Italian urbanism cannot be read as a simple index of industrialisation

Evidence

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. Are the “hundred” Italian cities industrial? 98 Does the agglomeration of the population in non-rural centres, which is almost twice as great as in France, demonstrate that Italy’s industrialisation is double that of France? 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”. 99 In this type of city there exists, among all social groups, an urban ideological unity against the countryside, a unity which even the most modern nuclei in terms of civil function do not escape (and there are such nuclei). — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 507

Categorization

• XREF: Urban-rural divide and the pre-capitalist residue embedded within modern centres — connects to the Gramscian distinction of passive revolution and non-capitalist social strata that later postcolonial readings deploy.