Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

A parliamentary enquiry of 1954 revealed that 85 percent of Italy’s poorest families lived south of Rome. A rural laborer in Apulia, in south-eastern Italy, could expect to earn at best half the wages of his counterpart in the province of Lombardy. Taking the average Italian per capita income in that year to be 100, the figure for Piedmont, in Italy’s wealthy North-West, was 174; that of Calabria, in the far South, just 52. 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.