changed—much of the land redistributed from the old latifundia lacked water, roads or housing. Of 74,000 hectares redistributed in Sicily after World War Two, 95 percent was ‘marginal’ or inferior land, unsuited to cultivation. The impoverished peasants to whom it was offered had no money and no access to credit; they could do little with their new holdings. The land reforms in Italy failed. Their stated goal—the solution of the ‘Southern Question’—would only be met a decade later, and then only in part, when the surplus peasantry of the South abandoned the soil and went in search of work to
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