Institute of Advanced Studies

Developmental dreams and dam disasters: The ‘economic miracle’ and the Italian environment, 1950s–1960s

by Dr Giuseppe Finaldi, UWA 

The 1950s in Italy were a time of extraordinary economic development.

The spectre of permanent backwardness leading to the dissatisfaction and internal strife which had been the cause of so many of the vicissitudes of Italy's tortured twentieth century was dispelled at last. As Italians slicked their hair back, clicked their fingers to the beat of Tu vo fa l'Americano [So, you want to be an American], watched ‘Mike’ Bongiorno on TV, posed on Vespas and crammed families into their newly acquired Fiat Cinquecento, the old Italy, with its barriers of towering mountains, hilltop fortified towns, austerely walled cities and its opaque and almost foreign peasantry scratching out a living like generation upon generation before them on the peninsula's meagre soils, quietly gave up the ghost. Few regretted its passing. Yet the elation of that moment was also punctuated by environmental disaster, quickly brushed aside as the necessary corollary of the country's Great Leap Forward. The Vajont dam disaster barely halted the electrification of Italy's North, to ‘see Naples and die’ took on a more sinister meaning than it had had at the time of Goethe, the Venetian lagoon's poisoning did not still the petro-chemical plant of Porto Marghera. This paper examines some of the environmental implications of Italian modernisation and discusses the legacy of what, until recently, has been regarded as the unmitigated success story of the Italian ‘Economic Miracle’.