Walker - 1967 - A geography of Italy

THE SOUTH
eastern Sicily, where rivers tap reservoirs o f permeable rock, are relatively well
endowed with water supplies, but over vast upland areas where impermeable
rocks predominate, water control for power, irrigation and domestic purposes is
ruinously expensive when not practically impossible. Even so the resettlement o f
the coastal plains and the intensification o f their agricultme hinges on the successful
establishment o f water control. Although limestone areas may provide
useful reservoirs for neighbouring districts their own surfaces are often almost
entirely lacking in surface water. An obvious case is the Murge tableland whose
large urban population relies on supplies brought by the ApuHan aqueduct from
the headwaters o f the Sele river. The shortcomings o f the Southern environment
as it affeas industrialization will receive attention below but it should be noted
in passing that the availability o f reliable water supplies, which even in England
is now taken less for granted, is a powerful locational factor tending to restrict the
number o f zones which can hope to develop industry on a large scale.
Any attempt to isolate and assess in detail the historical forces which have contributed
to the relative economic backwardness o f the South would be out of
place here but it may be useful to suggest a few lines o f inquiry:
1) The long periods o f insecurity to which the South has been subjected; it has
been fought over by a succession o f destructive invaders - Goths, Vandals,
Lombards, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, French and Spaniards - and the
coastlands in particular have been repeatedly the prey o f sea raiders from
the days o f the Vandals to that o f the Barbary pirates.
2) The relative unimportance o f the trading city as it developed in the North,
to the great benefit o f agriculture; Naples is an obvious exception.
3) The Spanish occupation which is condemned by many Italian historians not
only for its oppression and maladministration but for the inculcation o f certain
unhelpful social attitudes.
4) The support o f the authorities, from the Middle Ages onwards, o f powerful
pastoral elements, particularly in Apulia, whose interests often ran counter
to a more effective occupation o f the land.
5) The excessive concentration o f activity in the capital imder the Bourbons and
the neglect of its estates by an absentee aristocracy; the survival o f feudalism
imtil the French occupation and o f feudal attitudes long after it.
6) The failure after i860 to match political unity with economic unity; the collapse
of infant Southern industries in the face o f Northern competition.
7) The complacency with which overseas emigration was for long regarded as
the natural solution to Southern poverty.
Whatever their origins it is generally admitted that over the centuries Southern
society has accepted certain characteristic attitudes not all o f which are helpful
in the present situation. (Some would assert that in this respect the South is
merely Italy writ large.) For example, there is a profound distrust o f the authorities
and an imwillingness to co-operate actively with them, an attitude which a
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