Il Mezzogiorno nella storia economica d’Italia

Special issue of the editorial series Svimez Notebooks (Association for the Development of Industry in the Mezzogiorno), the volume collects the Proceedings of the Conference held at the Central State Archive on March 17, 2016, on the theme that gives the title to the volume itself, namely the development of an analysis on the economy of the Mezzogiorno.

The day was organized on the occasion of the conclusion of the ASET project – Territorial Economic Development Archives Project. Innovative models of conservation and reuse of sources for the history of extraordinary interventions for the development of the Mezzogiorno. – funded by the European Union through the Ministry of Economic Development and subject to an SVIMEZ-Central State Archive Agreement signed in May 2014. The project aims to recover, through the safeguarding and accessibility of documentation, the memory of the Fund for Extraordinary Interventions in the Mezzogiorno. The entity, born in 1950 with broad autonomy of action and its own technostructure to which the intervention for the development of the southern regions was entrusted – the most important regional policy intervention in Italian history – was a peculiar and virtuous model of Agency, characterized by elements of absolute originality and was the protagonist of an experience of crucial relevance realized in our post-war period.

Thanks to the project, it was possible to reunify about 20 km of documents at the ACS, carry out the inventory and digitization of the most significant archival series, and proceed with the cataloging in SBN web of the technical library of the Fund for the Mezzogiorno.

The subtitle of the project alludes both to advanced methods of physical conservation of archives, which in the new and modern repository would have been possible to configure, and to a new way of producing and presenting archival descriptions, useful for understanding, through a reinterpretation of the successes of the extraordinary intervention in its first twenty years, methods and norms practicable for the resumption of coherent development policies. The volume reproduces the texts of the reports and interventions carried out, in the version revised by SVIMEZ and/or integrated by the Authors.