Walker - 1967 - A geography of Italy

EMIGRATION A N D INTERNAL M I GRATION
abandoning the countryside. ‘La terra non rende piu’ is a complaint heard all
over Italy and few young people are content to be just peasants any more. In fact,
evidence o f the drift, as revealed in the landscape in the form o f abandoned
holdings and deserted farmsteads and o f arable turned over to woodland and
grazing, is more apparent in Alpine and central Italy than in the South where the
economic pressures are greater but the alternative opportunities are less.
Secondly, the incidence o f urbanization is uneven; in the last decade the small
towns, particularly in the remoter mountain and hill country, have barely held
their own. They have been by-passed for the larger cities, especially Rome and
the industrial centres o f Lombardy and Piedmont. The capital, whose population
rose 31% in the decade 1951-1961, draws its increase largely from the
Centre and South; the two northern regions also attract most o f their recruits
from Calabria, Basilicata, Apuha and Sicily, but they are substantially reinforced
from the Three Venetias. Compared with the exodus from Sicily, that from Sardinia
is unimportant. Between 1951 and 1961 the populations of Milan and Turin
rose by 26% and 46% respectively. The cities o f Emilia, particularly Bologna,
Modena and Ravenna, also registered substantial increases (20-25%), mainly
from the immediate countryside, but the essentially heavy industrial city o f
Genoa increased by only 16% . Where special factors were at work some o f the
smaller urban areas recorded an above-average increase, for example Caghari,
Grosseto, Latina and Catania, which are benefiting from local development
projects. Ravenna, which has found a new lease of life in terms o f petro-chemicals,
and Salerno, which was rebuilt during the relevant decade, fall into a similar
category. Trieste, whose economic difficulties have received attention above,
scarcely increased at all and Venice’s performance was much below average:
TABLE 3
POPULATION INCREASES I 9 5 I - I 9 6 1 FOR SELECTED
CITY COMMUNES
In 1961 the population of the main urban communes totalled
16,526,000, an increase of 21% on the 1951 figure
®/ /o
Turin (1,050,000) 46
Latina (50,000) 43
Rome (2,246,000) 31
Grosseto (52,000) 31
Cagliari (187,000) 23
Bologna (456,000) 27
Modena (143,000) 26
Raveima (116,000) 26
Milan (1,599,000) 26
Salerno (123,000) 26
Verona (230,000)
Brescia (180,000)
Catania (363,000)
Palermo (593,000)
%
23
22
20
18
Florence (459,000) 17
Naples (1,196,000) 17
Bari (317,000) 16
Genoa (796,000) 16
Venice (359,000) 11
Trieste (273,000) o
It is quite certain that the scale o f urbanization is greater than the statistics suggest;
in most urban areas there is a sizeable group o f new arrivals, who escape,
not always unintentionally, the statistical net. In fact it is only in recent years that
the administrative restrictions on internal migration have been relaxed. The
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