This article analyses representations of the relationship between the city and the countryside in central and north-eastern Italy in the second half of the twentieth century. It aims to examine three different issues: first, the relationship between the idea of the city and the idea of the nation in contemporary Italy; secondly, the emergence of new approaches to what constituted urban living in the late twentieth century; thirdly, the development of the idea of a distinctive relationship between town and country in central and north-eastern Italy, which provided an original ‘model of Italian development’.
During the 1970s, a period also characterized in Italy by the widespread conviction that the crisis of Fordism was irreversible, sociologists and economists identified the centre/north-east of Italy as a macroregion where a new model of social and economic development was flourishing. This macroregion comprised seven regioni (administrative counties) – Tuscany, Umbria, Emilia-Romagna, Marche, Veneto, Friuli Venezia Giulia and Trentino-Alto Adige – and came to be known as the ‘Third Italy’ in order to distinguish it from the ‘first’ Italy, the north-west, and the ‘second’, the south (Figure 1).
The seven regioni of the ‘Third Italy’
The main characteristics of the Third Italy model were the role of family entrepreneurship, the dynamism of small industries and the social cohesion of the local community.Footnote 1 Scholars, however, also emphasized a distinctive territorial organization, marked by accentuated urban polycentrism and the integration of the urban and rural environments. In public discourse, this interconnection between city and countryside was not only considered a fundamental characteristic of the history of the macroregion, but also an exemplary solution for a transition towards a new post-Fordist social organization. In many respects, the Third Italy began to symbolize a particular ‘way of life’, comprising both small towns and well-ordered agricultural areas; it merged traditional social practices and innovative production systems, conservatism and flexibility. It also prefigured a revitalized relationship between the urban and the rural, which would substitute, it was believed, metropolitan expansion in an increasingly postmodern society. Furthermore, the Third Italy embodied the idea of an original ‘Italian model’ for a more sustainable development, which became one of the most internationally renowned examples for supporting the virtues of ‘historical alternatives’ to the mass production during the 1980s.Footnote 2
Finally, it is also interesting to note that the idea of the Third Italy contributed to the affirmation of a supremacy of the economic and social sciences in the construction of the representations of the nation. If the humanistic disciplines (first of all history, but also geography and literature) still retained a sort of rhetorical primacy in the elaboration of a national discourse at the beginning of the 1960s, this predominance was significantly reduced at the end of the following decade. It is meaningful that, at its outset, the idea of the Third Italy was not based on an explanatory model inspired by historicism.Footnote 3
This article is divided into four parts. The first part discusses the emergence of a representation of an urban primacy that, despite the pre-eminence of an agrarian economy up to the 1950s, had strongly influenced the idea of Italian national identity since the nineteenth century. The second part analyses the emergence of a new idea of a ‘middle’ Italy at the end of the 1960s, which was characterized by enhanced links between urban and rural contexts: the recognition of this central region paved the way for doing away with the long-established dualism between north and south. The third part examines ways in which the distinction between city and countryside was broken down in the Third Italy during the 1970s and 1980s owing to the emergence of local communities based on a post-Fordist productive system. The fourth part is a reflection on the subsequent development of these issues and the impact that they have on an idea of central Italy today.
An urban nation
Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, one of the distinctive features of Italian national discourse has undoubtedly been the assertion of the primacy of the city over the countryside. More than in other European countries, Italian nationalism has been nourished almost exclusively by urbanism, or, rather, by historical events and myths relating to the city, with notably little mention of the role of the peasant-patriot. In the narrative of the Italian Risorgimento, there is nothing similar to the northern European epics set in remote forests and natural places of uncontaminated beauty; instead, there is a vast collection of tales and characters closely linked to the urban world. Above all, the battles of the communes against the Holy Roman Empire in the Middle Ages, as well as the revolts of cities under foreign domination in the early modern period, became the foundation myths of the nation: not by chance, the victory of the Lombard League (1176), the Sicilian Vespers rebellion (1282) or the resistance of Florence besieged by imperial troops (1529–30) were some of the more popular episodes in the creation of a national identity.Footnote 4
Within this discourse, two nation-building functions of the city stand out. On the one hand, the city was seen as the origin of experimentation with the political institutions that constitute Italian ‘modernity’. On the other hand, the city was seen as the driving force for the organization of the country as a whole. Both functions conveyed an idea of the supremacy of the urban context over the rural one, above all in its ability to create a communal space. In this regard, the observations made by Carlo Cattaneo formalized an interpretative pattern. Cattaneo, one of the leading intellectual and political figures of the Risorgimento, supporter of a federalist organization for the Italian state, described the city as ‘the only principle that can reduce thirty centuries of Italian history to clear and continuous narrative’.Footnote 5 In other words, the city provides the dynamism that has formed the nation over the centuries. What Cattaneo emphasized was the legacy of the medieval city-state: the dominance of the city over its rural hinterlands. The result was that the city created the identity of the countryside.
Our cities are not merely the happy seat of the largest number of inhabitants, shops, and workshops, or of the largest depository of provisions. Such would be, for example, Birmingham, Trieste, Malta, or Gibraltar, none of which has any intimate moral link with the populations surrounding them, and all of which could be described as geopolitical cities that stand on the mainland like ships anchored in the sea.
Our cities are the ancient centers of all communications in large and populous provinces. All the roads and markets in their respective areas converge on them; they function rather like the heart in a system of veins. They are the terms to which all consumption is directed and from which all industry and capital derive. They are a point of intersection, or rather, a center of gravity; and gravity, as we know, cannot be made to fall on merely any point chosen at random.Footnote 6
In the aftermath of political unification, and despite the absolute dominance of the agricultural economy, nobody doubted the leading role that cities had in the modernization of the nation. Not by chance, the division between the developed north and the backward south has often been shaped in the public discourse by the opposition between the city (symbolized by the north) and rural areas (symbolized by the south). For many intellectuals and politicians interested in investigating the underdeveloped southern regions, the latter lagged behind because they were still afflicted by the feudalism that, since the Norman domination of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, had impeded the growth of a modern urbanized society, like the one that emerged in northern and central Italy.Footnote 7 According to Giustino Fortunato, a renowned scholar on southern Italy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the south was characterized by the lack of a strong, well-structured urban network.
[H]alf of Italy, from the Tiber up,…keeps the social character of an essentially homogeneous country intact, where connection is based on the independence of the municipality…on the contrary, from the Abruzzi and Lazio down,…throughout the ages, with any form of government, whether subject or not to foreign dominion, southern Italy has remained immobile like a single body with a single centre, such as Benevento or Naples, and so like an island it has always been organized in a feudal way, even when feudalism was disappearing elsewhere, first politically and then by legislation.Footnote 8
This dialectic between the urban and rural worlds was also central to Antonio Gramsci's thoughts on Italian society in the aftermath of the Great War, a time when he viewed the communist revolution as imminent. In January 1920, he published an article in L'Ordine Nuovo, where the city and country were irresolvably opposed: on the one hand, there was the place of progress, modernity and ‘historical and spiritual conquests’, and on the other, tradition, conservation and basic needs. When one prevailed, the other regressed, according to a dialectical model where no synthesis was possible. According to Gramsci, although the city had contributed to the rise and consolidation of industrial capitalism, it later began to be overwhelmed by the ‘decay’ of bourgeois power, which created space for rural areas, for its ‘usurers’ and diehard opponents of modernity. Only the dictatorship of the proletariat would be able to save the ‘modern city’ and its civilization by ensuring ‘peace’ and ‘fraternity’ with the country:
Just as the city, this organ of industry and civic life, was the instrument of capitalist economic power and the bourgeois dictatorship, so will it also be the instrument of the communist economic power and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The proletarian dictatorship will preserve this magnificent apparatus of industrial and intellectual production, this driving force of civic life, from the ruin which is looming so threateningly over it.Footnote 9
More than a decade later, in some famous notes written from prison, Gramsci further explored the relationship between the city and the country in the Italian context. A much more complex picture emerged compared to his earlier analysis: its meaning was more difficult to decipher, and in some respects, it was even contradictory. It is not by chance that Gramsci saw the town–country relationship as the source of certain historical issues affecting Italian society, which contributed also to the rise of fascism.
An ‘industrial’ city is always more progressive than the countryside which depends organically upon it. But not all Italy's cities are ‘industrial’, and even fewer are typically industrial…Urbanism in Italy is not purely, nor ‘especially’, a phenomenon of capitalistic development or of that of big industry. Naples, which for a long time was the biggest Italian city and which continues to be one of the biggest, is not an industrial city: neither is Rome – at present the largest Italian city. Yet in these mediaeval-type cities too, there exist strong nuclei of populations of a modern urban type; but what is their relative position? They are submerged, oppressed, crushed by the other part, which is not of a modern type, and constitutes the great majority. Paradox of the ‘cities of silence’.Footnote 10
According to Gramsci, it was the socio-economic status of the city that determined its relationship with rural areas. In Italy, the dualism between modernity (the city) and tradition (the countryside) would also have developed within the urban world, which would not have had an industrial profile prevalent enough to relegate the rural world to a subordinate role. However, the sides might have been confused, because sometimes the paradox happened wherein a ‘rural type’ was more progressive than an ‘urban’ one. This apparent ambiguity did not prevent Gramsci from interpreting the relationship between the city and the country as the major paradigm for the territorial and social divisions of the nation. It shaped his ideas on the southern question: in fact, the dualism between city and countryside became a kind of conceptual model for the divide between north and south.Footnote 11
Unlike the Marxists, even those who did not consider industrialization and urbanization as obligatory paths for the modernization of the Italian society maintained that cities had an irreplaceable national-building function. For example, Luigi Sturzo, one of the leading exponents of political Catholicism and a committed defender of the rural world, did not hesitate to attribute a leading role to the great cities of the past in the process of nation-building.
In all Italian cities a historical element of great value elevates morally these glorious ones that once had functions and political characteristics; they accumulated treasures of wisdom and art and today, even in the new civil status in the unified kingdom, they must radiate their moral influence throughout the nation, these municipalities being the most legitimate and most glorious resources.Footnote 12
A similar paradox also emerges in fascist discourse, where ruralist propaganda did not erode the idea of the city as the engine behind the nationalization of the masses. While it is true that Mussolini did not miss the chance to celebrate the virtues of the farming world, particularly after the impact of the economic crisis of the 1930s, it is very difficult to identify any programme for the ruralization of Italy in fascist policies.Footnote 13 Fascism aimed to ‘evacuate the cities’, halt the emigration from the countryside and support agricultural development, but all this could only happen by urbanizing rural areas through the introduction of the infrastructure and services that encourage the expansion of urban practices and cultures in a variety of ways. The regime invested in land reclamation, in the foundation of new cities and in the creation of more efficient links between rural areas and the metropolises.Footnote 14 The latter, however, were promoted as the designated places for displaying fascist modernity: the rebirth of Roma Imperiale, the construction of the Grande Milano and a general ambition to transform the urban landscape of the major cities according to fascist ideals. Indeed, much of the fascist project for the nationalization of Italians was based on a glorification of urban modernity. This is emphasized by many modern scholars who also agree that architecture was exploited by fascism ‘in an excellent way, as no modern nation had ever done previously’.Footnote 15
The middle Italy
In these discourses, there is almost no mention of the existence of a central Italy. Until the middle of the twentieth century, the only territorial division recognized by public opinion was that between north and south. Even those who were supposed to represent the interests of the central regions ended up identifying themselves in this dualism. For example, at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the north seemed privileged by national economic policies and the south had begun to enjoy special laws, a brief but intense political movement arose to claim special provisions for the centre (Marche, Umbria and Lazio, but not Tuscany) similar to those reserved for the south. To legitimize this request, the local elites – mostly radical-republican and socialist administrators – put forward the idea of a ‘media Italia’ without its own specific role, but still within the south, at least as far as its poorest areas were concerned.Footnote 16 The republican Angelo Celli described it thus in parliament in May 1904:
It is believed that the centre of Italy is a uniform region, not as rich as northern Italy, nor as poor as the south, but in a middling condition, almost created to act as a buffer between the two contrary trends, between the extremes of the two Italies. However, if we look carefully, we need to distinguish the two Italies a little better. It was always said that the border of the two Italies on the Adriatic side was the Tronto. Unfortunately, this is not so. If a border is to be drawn, we must unfortunately go back in time, and if we also want a historical border, which represents a great event, and which demonstrated the different local economic conditions of the past, we have to go back to the Rubicon. This is the real border between the two Italies: between poor Italy and rich Italy.Footnote 17
Later, in the fascist period, some economists such as Ferdinando Milone began to question the reliability of this dualism, especially in relation to the growth of industrialization. After examining the industrial census carried out in 1927, Milone highlighted the differences between an area of ‘greater industrialism’ (Lombardy, Piedmont and Liguria) and one of ‘less intense industrialism’ (Venezia Giulia, Veneto and Tuscany), merging the rest of the country into a single, predominantly agricultural, region: it was a tripartism which, in his opinion, ‘is determined by geographical location, physical characteristics and history’.Footnote 18 Nevertheless, these attempts to provide a different representation of Italy's internal borders had little impact outside academic circles. This was generally because the rhetoric of the regime strove to legitimize the idea of a successful recomposition of the dualisms that had plagued the nation in the liberal period, above all, any dualism concerning the north–south and city–rural area divide.
However, these oppositions very much came to the fore in the first two decades after the fall of fascism: the nation was represented as divided between a rich urban north and a poor rural south and progress was to be found in the city, while rural areas were dominated by backwardness. This was an extremely simplistic reading, which did not take into account the development and the increasing complexity of the economic and social structures of Italy during the second half of the 1940s and throughout the 1950s.Footnote 19 But it was only in the middle of the 1960s, as the effects of the economic ‘miracle’ wore off and Italians became more aware of the changes that had been taking place, that the need to rethink the traditional dualistic pattern became more urgent. For example, in government economic policy studies, a division into three macroareas (Triangolo, Mezzogiorno and Resto d'Italia) started to gain currency, although it was evident that these denominations still implied the primacy of the north–south divide.Footnote 20 On the contrary, the geographer Calogero Muscarà openly criticized the obsolescence of the dualistic scheme, and in 1967, he published a book in which he supported the existence of ‘at least three Italies’.
It is not possible to talk of one or two Italies, the first restricted to the eight most advanced provinces of the north-west, and the second covering the rest of the country that is supposedly clearly rural. We need to recognize at least three Italies, with a south which, in terms of development and general appearance, is clearly in contrast to northern-western Italy, which is characterized by an equally homogeneous appearance – albeit far less backward – and a middle Italy, in which there are the most diverse contexts and combinations of income and activities.Footnote 21
According to Muscarà, the latter is ‘a middle Italy not only in a topographical sense: even from the economic point of view we are faced with a situation of transition, which has some features in common with the north-western area and some in common with the south’.Footnote 22
At the end of the 1960s, this idea of the existence of a ‘middle’ Italy raised new questions about the consequences of the survival of ancient traditions, such as sharecropping and craftsmanship, which had characterized the central regions of Italy since the Middle Ages. On the one hand, there was the tradition of an agricultural organization which required close contact between the landowner, who resided in the city, and the sharecropper, who lived in the country. On the other hand, there was the wide-scale growth of a small manufacturing system which had left little room for a Fordist industry to develop. What is interesting at the end of the 1960s is that these social and economic characteristics were no longer viewed as relics of the past, but were seen as specific cultural values in the make-up of a typical development pattern. According to some Italian scholars, largely geographers and economists, the presence of a ‘middle’ Italy signified an intermediate category positioned between the modernity of the ‘industrial triangle’ and the backwardness of the south. This ‘middle’ Italy was described as a ‘peripheral’ world, where the urban polycentrism of the medieval city-state tradition and the dynamism of sharecropping practices still held sway.
In the wake of Edward Banfield's research on the backwardness of the south (The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, 1958), various foreign scholars also began to regard this area as an alternative social and economic model to that of southern regions. For example, the American anthropologist Sydel Silverman pointed out that central Italy had no experience of Banfield's ‘amoral familism’.Footnote 23 The reason for this was that since the Middle Ages, the practice of sharecropping had created a special relationship between city and rural areas, which produced the characteristic ‘civilization’ of central Italy. What struck Silverman was the urban presence in rural areas, even in small communities: ‘In the Center, civiltà and other urban values are most readily attained by the peasants indirectly, through the identity of the community as a whole.’Footnote 24 Despite the visibility of a physical boundary between city and countryside, which was symbolized in many small and medium-sized cities by the survival of city walls and a cohesive urban morphology, social and cultural borders appeared more permeable. These two worlds were linked, were integrated, in the name of a common ‘civilization’ which was often reflected in a certain lifestyle: ‘The social organization of agriculture within the mezzadria system reflects the interpenetration of town and country that is intrinsic to the civic life. A sharp contrast between townsman-citizen (cittadino) and excluded countryman (contadino) co-exists with important relationships that tie them together.’Footnote 25
The rediscovery of this territorial organization also fascinated various Italian intellectuals. According to the linguist Giacomo Devoto, the recognition of the particular nature of central Italy helped to ‘valorize another Italy, valued for the dignity of its history, for its socio-political ferment, civil and discreet, though fundamentally misunderstood, or at least undervalued in proportion to the number and the abilities of its inhabitants’.Footnote 26 He even argued for the foundation of a new capital for this ‘sovraregione’ (macroregion) which was to be located in northern Lazio:
I ask myself if there is an urban planner whose heart is drawn towards the thought of a centre of just a few tens of thousands of inhabitants, without the ambition to be either a metropolis or a ‘hometown’, aimed at welcoming small business, working with the farmers that remained; that gives the impression of a unified aesthetic impulse, with respect for nature, and the comfort of dwellings, refusing all monotony, with a clear commitment to a care for detail: a small Brasilia in the Tuscia area, under the agreed supra-regional protection of Tuscany, Umbria and Lazio.Footnote 27
In many ways, it is surprising that many of these arguments were being raised while sharecropping was on the decline and the growth of small industry was radically transforming the landscape of the regions in question. On the one hand, there had been a progressive relocation of the population from the mountain centres on the Apennines towards the coast and a massive exodus of agricultural labour (in 1982, a law definitively abolished sharecropping contracts);Footnote 28 on the other hand, a proliferation of industrial activity brought about the construction of small factories, warehouses and workshops scattered throughout the outskirts of urban areas, along the main roads, and in places that acquired an indefinite urban–rural identity.
The idea that there was an ‘urbanized countryside’ became popular, although its significance was somewhat different to what Silverman once talked about. In particular, it indicated the territorial organization of a ‘widespread industry’, made up of thousands of small family enterprises. Their development outside urban centres, along with the expansion of new residential suburbs constituted mainly by single-family houses, contributed to the breakdown of the physical borderline between the urban and rural worlds.
Urbanized countryside, industrial districts and local systems
Between 1961 and 1971, industries in central/north-east regions had grown more rapidly than those in the north-west.Footnote 29 Whereas the big Fordist factories of the ‘industrial triangle’ were hit by crisis in the second half of the 1970s, the small flexible industries of the centre/north-east area constituted the most dynamic sector of the Italian economy. On the basis of such empirical evidence, the existence of a Third Italy was put forward. This area not only had a common economic system, but also shared cultural values and social practices. According to the sociologist Arnaldo Bagnasco, there were ‘three specific societies’ in Italy at the end of the 1970s: the north-west, the centre/north-east and the south, which ‘had at least in part different class systems, political structures, and cultural characteristics’.Footnote 30
The main characteristic of this Third Italy was the presence of ‘industrial districts’. According to Alfred Marshall's classification, these districts were seen as clusters of firms situated in a limited area, specializing in the same production sector, and sharing ‘a set of values and knowledge so important as to determine a cultural environment’.Footnote 31 According to the economist Giacomo Becattini, this district was a ‘social machine which produces a set of attitudes based on certain values and knowledge produced by history’. This implied an extraordinary disciplining social device, where ‘any behaviour detrimental to the typical enterprise in the area was automatically rejected through the discrimination of the individual responsible’.Footnote 32
What is pertinent to our analysis is the fact that the district prescribed a specific territorial organization. In many respects, the so-called ‘homines distrectualis’ occurred as the result of the gradual integration of the worlds of the urban craftsman and the rural sharecropper. These people lived and worked in an area that still felt the legacy of medieval city-state polycentrism and the structure of agricultural sharecropping. The economist Giorgio Fuà described this integration of city and countryside at the beginning of the 1980s:
In evocative terms, albeit expressed a little roughly, the original environment is typical of the Italy of designated municipalities as opposed to the territories of the former Kingdom of Naples.
Some characteristics of this environment must be stressed as their influence will be found later in the model of industrialization. The territory is densely dotted with medium and small cities. They are centres full of urban activity, with a tradition of local, democratic and effective administration, as well as flourishing private sectors regarding commerce, the professions and crafts.
Rural areas are served by a dense network of roads and there is a decent infrastructure and access to services. The small family business (owner, sharecropper or tenant) prevails in agriculture. The rural population is numerous and has a close relationship with the urban population.
There is a relatively high level of self-employment, both urban and rural. It is quite common for the economic status of the family not to be restricted to consumption, but to include production too. A large section of the population can rely for support on a house or a farm, a workshop or a family shop. There is a relationship of solidarity within the ‘extended family’ and the neighbourhood and, to resort to a somewhat generic form of expression, there is strong participation in community affairs and in social integration.Footnote 33
In the middle of the 1980s, another economist, Fabio Sforzi, suggested defining the boundaries of these districts by positing three different ‘spatial models’: the ‘production system’ space (the location of production units), the ‘social system’ space (the overlapping between productive and social identities) and the ‘urban system’ space (the link between home and the workplace).Footnote 34 This new space, both urban and rural, was seen as a site for the development of a community of small producers, where there was an ‘organic correspondence’ between economy, society and culture. As Becattini pointed out, ‘in the district, unlike what happens in other environments (for example, in a manufacturing city), community and businesses tend, for instance, to interlink with each other’.Footnote 35 With reference to this spatial typology, social scientists started to use concepts and images such as ‘network’, ‘urban–rural continuum’, ‘territorial system’ and ‘local system’.Footnote 36 In the early 1990s, Italian law (n. 317, 1991) gave legal recognition to the industrial district, which also became a category adopted by the Italian National Institute of Statistics.
Furthermore, these hardworking communities located in an ‘urban–rural continuum’ attracted many foreign observers. This was not only because economists Michael Piore and Charles Sabel made the Third Italy an inspiring illustration of their theory on the potential of ‘flexible specialization’, but also because this macroregion became the symbol of a lifestyle that appeared to be a solution to the crisis in Fordist society.Footnote 37
In a study commissioned by the Acton Society Trust, Edward Goodman highlighted that the Italian industrial district was ‘an innovation of great importance in the realm of ideas which carries with it few of the moral objections to capitalism and few of the political objections to communism’.Footnote 38 In other words, the Italian industrial district offered an ‘approach to the liberal dream of free and creative work as an essential part of liberty’.Footnote 39 According to Sabel, ‘if you had thought so long about Rousseau's artisan clockmakers at Neuchâtel or Marx's idea of labour as joyful, self-creative association that you had begun to doubt their possibility, then you might, watching these craftsmen at work, forgive yourself the sudden conviction that something more utopian than the present factory system is practical after all’.Footnote 40
All this was also due to the wherewithal to revitalize a traditional territorial organization. As Goodman stressed, ‘the boundaries of the medieval city states remain between the hills and plains, crossed as they are by the efficient communication network of the modern autostrada; but within these boundaries there are still independent, purposeful groups that are assertive, and immensely confident of themselves and of the smallest communities to which they belong’.Footnote 41
Even in the early 1990s, the American political scientist, Robert Putnam, pointed out that this was the part of Italy where the most solid ‘networks of civic engagement’ could be found.
What is crucial about these small-firm industrial districts, conclude most observers, is mutual trust, social cooperation, and a well-developed sense of civic-duty – in short, the hallmarks of the civic community. It is no surprise to learn that these highly productive, small-scale industrial districts are concentrated in those very regions of north-central Italy that we have highlighted as centers of civic traditions, of the contemporary civic community, and of high-performance regional government.Footnote 42
Between polycentrism and sprawl
What is left of this model? Now that the link between the centre and the north-east has been broken, since public opinion has restored the latter to ‘the north’, is there still a chance that central Italy can be seen as a region characterized by its own distinctive territorial structure and a specific relationship between urban and rural areas? Although it is possible to consider this idea of a Third Italy at the end of the twentieth century as part of a process of reshaping territoriality under new conditions of global interaction, is it still feasible that a macroregion in central Italy can figure on the European and world scenario, working for the survival of a tradition of cultural integration between city and countryside?
Some still believe that this model can be revived. According to the sociologist Aldo Bonomi, however, ‘the question of cities and metropolitan space’ is nowadays the ‘new dimension of the territory’, although in Italy there can be no ‘smart city without smart land’.Footnote 43 In the face of the current crisis of the ‘Italian development model’, it is necessary to take inspiration from the Renaissance, for the ‘synthesis and workshop’ providing a functional interconnection between smart city and smart land’, and propose a new idea of ‘territory’ through an evaluation of ‘those civic and economic virtues that emerge from the long history of central Italy’.Footnote 44
For Italy, the smart city is a fundamental opportunity to ‘reinvent’ the territory, in a perspective that brings the smart city and the smart land together…The smart land therefore appears to be an encouraging perspective upon which to experiment with modernization and civil forms of production. In this sense, smart land is an area in which it is possible to experiment with widespread common policies aimed at increasing the competitiveness and attractiveness of the territory, with special attention to social cohesion, the sharing of knowledge, creative growth, accessibility and freedom of movement, the usability of the environment (natural, historical-architectural, in the city and beyond), the quality of the landscape and the life of its citizens.Footnote 45
According to other observers, the traditional ‘highly polycentric urban system’ of central Italy is becoming an area of ‘territorial coalescence’ which, in many cases, has triggered ‘a real process of construction of new cities’ arising from the integration of originally distinct urban agglomerations.Footnote 46 In particular, the economist Antonio Calafati holds that many ‘local systems’ should now be redefined as cities, de facto cities, which bear witness to the increased ‘urban nature’ of society in central Italy.Footnote 47 Within this change, our experience of the rural dimension is also completely transformed:
Now that they are embraced by the wider city and being an element of connection between the nodes of the new territorial system, the countryside has become a physical place in the daily life of townspeople. Like many urban places, it is an area that is continuously crossed to reach the workplace or places of consumption, education and recreation. The territory of the ‘countryside’ is now part of everyday life even for those who do not actually work or live in it. If one observes the territory of the new cities, paying particular attention to how its urban and landscape-environmental components are distributed, what emerges is the image of a city which develops surrounded by green space. Its built-up areas – some dense and compact, others apart and isolated – are located in a context of green space consisting of large portions of agricultural land.Footnote 48
Beyond the rhetoric regarding the survival of an ‘Italian development model’, it is also important to view this reconfiguration of the relationship between the city and countryside as an example of a more general expansion of European urban systems. Indeed, it is paradoxically very similar to those representations of the new ‘emerging city’ which stress a radical departure from the urban tradition. This is summed up in Pierre Donadieu's observations:
The emerging city is not the result of a project based on pre-existing models; it is opposed to the ‘old city’ which is enhanced by a pre-established order, a geometric construction, a desire for harmony and unity. It is not born of the desire for a precise form, which supports densely populated spaces, distinct from the deserted rural areas. On the contrary, going beyond the limitations that local administrators and planning experts assign to it, the territory is organized according to the reduced time spent between workplace, home, entertainment, commercial, medical and educational services; it is the creation of citizens who are free in their choices and their movement, who ignore municipal limits and are able to evaluate their interests according to their destinations. The new city arises from urban practices, ignores the spaces of power, creates its facades and its rears, and cannot be limited either by fortified walls or by green belts.Footnote 49
Conclusion
For a few decades, the idea that the territorial organization of the medieval city-state survived encouraged many observers to think that there was an ‘another’ Italy. It had flexible boundaries, and social, economic and cultural characteristics which were different from those of the metropolitan north or the rural south. However, the flourishing of industrial districts during the 1970s and 1980s began to break down the differences between city and countryside, determining the development of an urban–rural space, which is now often viewed as an Italian version of urban sprawl.Footnote 50 A surprising paradox thus emerged: while an awareness of the virtues of a centuries-old tradition of balanced integration between urban and rural space gained traction, the territory started to change physically. The disappearance of sharecropping affected the rural order, and polycentrism has been transformed into a ‘diffuse city’ or a ‘territorial coalescence’.
Nevertheless, some scholars and local administrators still imagine central Italy as the cradle of a new form of territory and landscape.Footnote 51 This would come about from a different approach to the evaluation of ‘the trade-off in an economy of global competition between territorial systems, in world tourism and in the economy of experience’.Footnote 52
At the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, it is significant that the eclipse of the idea of a Third Italy has not cancelled out either the proposition that an original Italian development model exists or the ambition to revive a territorial organization based on medieval and early modern models. It is therefore not surprising that in the present global scenario, the survival of a sort of myth regarding the ‘Italian City’ continues to be discussed as a key to reviving the historical identity of a macroregion and a nation.
