PURSUIT OF ALBION^251under Habsburg rule) and in and around Genoa. Venice and Florence,
once flourishing industrial as well as commercial centers, were well on
the way to becoming pure tourist attractions—clusters of shops and ho
tels and living museums. No traveler could afford to miss them. (The
process continues, and Venice has already had to restrict access.) Ital
ian unification (1870) changed litde of the earlier division of labor and
wealth. The north, especially Lombardy and the Piedmont, mixed agri
cultural and industrial, riverbottom and plain. The south (il mezzo
giorno, the land of noon) remained a wilderness of hardscrabble
landscratching on barren uplands and broad latifundia. Illiterate peas
ants, most of them sharecroppers and landless laborers, deferred to
local notables—old and new rich, who cultivated pride ("respect") and
a style of living that evoked the Old Regime.* The biggest export of
the Mezzogiorno was people: emigrants to the New World, especially
to the United States and Argentina, and after World War II, to the
northern half of the country. Even the north sent its children abroad,
generally to the richer industrial areas north of the Alps. The French,
for example, relied heavily on Italian immigrants to work the newly
opened (1880s) iron mines and mills of Lorraine.
The south has remained backward, in spite of huge development
subsidies from the Italian government and, in our time, from the Eu
ropean Community. The landscape is dotted with idle factories, unfin
ished housing developments, roads that go nowhere. This slough of
failure and despond testifies to deep failings: ignorance, bias, want of
community, organized criminality. The Mezzogiorno continues to pay
for the sins of yesteryear. Many northerners are disgusted to the point
of talking secession. Read: expulsion. It won't happen. It takes matter-
of-fact Czechs to let Slovakia go.
Eastern Europe was like another world. In Slavic lands—Russia par
ticularly—serfdom persisted in its worst form. So much wealth in the
hands of a spendthrift nobility meant reduced consumer demand for
those basic manufactures that might lead to modern industry. Under
ordinary circumstances, autocratic Russia might simply have taken its
time about emulating the West: the people were used to poverty and
ignorant of the outside world. But Russia was a power, with big terri
torial ambitions. It had tried very early (sixteenth century) to learn
from the West, if only to gain autonomy in such strategic branches as
gunmaking. Russia as a power needed industry, and the tsarist gov-
* The best, certainly the most accessible, source is a novel, Lampedusa's II Gat-
topardo—The Leopard.