Success in Sicily

In the 19th century, Sicily was considered (by northern Italians) nothing more than "a paradise of poor devils." But no more. Since World War II, long-neglected Sicily has suddenly started racing ahead far faster than the rest of Italy -- or for that matter almost any other part of Europe.

Last week, in the new Catania industrial zone, a $4,000,000 steel fabricating plant went into operation. Nearby, close to Messina, work started on a $5,000,000 plant to .produce frozen orange juice. At Augusta, a ghost port barely five years ago, a third major project was completed, a multimillion-dollar oil refinery with a capacity of 2,800,000 tons annually and new docks for 45,000-ton oil tankers. At Enna, in Sicily's depressed interior, Milan Edison was putting the finishing touches on a $16 million chemical plant. All told, since 1948 nearly $500 million in new capital has been invested in Sicily. In the process, Sicily's gross income last year soared 20% to $857 million, v. only 8% increase for the rest of Italy.

Taxes & Loans. The credit for Sicily's renaissance goes largely to the island's autonomous regional parliament and to Domenico La Cavera, 41, the slim, dynamic president of Sicily's Confederation of Industry. Says La Cavera: "My heart beats with joy. I am vibrating with enthusiasm." He also vibrates with strong ideas about free enterprise and how to help it along. A peasant's son, La Cavera started out with a small cement plant, expanded it, then set out to see how U.S. industry operated. He returned from the U.S. convinced that Sicily should reject Italy's statist economic policy and instead open the doors to private investment. Says he: "Government has neither the means nor the ability to remake Sicily. But it must act to give private enterprise freedom and encouragement to do the job."

For a starter in 1948, La Cavera helped convince Sicily's parliament to encourage investment with a new law permitting investors legally to avoid paying taxes on dividends by holding stock "in the name of the bearer," i.e., anonymously. To help companies themselves, another law was passed two years later exempting all new industrial enterprises from corporate income taxes (18% and up on mainland Italy) for ten years; all customs duties were abolished on machinery and other goods for new companies. Small business was encouraged by a government finance agency providing loans up to $80,000, big business by another state agency with $32 million capital and total lending authority of $160 million at low 4% (average Italian money rate: 12%) interest terms. The government also set up an apprentice school to turn out 70,000 trained industrial workers annually.

Home & Abroad. Sicilian businessmen learned to take full advantage of their country's natural resources. Sicily's position astride shipping routes turned the port of Palermo into the Mediterranean's busiest repair center, with 5,000 new workers. New irrigation and land-reclamation schemes are making agriculture a prime source of foreign exchange, with export sales of processed fruits and vegetables rising from almost nothing in 1946 to $37 million in 1955, some $48 million last year. Much of the new industry is homegrown, but much more comes from foreign businessmen and mainland Italians who know a good thing when they see it. Italy's Montecatini Co. recently opened a big potash works near Syracuse employing 2,000 workers, is already building a second to tap newly discovered deposits 55 miles inland. French chemical, German beer and electric-power companies are also moving in.

But the biggest moneymaker of all is Sicily's booming young oil industry. Instead of throttling foreign oil exploration by setting up a state-run monopoly such as Italy's ENI (TIME, Sept. 2), Sicily encouraged Gulf Oil Corp. with a deal that one U.S. oilman calls "the best terms of any oil company operating anywhere in the world." Instead of the standard fifty-fifty split, Gulf gets 80% of all profits, has pumped $50 million into Sicilian oil development. The payoff: wells that will produce 1,650.000 tons of oil next year, some 15% of Italy's total needs. Last week British Petroleum and Standard Oil Co. (New Jersey) were also coming in beside Gulf.

Businessman La Cavera knows that Sicily has a long way to go. Sicily's per capita income is still woefully low at $175 annually (v. $470 in Italy's industrial region of Piedmont); many thousands of unemployed still eke out a bare existence, eating lumache ed erbe (snails and greens) gathered in the woods. But Sicily has hope and enterprise for the first time in. centuries. "It doesn't require miracles," says La Cavera. "All it takes is will and work, intelligence and initiative. In ten years, we'll catch up with the rest of Italy and then we'll push ahead."

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