Shine on the Boot

Just outside the gateway to Milan's 33rd annual fair last week, an enormous yellow sign bore the proud legend: "1945-1955--ten years of work for a free and respected fatherland.' Inside, at the biggest industrial fair in Italian history, were the results of Italy's postwar labors, helped by some $3 billion in U.S. funds. Stretching over 100 acres were futuristic exhibit halls and brightly painted booths of 9,400 Italian firms--and 4,000 foreign companies that wanted to sell in Italy's expanding markets. In the two weeks of the fair, some 4,250,000 visitors crowded the grounds, 89,720 of them foreigners or foreign buyers. What they found was an impressive tribute to Italy's recovery from war and defeat.

On display at Milan was everything from toothpaste to refrigerators, caffe espresso vending machines, jet engines and a diesel locomotive. One big hall was filled with several dozen kinds of motor scooters and motorcycles; other halls displayed delicate glassware and pottery, tractors, sail-and motorboats, house trailers. The Montecatini chemical company showed off its insecticides, fertilizers and aluminum products in an elaborate pavilion decorated with immense papier-macheaa insects and lacy scaffoldings festooned with sunbursts of aluminum chairs and kitchen utensils

Help from the South. The Milan fair was an accurate reflection of Italy's growing boom. Gross national product jumped by 5% last, year, even though drought lopped 2 billion tons from the normal 9 billion ton wheat harvest; industrial production was up nearly 10%. Crude-steel production topped 4,000,000 tons and auto production increased to 215,000 cars and trucks, both alltime records. An important new oilfield has been tapped on the Adriatic coast, while Sicily's Ragusa field (TIME, Jan. 25, 1954) has four producing wells, with a fifth on the way.

Even in the chronically depressed southern half of Italy's boot, businessmen are pouring capital into new plants, offices and stores. Last week Olivetti (office machines) opened an adding-machine plant (capacity: 50,000 machines a year) just south of Naples, with free clinics and nurseries for its workers' use. Five other big firms have traveled south in the past year. The results are striking. In 1954 electricity consumption in the Italian south was up by 43.5%, radio sales by 15.5%, car sales by 42.6%, tractors by 35.6%. Said Italy's Banca Commerciale in its annual report: "For the first time since the unification of Italy, statistics for the South of Italy pull up the averages instead of pushing them down."

In the heavily industrialized north, executives at Falck, Italy's biggest privately owned steel company, reported that demand was outstripping production, that steel had been in a sellers' market for the past nine months. Such big motor-scooter companies as Innocenti and Vespa were rolling along at an 11,000-per-month production rate, more than double the figure two years ago; overall, the industry has produced 2,400,000 postwar scooters, and has only skimmed the top off the market.

Fiats for Families. For Italy's industrial workers the rising production meant a wage increase of 3.5% last year. Unemployment is almost nonexistent in the heavy industries of Milan and Turin, with an actual shortage of skilled labor in the building trades. In many families, three or more people are working full time, enabling them to put money aside for that dream of dreams--a car. At the Fiat factory alone, more than 1,000 workmen are on the waiting list to buy their company's new, $950 Fiat "600."

As a result, Italy's Communists have been steadily losing ground in their attempts to win over the workingman. In some two dozen northern industrial plants, union control has passed out of Communist hands. Last week at Falck Steel's Milan .plants, the Reds were decisively beaten again in plant elections, saw their vote plummet from 72% last year to a minority 48%.

Blemishes & Cures. No one, least of all thoughtful Italians, argues that Italy has solved all its economic problems. There are still an estimated 2,000,000 unemployed in a work force of 20 million. Agriculture is still largely backward, and industry suffers from lack of capital and from a feudal fiscal system, in which varying and discriminatory interest rates make it difficult for small businessmen to operate. The textile industry, which has seen many of its markets disappear behind the Iron Curtain, is in bad shape, last year slumped to 117 on the national production index (1938 = 100), compared to 180 for industry as a whole. Such big tax-supported state monopolies as Institute per la Ricostruzione Industriale (I.R.I.) and Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (E.N.I.) spread over Italy's economy like a ground fog, dampening the growth of private business initiative (TIME, Nov. 29).

Nevertheless, in everyone from businessmen clear down to the lowliest worker, there is a new air of confidence and optimism. Says Innocenti's General Manager Giuseppe Lauro: "After all these years of hard work, things seem to be ripening all at once. We have, begun at last to pluck the fruits of our labors."

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