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The main problem facing Italy geographically and demographically is the aging of its population. Today, women have a life expectancy at birth of 84 years, while that of men is 79. This means that 20 percent of the Italian population is over 65 years of age. This, added to the country's very low birth rate, means that there is an increasing proportion of the elderly population, with the consequent economic impact given the greater dependence of these people on the pension system, and the decreasing productivity of the economically active population.
Italy faced serious postwar economic problems. Wartime governments had printed money to pay for arms, and inflation intensified. By the end of 1920 the lira was worth only one-sixth of its 1913 value. Savings became nearly worthless, and rents collected by landowners plummeted in value. Meanwhile, the major arms and shipbuilding firms went bankrupt after the war for lack of government orders. Unemployment rose to two million as returning soldiers searched for work. Peasants, organized by trade unions, ex-servicemen’s groups, or Catholic leagues, seized land for themselves, especially in the south; agricultural labourers went on strike at harvest time. Trade unions, now operating again, pressed for higher wages, and strikes, including those in the public services, became routine. A series of stoppages paralyzed the railroads, as well as postal and telegraph services.
Throughout the biennio rosso (“two red years”; 1919–20), revolution appeared imminent. While spontaneous land occupations swept through the south, riots and lootings hit shopkeepers in the north and centre in the summer of 1919, and prices were cut by half throughout the country. Socialist deputies walked out of parliament in December 1919 to protest the presence of the king. They were attacked by nationalists, and widespread general strikes followed. In April 1920 the Piedmontese General Strike blocked work throughout Piedmont. The Socialist Party and the trade unions met in Milan to decide, absurdly, whether or not to call a revolution. They voted against, and Piedmont was isolated. In June 1920, mutinies, riots, and strikes hit the Ancona region and threatened to become an insurrection. Massive rural-worker agitation swept the whole of the Po valley and threatened the harvest during the summer of 1920. The Catholic “white” (as opposed to the Socialist “red”) union federation, the CIL (Confederazione Italiana Lavoratori), formed in 1918, grew massively throughout the biennio rosso, above all in the agricultural regions of the north and especially around Bergamo, Brescia, and Cremona. A Catholic left even emerged in the north that preached revolution and led long strikes in Lombardy and the Veneto. Yet this mass movement never linked up with the Socialists, whose ideological anticlericalism alienated them from all wings of the Catholic movement.
