The way to the North today is lost, like that of Italy (in a Europe that has perhaps never found one). In fact, northern society has lost its most exemplary character, that is, being the engine of the country's development, capable not only of pointing out a path of progress, but of channeling parts and components of the rest of Italy along the path of growth. Now the most solid stereotype of the North – thinking of itself as a strong area among the strong areas of Europe – simply no longer exists, dissolved like the virtuous civil practices of which it was once believed to be the repository. The North now appears largely homogeneous to the rest of a nation which, together with its point of equilibrium, is struggling to find its place in the world, while feeling the threat of an irreparable fall.
In the autumn of 2014, a North that does not know how to react to the environmental breakdowns generated by waves of bad weather that is far from exceptional, that is unable to escape the trap of corruption to implement its public works, certainly has no more models to propose. who witnesses the attrition of the resources with which he tried to stem an unstoppable crisis. Who, above all, is desolately poor in ideas and projects that would allow him to design a possible future.
This was not the nature of the territory in which I grew up and where I trained at a time when its beating heart was the imposing concentration of workers, capital and means of production called “industrial triangle”, the structured area around the poles of Milan, Turin and Genoa. That was the North for those who observed the movement of economic development between the XNUMXs and XNUMXs, especially when they were directly affected or involved in it. Certainly it did not coincide with the entire North, but it constituted its dynamic nucleus, which distinguished itself from the rest of Italy thanks to its growth rates and left its stamp on it, through the pace of its economy. It was an industrial North, where the countryside was rapidly depopulating, while still retaining the rural trace inherited from a very recent past in the forms of the landscape and in the stamp of social relations. The presence of the big city was imminent, which however had not yet expanded, projecting the urban form onto the provinces.
Subsequent history did not at all represent, as many were inclined to believe at the time, the unconditional success of a scheme of organization of the economy and of the territory which seemed unparalleled in terms of its power. On the contrary, having overcome the season in which that model dictated the pace of Italian expansion, the following decades saw the configuration of the North established by the canon of the "industrial triangle" fade and decay. The dynamics of the transformation took an unexpected curvature with respect to the features that had imposed themselves in such a plastic way when Italy had begun to burn the stages of growth. The race towards the industrial and spatial concentration of production had to be stopped, while the big cities ceased to attract the factors of development and the latter began to radiate along longer territorial axes.
The countryside was urbanized quickly, while the city gradually took on a tertiary aspect, which then ended up replacing the previous industrial aspect. Wordings like "North East" e "Northwest" they asserted themselves within a scenario that disregarded the previous arrangements. With the last two decades of the twentieth century, the North becomes a reality that declines in the plural, while the large economic and social aggregates are also decomposing.
We discover and invent roots and community belongings, as we detach ourselves from the social blocks of the past and overcome them. In the end, it will be a composite and at the same time more integrated North that emerges, new in some ways, but impoverished in comparison with its historical endowments.
This book tries to tell the change in northern society over more than six decades, according to a perspective that consists, initially, in the consolidation of the triangle between Milan, Turin and Genoa and, later, in its disarticulation. It is in this closest phase that the northern Po valley assumes the form of a vast urban area, where the poles of the major cities no longer present themselves as spatial boundaries, dislocating instead as organizational nodes and active centres.
La via del Nord bears in the title an assonance with a distant essay by Riccardo Musatti, La via del Sud (1955), which struck me a lot as a young man, also for the density of the writing. Musatti was a lucid man of culture from the Olivetti circle, who for the Community Movement had gone in search of a way of emancipation for the South such as to safeguard some of its original characteristics without jeopardizing its access to modernity.
Like my previous book Nord (2008), this book also summarizes the history of northern society from the XNUMXs to today through the axes of business, the world of work, the city and politics. I have extensively taken up that text, leaving room for the words of the protagonists, consigned to official documents and deeds or evoked from memory, pronounced on formal occasions or saved as private testimony, in the belief that the historian's profession is entrusted to the ability to connect moments and situations diverse by welding collective action to personal experience. In some important passages, above all in chapter III, where the theme of the urban form is more elusive, I did not hesitate to resort to literary texts, both for the effectiveness with which they summarize issues with complex implications, and because they reveal a surprising depth of perception.
Yet, in many respects, The Northern Way is an entirely new book compared to its predecessors, not only because every chapter has been revised and quite a few paragraphs have been completely rewritten or added. What has changed is the perspective within which my attempt at historical reconstruction falls. Today I would say that a period of burning and convulsive development is followed by a prolonged season in which the North consumes and disperses its energies and capacities.
A phase that is not rectilinear, of course, punctuated as it is by gaps and discontinuities; but which from a certain moment onwards – the turning point of the 2008s – witnesses a clearer and more progressive deterioration, destined to culminate with the great crisis which explodes in Europe and in the world in the autumn of XNUMX. Even then the Northern Italy was at a standstill, with an economy oriented towards substantial stagnation and a society less and less permeated with vital impulses for change. About ten years ago this path was not so clear to me that my judgment on the decline of Italy and its North was cautious. I believe that my perspective error did not depend only on the radical nature of the crisis, which has laid bare, often even brutally, the fragility of the constitution of contemporary Italy.
The elements to understand in which direction the country and its North were moving were already visible and deployed before. What influenced my point of view? The influence was probably the fact that at the time I was closer to some portion of the establishment and that I myself had been drawn into the administrative orbit at the local level, albeit from an extremely marginal position. This was probably enough to make me abdicate, even without being aware of it, the attitude of critical detachment that a scholar should safeguard in all circumstances. So if I've learned a lesson, it's that intellectual independence is a very difficult condition to preserve, since it takes very little to compromise it. Returning to the space of the ordinary citizen, devoid of privileged relationships with institutional decision-makers, I realize the advantage that derives from this for the scholar, who is free to make full use of the critical tools of his profession.
