In the 1970s, Italy's economy grew faster than all in the industrialized world but Japan's. Its growth rates of up to 5 percent, although lower than in the 1960s, compared favorably to the relatively flat figures from Britain, Germany, and the United States, most strikingly in the two years after the second oil shock of 1979. Following its first “economic miracle” in the 1950s and 1960s, wrote The Economist, Italy's “second, lesser miracle” was how the country continued to thrive in the 1970s despite a “bumbling bureaucracy,” ineffective governments, high inflation and public debt, terrorism, and “the left-wing unions’ greedy, if understandable, reaction to the headlong development of the 1960s.” Italy's rapid growth was all the more impressive in light of the ongoing economic stagnation of the South and a general crisis in the big corporations of Lombardy and Piedmont, which had been dragged down by high oil prices, recession abroad, and indexed wages.

Since the mid-1970s a number of rural areas on the periphery of Southern Europe have undergone rapid economic growth and structural transformation. They appeared to be following the earlier and much celebrated experience of the Third Italy comprising the North-East and Central provinces. The major form of industrial organisation which emerged in these regions was the small “flexible” firm, which was widely regarded as an alternative to the principles of Taylor-Fordism that lay at the heart of the industrialisation process of the more favored regions. However, almost from the outset the idea that flexible specialization presented a coherent and robust organisational paradigm has been controversial. Much of the debate was directed towards Spain and Portugal, but Greece, though an integral part of the Southern European space and despite its earlier accession to the European Community (hereafter, EC), has only attracted a limited degree of scholarly interest.

In Brazil, ever since the thirties, when the sociologist, Gilberto Freyre, made pioneering use of journalism as a source for his studies of the past, considerable weight has been given to journalistic texts on the grounds that their news and editorial sections, as well as their advertising columns, portray society with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

The bells tolled early on the morning of the 28th of January 1867, summoning the peasants from Agró and the surrounding areas on the island of Kerkyra. The bailiffs employed by the local landlords and the constables ordered to protect them were to arrive that day to collect the current year's rent. Most peasants in the area around Agró were sharecroppers cultivating the land of absentee landlords and bound to these plantation owners both by contracts and forms of quasi-feudal obligations. The annual collection of the rents was always a tense affair because under Ionian law and custom, if a sharecropper failed to pay his rent, he was subject to summary seizure and detention in prison until someone settled the debt. And from this law, there was no right of appeal.

One of the most persistent of all New World dreams, El Dorado has acquired new life over the last two decades throughout much of the Amazon Basin. Many of the same golden visions that led Orellana and his men to plunge ahead down an “ocean-river” in the sixteenth century continue to prompt large numbers of people in Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and, above all, Brazil to leave their families and set out for makeshift mining camps to seek their fortunes amidst a sea of mud. This discussion focuses on representations of gold miners or garimpeiros by themselves and others. I argue that although miners unquestionably draw on a much larger oral tradition, their stories stand apart from those told by a more general population in their tendency to portray gold as an active, female agent and in their relative lack of interest in clear-cut morals. In addition, while the vision of nature and natural forces as female and the fixation on violence as a (if not the) key element of life in the garimpo would appear to corroborate precisely those images of miners that reach a national and international public, this surface agreement cloaks important underlying differences that underscore the fundamental multiplicity of metaphor.