contrasts between
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