Word: milan
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Milan's opulence is no sudden sparkle or passing phenomenon. The city is the dynamic fountainhead of the biggest, most sustained comeback that any European nation has made from World War II ashes. Germany has had its economic miracle, and France its postwar resurgence; both are still prospering but at a slightly slower pace. North Italy has sustained its boom. In Milan the Gothic finials of the renowned duomo now have to fight for recognition against a skyline of striking new skyscrapers. From the Piazza del Duomo rises the bedlam that only Italian traffic can generate. In front...
...only the businessmen prosper, Milan's workers are the industrial elite of Italy. Per capita earnings have leaped 56% since 1952 to $1,000 a year, which in actual purchasing power amounts to much more. Milan's 1,500,000 people pay 26% of the taxes-and grumble as if it were 100%. And all over North Italy-the flaring top quarter of the boot that lies above Florence-workers can now own the refrigerators and television sets they produce. Last year so many of them traded their motor scooters for autos that car registrations in Italy soared...
Italian industrial production, still largely concentrated in the "iron triangle" of Milan, Turin and Genoa, has doubled in the past eight years. So avidly does the rest of the world gobble up Italian products that the nation's balance-of-payments surplus is the envy of the U.S. Treasury. Buoyed by these achievements, North Italian businessmen, who once argued that they could hold their home markets only with the help of protectionism, today swagger forth on a Common Market invasion of the rest of Europe with all the self-assurance of the Caesars...
...Italian government and U.S. aid money poured in, is still primarily a land of hunger and hopelessness. In startling contrast gleams the prosperity of North Italy, which has replaced the U.S. as the near and visible promised land in the dreams of impoverished Sicilians and Calabrians. "California begins at Milan," runs the current folklore of South Italy and each day hundreds of southerners board northbound trains to seek the living wage they cannot find at home. Last year some 70,000 of them settled in Milan alone...
Ferdinando Innocenti, 71, is another who combines restless curiosity with shrewd economic sense. One day before World War II, Innocenti, then a small-time maker of steel pipe in Milan, bumped his head on a wooden scaffolding. This, in Da Vinci style, led him to develop the lightweight steel scaffolds now standard the world over. After the war, he bent his tubes into a motor scooter frame and, with his Lambretta, rode the crest of Italy's pent-up demand for cheap transportation. Next, spotting Italian industry's growing need for tools, he began producing heavy machinery...