ITALY'S BOOMING NORTH
EACH opening night during the opera season, Milan's Via Manzoni is transformed from a bustling commercial street to a river of wealth and elegance. Bumper to bumper, a seemingly endless line of Mercedes, Alfa Romeos, Lancias and Maseratis inches toward the Piazza della Scala, their high-powered engines being raced by traffic-frustrated drivers. Pulling up before La Scala's neoclassic facade, the cars discharge their cargoes—usually an Italian businessman, resplendent in white tie, and his bejeweled wife, dressed in a Fontana, Capucci or Dior.
Milan's opulence is no sudden sparkle or passing phenomenon. The city is the dynamic fountainhead of the biggest, most sustained comeback that any European nation has made from World War II ashes. Germany has had its economic miracle, and France its postwar resurgence; both are still prospering but at a slightly slower pace. North Italy has sustained its boom. In Milan the Gothic finials of the renowned duomo now have to fight for recognition against a skyline of striking new skyscrapers. From the Piazza del Duomo rises the bedlam that only Italian traffic can generate. In front of the cathedral's stately bronze doors Milan is digging an entrance for its new subway. Everywhere Milanese businessmen move at dogtrot pace in a furious pursuit of profits, and lavish restaurants, such as Giannino, have geared their cuisine and prices to help them spend it.
Not only the businessmen prosper, Milan's workers are the industrial elite of Italy. Per capita earnings have leaped 56% since 1952 to $1,000 a year, which in actual purchasing power amounts to much more. Milan's 1,500,000 people pay 26% of the taxes—and grumble as if it were 100%. And all over North Italy—the flaring top quarter of the boot that lies above Florence—workers can now own the refrigerators and television sets they produce. Last year so many of them traded their motor scooters for autos that car registrations in Italy soared some 30%.
Italian industrial production, still largely concentrated in the "iron triangle" of Milan, Turin and Genoa, has doubled in the past eight years. So avidly does the rest of the world gobble up Italian products that the nation's balance-of-payments surplus is the envy of the U.S. Treasury. Buoyed by these achievements, North Italian businessmen, who once argued that they could hold their home markets only with the help of protectionism, today swagger forth on a Common Market invasion of the rest of Europe with all the self-assurance of the Caesars of old.
Promised Land. As always. North Italy is outpacing the rest of the country. The arid South, despite all the Italian government and U.S. aid money poured in, is still primarily a land of hunger and hopelessness. In startling contrast gleams the prosperity of North Italy, which has replaced the U.S. as the near and visible promised land in the dreams of impoverished Sicilians and Calabrians. "California begins at Milan," runs the current folklore of South Italy and each day hundreds of southerners board northbound trains to seek the living wage they cannot find at home. Last year some 70,000 of them settled in Milan alone.