Word: mezzogiorno
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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That backward and poverty-stricken bottom half of the Italian boot, Il Mezzogiorno, was long considered a good place to be from and a hard place to get to. Economically and physically isolated, a separate and underdeveloped land within a developed nation, the south stood in harsh contrast to Italy's industrialized north. Now all the old ideas about the south may have to be revised. Last week, with flying banners and ecclesiastical pomp, the Italians opened the last stretch of the 468-mile Milan-to-Salerno Autostrada del Sole, the first modern highway link between north and south...
...beautiful photographs by Walker Evans, probing into the timeless peasant homes and sun-squinting faces of the Deep South, then ravaged by the Depression. Despite centuries of Anglo-Saxon inbreeding, the faces seem Latin: these same lean, starveling families could have emerged as easily from the caves of the Mezzogiorno or the baked hills of Mexico...