Alba e tramonto del nuovo meridionalismo. La lezione di Pasquale Saraceno

[Autom. eng. transl.] The essay investigates the long season of "new southernism" between the 1930s and the end of the 1980s, through its most representative figure, Pasquale Saraceno. In particular, it focuses on the genesis of an industrialist approach to the South, in discontinuity with the long Catholic and Nittian tradition, matured in the rooms of the IRI, through new economic and cultural references; on its maturation during the reconstruction, through the drafting of the First Aid Plans and the first planning experiments, despite the poor representation of the topic in the public debate and in the Constituent Assembly; on its institutional fulfillment with Svimez, the Association for the industrial development of Southern Italy, thanks to the political turning point of the centre-left and initiatives such as the Vanoni Plan and the National Commission for economic planning; on its decline in the Seventies and Eighties, marked by economic crisis, controversies over the extraordinary intervention, globalization and collapse of the First Republic. At the end of the essay we draw the balance of an experience that spanned the first forty republican years, as an unfinished historical project, that of the economic unification of the nation.