Post-war rebuilding

The story

A country in ruins

When the war ended, in 1945, Italy had destroyed cities, collapsed bridges, broken railways, damaged factories and abandoned fields. Millions of people had lost their homes. In many areas there was no food: bread, pasta, sugar and milk were rationed and bought with a ration card, and those who could bought on the “black market”, where prices were sky-high. Children wore broken shoes and second-hand clothes. Many men had died, others were coming back from captivity, and there was a great need for work.

And yet, after the war, there was also a great desire to start again. Families were reunited, children went back to school, shops reopened. On 11 May 1946, in La Scala theatre in Milan, bombed during the war and rebuilt in a few months, the conductor Arturo Toscanini conducted the reopening concert, with tears in the audience's eyes.

The Marshall Plan

All of Europe was on its knees, and the United States, which had come out of the war stronger, feared that poverty would push European countries towards Communism. On 5 June 1947 the American Secretary of State, General George Marshall, speaking at a university, proposed a great aid plan for the reconstruction of Europe, the “European Recovery Program”, known as the Marshall Plan. In April 1948 the American Congress approved the funds.

Between 1948 and 1952 the United States sent about thirteen billion dollars to the European countries that accepted the aid, in food, machinery, raw materials and money. Italy received more than a billion. The countries of Eastern Europe, under the influence of the Soviet Union, refused. The aid came with a condition: the countries had to cooperate with one another, and this encouraged European cooperation.

Rolling up their sleeves

Aid alone was not enough: the work of the Italians was needed. Bridges, roads and railways were rebuilt, and factories repaired. The government, led by Alcide De Gasperi, and a strict economist, Luigi Einaudi, managed to curb inflation, that is, the rise in prices, which was eating up wages. In 1949 a plan to build houses, the INA-Casa Plan, backed by Amintore Fanfani, gave work to thousands of workers and homes to many families. In 1950 the Fund for the South (Cassa per il Mezzogiorno) was created, to bring roads, aqueducts and industries to the south, which was much poorer. In the countryside, a land reform gave land to poor farmers.

Meanwhile the way people travelled and lived was changing too. In 1946 the Piaggio company introduced the Vespa, and soon afterwards the Lambretta: two cheap scooters that took people to work and on outings. Italian cinema showed reality with new eyes: films such as “Rome, Open City” (1945) and “Bicycle Thieves” (1948), shot in real streets with non-professional actors, became famous all over the world and gave rise to “neorealism”.

Towards the boom

Within a few years industrial production was back to pre-war levels, and the recovery continued. From the mid-1950s the Italian economy grew at a tremendous pace, so much that people spoke of an “economic miracle”: from 1958 to 1963 the gross domestic product (GDP) rose by more than six per cent every year. Big companies such as Fiat, Olivetti and ENI were born, and many Italians moved from the fields to the factories. Many from the south moved to the north, or emigrated abroad, in search of work.

In 1957 Fiat introduced the 500, a small, cheap car that turned Italy into a motorised country. Fridges, washing machines and televisions arrived. Life changed: Italy, which in 1945 had been a poor farming country, within a generation became one of the world's major industrial powers.