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Italian fashions are no longer a mere copy of Paris, but a style-setting world of their own. In straw, leather, ceramics, in automobile design (but not production), in shipbuilding (the new Andrea Doria and the Cristoforo Colombo), the fine Italian hand and the fertile Italian mind are making money and fame.
Italy's national income is at an alltime high ($16 billion) and going up. The lira is close to being hard money now (stabilized at 625 to the dollar), and De Gasperi's finance experts proudly point out that "not one single lira" has been printed since 1948. A new government department has been set up to treat the economic ills of Italy's shamefully impoverished south. Altogether, 1,600,000 acres of land owned by absentee landlords (including such aristocratic names as the Torlonia, the Orsini, the Boncompagni) is being purchased by the government at a fair price and distributed among the landless peasants on easy terms. So far, only 400,000 acres have reached the peasantry.
Hopelessness in Caves. Close to Parioli, Rome's most fashionable residential district, families still live in hillside caves or shacks. In the Palermo slums, within shouting distance of a luxurious, modern, maternity clinic, seven or eight people crowd into a single, unlighted room. The antique debtors' law is charitable to such families: whatever else officers of the law may impound for payment of a debt, they may not touch a bed in which a woman has just given birth to a child, or is about to do so. Population (47 million) is now growing by 400,000 a year, in a country where overpopulation is a long-endured complaint (and the chief pragmatic excuse for Mussolini's conquests in Africa).
Manpower is Italy's only surplus—and it is no longer very exportable. In 1949 there were 1,700,000 unemployed; today there are more than 2,000,000, and every year another 130,000 young people join the ranks of the jobless.
Italy, for all its beauty, is a hard land —deficient in food, fuel and minerals.
The gap grows between what it must buy and what it can sell to pay for these things, and is papered over only by U.S.
aid (about $3 billion since war's end).
Discontent & Promises. The Italian in Milan who desperately needs an apartment he cannot afford, the Calabrian family burying a one-year-old for lack of a doctor, the frayed-white-collar worker who remembers how many government sinecures were available under the Fascists, the landowner who savors the old monarchical days when a conte was a conte and his land his own—these by the thousands lend an ear to the bombast and promises of De Gasperi's political enemies on left & right.
Their discontent is magnified by some of the things they see and hear in the government offices and town halls. Not all Christian Democrats are as patient as Alcide de Gasperi. Too many are neither so good nor so honest. In most parts of Italy, there are cases of favoritism, nepotism, buying of special privileges.
(As a galling contrast, local Communist administrators have proved by & large incorruptible.) And there is the church. It is the supreme anomaly in a land of anomalies that 99.6% Catholic Italy is bitterly anticlerical in politics. The war between church and state has never truly ended.