Today is the fortieth anniversary of the earthquake in Irpinia. The memory of a tragedy, of weeks and months lived in mourning, destruction and hope. I was a direct witness of that event; by profession I was forced to tell. Once the fear had passed, all anguish with respect to family and friends had been overcome, the problem of reconstruction arose. Where to begin after the serious warnings of the President of the Republic Sandro Pertini?
Italy had discovered that it had another Italy inside itself. Despite the economic boom, the recovery after the oil crisis of the 70s, the drive towards consumption and the growth of new professions, south of Rome one entered backward territories. Whole regions closed in on themselves, poor, disenchanted. Places already admirably narrated by writers, correspondents, scholars, political prisoners. When? Years and years ago. At least from Carlo Levi in "Christ Stopped at Eboli" onwards. However, the virtuous Italy of modern factories, of design, of fast motorways, hadn't bothered to read those stories, delve into those themes even developed by foreign sociologists and economists.
The advanced part of the country welcomed the energies and talents of the South, it gave them the opportunity to emerge and establish themselves, without understanding how and what those talents could do - from positions of authentic power - to revive the South. A large slice of the ruling class, born in the South, landed in the galaxy of political, economic, financial power, but careless, heedless of the national unifying function. If it wasn't a betrayal, he told himself, it was close. An indolence that the tremors of November 1980 had shown to the whole world. Where to start? From the houses, from the streets, from the schools, from the infrastructures, from everything that the other Italy had and which had cost us in the South more than three thousand dead.
In 40 years the State has spent 60 thousand billion of the old lire to remodel that pocket of backwardness that coexisted with the Italy of growth and "Made". None of us imagined that the post-earthquake reconstruction would last decades, with rivers of money unchecked for a long time to support customers, political-business consortia, criminal organizations, speculators.
At a conference of the Gramsci Institute in Avellino, in January 1981, the secretary of the PCI, Enrico Berlinguer, in an interview he told me that to revive the South needed the unity of political forces of every inspiration: secular, socialist, catholic. And the Catholic one - even if erroneously confused with the DC - was absent in those weeks. You would have to wake up, Berlinguer said, and come to terms with that pitiful state of affairs uncovered by the earthquake.
Effort and solidarity, then, were not lacking and since the 90s the Mezzogiorno has changed its face with completed projects, economic undertakings, quality universities, reconstructed towns. It does not have the same face as the advanced areas of the country, nor the incomes of the North. There is still so much poverty, so much desire for redemption and thousands of young people flee every year in search of work and affirmation. The young people of that time today ask themselves questions and remember. But at the bottom remains the problem of the ruling class, skills, roles and public functions. Just like in 1980.
