Agriculture, still the dominant sector of the economy, provided jobs for almost 60 percent of employed adults in 1911. It too enjoyed a boom, partly because of state-subsidized land reclamation and irrigation schemes (particularly in the Po valley) and partly because of continued high tariffs on grain imports, which gave ample incentive to produce more food on suitable land. Wheat production rose by about one-third in these years. In central Italy, sugar beet production, another heavily protected sector, stimulated a new refining industry. The Socialists and Catholics founded cooperatives throughout northern and central Italy to help provide seeds and machinery and to market produce, and a network of rural banks provided farmers with much-needed cheap credit.
Economic growth, however, was heavily concentrated in the north. The south languished, and income there was less than half that in the north. The southern economy was arguably linked more closely to northern Europe and South America (to which it exported wine, olive oil, fruit, and labour) than to northern Italy. Southern produce needed markets abroad, and the south was very badly hit by the tariff war with France. Moreover, the positivist school of anthropology, fashionable in the 1890s and later, promoted a widely held view that southerners were more criminal than northerners and even “racially” degenerate—an argument that lent ethnic overtones to the debate on “southern backwardness.”
Southern politicians soon began demanding and, when in office, securing tax relief and development schemes, which provided, among other things, roads, schools, and irrigation. In 1897 the first “special law” provided Italy’s poorest region, Sardinia, with cheaper credit and funds for irrigation and reforestation. Sardinia’s leading politician, Francesco Cocco Ortu, was minister of agriculture. Later laws extended similar or greater benefits to other regions and in 1906 to the entire south. In practice, the legislation had little impact, because World War I interrupted any progress. However, it was the first time that funds derived from taxes paid by the prosperous north were used by central government agencies to stimulate economic activity in the south—or at least to win votes for government supporters.
Continuing southern poverty stimulated mass emigration from Sicily and the southern mainland, which averaged more than 500,000 people per year from about 1901 onward and rose to 900,000 in 1913, mainly to North and South America. About half of the migrants to the New World returned later, bringing new values as well as new money. Others sent back regular payments that contributed to the local economy. Some southerners crossed the Atlantic twice a year, commuting to seasonal agricultural work in Argentina. In the north most emigration to other European countries was seasonal, but many rural dwellers migrated within Italy to jobs in the expanding industrial cities. Migrants were usually young, male, unskilled, and illiterate, but many were also politically aware and militant, as the strong anarchist presence of Italians in the United States testified. Health and education
The other major social changes in these years, apart from emigration, resulted from the decline in serious illnesses and in illiteracy. Improved water supplies and sewerage meant fewer cholera epidemics—though these still occurred at times, as at Barletta in 1910–12. Malaria, a major scourge of the rural south, declined sharply as quinine became widely available after 1900. Pellagra, a vitamin-deficiency disease endemic among the northern peasantry, rapidly declined as diets improved. By 1901, for the first time, a majority (51.3 percent) of Italians could read and write. Emigrants needed to be able to write home, and so they had an incentive to learn. In 1911 the primary schools were removed from municipal control—poor communes had not been able to build schools or to enforce attendance—and were henceforth run and financed by the central government. Whereas most Italians at the time of national unification had spoken only their regional dialect, millions of people now spoke standard Italian, which they learned in school or in the army or for use as a lingua franca in the cities. A common language, common education, and common experience of military service had begun, by 1914, to “make Italians”—but religion, social class, and local loyalties still sharply divided them. World War I and fascism War and its aftermath Conduct of the war
On Giolitti’s resignation in March 1914, the more conservative Antonio Salandra formed a new government. In June, “Red Week,” a period of widespread rioting throughout the Romagna and the Marche, came in response to the killing of three antimilitarist demonstrators at Ancona. When World War I broke out in August, the Salandra government stayed neutral and began to negotiate with both sides—a policy that Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino described as “sacred egoism.” The Austrians eventually agreed to grant Trentino to Italy in exchange for an alliance, but the Triple Entente (France, Britain, and Russia) made a more generous offer, promising Italy not only Trentino but also South Tirol, Trieste, Gorizia, Istria, and northern Dalmatia. The Italians accepted this offer in the secret Treaty of London (April 1915) and joined the war against Austria-Hungary a month later, hoping for major territorial gains.
The negotiations, conducted by the foreign and prime ministers and a handful of diplomats, had been kept secret. The majority of deputies, meanwhile, favoured neutrality, as did former prime minister Giolitti, the major opposition groups (Catholics and Socialists), and most of the population. War therefore was supported only by the conservatives in government, by the Nationalist Association, a group formed in 1910 by Enrico Corradini and others to support Italian expansionism, by some Liberals who saw it as the culmination of the Risorgimento’s fight for national unity, by Republicans and reformist Socialists who knew nothing of the Treaty of London and thought they were fighting for national liberation, and by some syndicalists and extremist Socialists—including Benito Mussolini, then editor of the Socialist Party newspaper—who thought the war would bring about the overthrow of capitalism. Mussolini was soon expelled from the Socialist Party, but with help from the Triple Entente he managed to found his own alternative, pro-war newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia (“The People of Italy”). Futurists and nationalists (including Gabriele D’Annunzio) agitated for intervention. In April–May 1915 the government, helped by a series of noisy demonstrations by pro-war activists (the so-called “Radiant Days of May”), pushed through its war policy despite the opposition of the majority in parliament and in the country. Neither Giolitti nor any other “neutralist” could form a government without renouncing the Treaty of London, betraying Italy’s new allies, and compromising the king. The Salandra government officially declared war against Austria-Hungary on May 23 and entered combat the following day. Meanwhile, despite a series of defections to the nationalist cause, the Socialist Party expressed its official position in the slogan “Neither adherence, nor sabotage.” Unlike its sister parties in the Second International (an international meeting of trade unions and socialist parties), the PSI did not get behind the Italian war effort. The reformist Claudio Treves voiced the pacifist opinions of the movement in parliament in 1917, when he made a plea that the troops should not spend another winter in the trenches. Other Socialists took a more active role against the war and distributed antiwar propaganda or organized desertions. Many Catholics also failed to support Italy’s participation in the war, although others took an active part in the conflict. In August 1917 Pope Benedict XV called for an end to what he called a “useless slaughter.”