The story of Italy in the immediate aftermath of World War II (WWII) is a grim one. Physically, economically, and morally destroyed by defeat, fragmented by regionalism, class division, and the polyglossia of regional dialects , even its viability as a nation-state was being called into question (Ginsborg 1). Any pessimistic predictions made at that time for its resurrection would have been reasonable and realistic. Yet just a decade later, confounding any such expectations, it was on the way to enjoying an incredible era of prosperity and progress. By the late 1950s, it was in the midst of what came to be called “the era of the economic miracle .” Wealthy, with a gross domestic product equaling that of Great Britain, socially and culturally unified “by a single national culture … Italy has witnessed the most profound social revolution in the whole of its history” (Ginsborg 1). Author and social critic Pier Paolo Pasolini went as far as describing the social changes Italy was undergoing as “an anthropological revolution” (Forgacs 313). In 1963, President John Kennedy described Italy’s economic miracle in this manner: “the growth of […] nation’s economy, industry, and living standards in the postwar years has truly been phenomenal. A nation once literally in ruins, beset by heavy unemployment and inflation, has expanded its output and assets, stabilized its costs and currency, and created new jobs and new industries at a rate unmatched in the Western world” (Remarks 1963).
While history and sociology speak volumes about the economy, My Brilliant Friend chronicles the lives of characters living through the social and cultural upheavals. The era presented both opportunities and challenges. While Elena and Nino embody the rise of the lower middle class through socially sanctioned opportunity, the Solaras rise through criminality . This chapter will provide the historical background that enriches a reading of Ferrante’s work. Historical accounts of such periods of upheaval and transformation are made up of dates, facts, and statistics. Elena Ferrante covers the post WWII era in the four books that collectively make up the Neapolitan Novels from a different perspective, that of characters daily struggling to overcome obstacles such as poverty, fear, and violence in order to achieve their ambition of a better life. In the Neapolitan Novels the reader is offered the privilege of sharing the mental states, the interiority, of those who have lived this transformation. Although we can safely assume that Ferrante’s principal objective was not that of creating a historical chronicle, in My Brilliant Friend she adumbrates the watershed period of the economic miracle and its multiple facets. As we will see, she does this through a cluster of images surrounding the character of Don Achille, who is explicitly associated with “the dark ages,” before Elena’s birth, when “Don Achille had supposedly revealed himself in all his monstrous nature” (3).
Some critics have noted that Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels represent an “epic sweep of historical and political significance” (Falkoff 3–4/7). Others have remarked on the fact that the novels encompass “a world” (Simpson). Currier paints a more detailed picture and writes appreciatively that it is “…a story of self-realization alongside the self-realization of a nation … Ferrante subtly works in black market war profiteers, fascist collaborators, mafiosi, the workers’ movements and radical terrorism of the 1960s and ’70s, and the arrival of wealth and consumer goods to Italy’s new middle class.”
On the other hand, James Wood interestingly has suggested that Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels “may remind the reader of neorealist movies by De Sica and Visconti, or perhaps of Giovanni Verga’s short stories about Sicilian poverty.” While this may be true to a certain degree, this statement misses a crucial dimension of Ferrante’s books, and of the first of the tetralogy in particular. 1 Wood’s oversimplified picture of the Naples depicted by the author ignores the fact that while the poverty and deprivation discerned in Ferrante’s work are real, My Brilliant Friend simultaneously chronicles the new world that was emerging in post-WWII Italy. It is therefore historically evocative but also forward-looking and balanced in outlook. Indeed, as Forgacs suggests in “Twentieth-Century Culture,” although neorealist films did well in foreign countries, in Italy they were partially rejected (309) because they were too dark and reminded people of the sufferings they had just endured. In order to fully appreciate the complexity of Ferrante’s narrative, and the richness of its representation of the era, we need to examine the economic miracle from multiple perspectives: political, economic, and social. By doing so we give the narrative even more depth and texture. My intention in this chapter is not to develop the many and varied themes that subsequent essays will explore in depth. Rather, it is to provide a historical frame for the puzzle that we will construct collectively in the following chapters, in order to bring a deeper understanding of the events and characters that set the stage for the subsequent three novels and that simultaneously illuminates what can with justice be called the most important “long” decade of modern Italian history.
The phenomenon called the economic miracle did not have an exact start and end point. Some historians take the long view: post WWII to the late 1960s, but the dates most frequently cited are 1950–1963. The longest period attributed to the boom period is placed at 1950 to 1970 (Hine 324), but this is unusual, as is the shortest arc, placed at 1958 to 1963 by Forgacs (313). Events in My Brilliant Friend coincide almost exactly with the most common “long view” of roughly 1944, the estimated date of birth of both Lila Cerullo and Elena Greco, to approximately 1959 or 1960, the date that Lila marries.
In the current climate of economic crisis prevailing in Italy and in Europe in general, it is difficult to believe that there was a time in history when Italy’s economy grew at an astounding 12 percent. Between 1955 and 1962 all of the European countries were enjoying an unprecedented economic growth measured at around 9 percent. But Italy, dubbed “la tigre europea ,” reached a phenomenal 12 percent (Carioli 44) and its currency was declared in 1959 to be the strongest and most solid in the Western world (“Come eravamo” 73).
This era saw the birth of big industry, the emergence of a powerful entrepreneurial network, and large-scale infrastructural projects such as the Autostrada del Sole that stretched through two thirds of Italy, from Milano to Salerno. Forgacs summarizes that “At the same time the reconstruction, assisted by US aid through the European Recovery Program , set in train a process of modernization in which the American model of economic growth (monetarism, stimulation of the private sector, consumer-spending) played a powerful role…” (311). What were the underlying causes of the economic boom? Of course, we must acknowledge that wars, while devastating and unfortunate, destructive of life and property in the short run, almost always bring many rewards such as economic prosperity and social and scientific innovations in the long run. Historian Guido Crainz , interviewed by Carioli, admits that while the Marshall Plan made the immediate reconstruction possible after WWII, nevertheless “il miracolo non fu solo figlia dell’America” (“the miracle was not engendered only by America”) (42). He credits judicious internal choices made between 1950 and 1953 as the real impetus for the soon-to-emerge economic boom. The birth of the Cassa del Mezzogiorno , for example, while strongly criticized after 1957, was instrumental in rebuilding the destroyed infrastructure in southern Italy (the Mezzogiorno ). Large sums were invested in agriculture, road building, aqueducts, and drainage, from its inception. These were the engines that drove a renewal of Italy. Without a healthy infrastructure the paralysis that had resulted from the war would have continued and further weakened an economy and society that was in tatters. These so-called new sources of wealth were augmented between 1961 and 1965 to include significant investment in industry, 12 percent of the Cassa’s total budget. Additionally, in A History of Contemporary Italy, Ginsborg credits the decision taken by the Council of Ministers in 1957 to aid the South, to the tune of 40 percent of the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction’s total investments, and 60 percent of its investment in industrial plants would be concentrated in the Mezzogiorno (229).
Not least among the factors that stimulated the Italian economy were the immigrants’ remittances. Ginsborg offers the example of one southern village, Castelluccio, that received an astounding 800 million lire in a period of five years (230). While those from the diaspora abroad were the most impressive and encompassing, those from internal migrants, circulating among the various regions, were almost as significant. The reductionist misconception is frequently that these remittances went from the North to the South, tangible tokens, we might say, from those who had immigrated to the industrial triangle of Torino-Milano-Genova and embodying in a physical manner the sacrifices being made by them. However, while this may be the stereotypical image of the domestic immigrant, one made famous especially by popular films of the time such as Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli (1960) and Ottieri’s Donnarumma all’assalto (1959), it is a little known fact that the major flow of migrants to the northern industrial areas came not from the south, but from the Center-North. Southerners going north accounted for only 3 million (while 5 million migrated internally in the South). In contrast to this 3 million, 15 million from the Center-North migrated to the industrial triangle (Zerbinati 72). Overall, those immigrating to the industrial triangle were in equal numbers from the south and from the poor regions in the north east, such as the Veneto (Zerbinati 72). 2
Other factors that created the boom include the founding of l’ENI . Enrico Mattei, charged only with dismantling the Italian Petroleum Agency, AGIP, instead enlarged and reorganized it into the National Fuel Trust, the Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (ENI). Under his direction ENI negotiated important oil concessions in the Middle East and insured a profitable and steady supply of fuel for industry. Equally significant was the reconstruction of the many FIAT factories that had been destroyed in WWII. As the reconstruction proceeded, FIAT significantly increased its hiring, thus creating a positive ripple effect in the economy. Furthermore, its impressive investment effectively doubled the Mirafiori complex in Torino. Not only did investments like these stimulate an already stirring economy, but mass production (also known as Fordism) then made automobiles more accessible to the public, which, already enjoying the beginnings of the boom, then created a virtuous cycle in the sector. Indeed, the FIAT website probably does not overstate the case when they claim that “the automobile sector was the driving force behind [the economic miracle], fueled by FIAT innovation.” As a result of these factors “standards of living improved greatly; sugar and meat were being consumed in much greater quantities, and the number of children afflicted by serious illness had declined markedly” (Ginsborg 230). 3 Naturally, swift changes bring about uncertainty and fear as well. Thus, “The ethnologist Gianni Bosio and the ethnomusicologist Roberto Leydi sought to record the disappearing folk traditions, ways of life, songs, and spoken narratives of rural Italy…” (Forgacs 313) as the exodus to the industrial areas accelerated.
Events in My Brilliant Friend reflect the time period that bridged the old and the new. Early in the narrative Don Achille, the fulcrum of the before , a code word that in Lila and Elena’s personal lexicon comes to represent the abuses that characterized the Italy of poverty and fear, muses that she and Lila allowed his young son Alfonso to win their spontaneous scholastic competitions because:
Throughout the narrative the two expressions, before and after, become metonyms for a sociopolitical system, a culture and indeed, a worldview, and they will work in counterpoint. In one instance Lila suggests that Stefano’s invitation to celebrate the New Year of 1958 together with the Pelusos and other friends is an implicit acknowledgment that he wants to make a complete break with this before (italics in the original) period and that the times are different and they themselves are different from his father (171). Toward the end of My Brilliant Friend, Elena uses the same ploy to defuse Lila’s anger at Stefano’s selection of Silvio Solara as the master of speeches at their imminent wedding. “I spo...Like me, she [Lila] too had been forbidden to offend not only Don Achille but also his family. It was like that. We didn’t know the origin of that fear-rancor-hatred-meekness that our parents displayed toward the Carraccis and transmitted to us, but it was there, it was a fact, like the neighborhood, its dirty-white houses, the fetid odor of the landings, the dust of the streets. (51) 4