Requiem for the Third Italy? Rise and Fall of a too succesful concept

This paper reviews first the long controversy that finally led to recognition that dualistic models (North versus South) were no longer suitable for understanding the multi-regional differentiation of contemporary Italian development, since that development had generated a new geo-economic formation labelled as ‘peripheral economy’ or ‘Third Italy’, whose speciific development agent had been small enterprise spatial systems, later named with terms that were newly coined (‘system areas’) or rediscovered (the Marshallian ‘industrial district’). Frorn that point onwards, the Italian as well as the international debates on small enterprise spatial systems (SESSs), and especially on industrial districts, record attitudes oscillating from being passionately in favour to being hypercritical but, in both cases, strongly ideologized. The Third Italy's case supplies a pertinent example of the risk of ideologizing a scientific controversy. Despite the continuing emphasis put on their past performances, the most rece...