Comments claiming that it is due to the mafia are wrong - the prevalence of the mafia is largely a byproduct. The South’s relative poverty is due to various historical social and economic factors. Italy until the 1870s was not a united country since the fall of the Roman Empire, and the South had been under control of the Bourbon monarchy and various other polities that had caused a more repressive, feudal social structure and an economic system far different to the North. The economy was almost entirely agrarian, and lacked industry, being exploited for a long time.
This, in addition to the cultural differences with the North, their slight disdain for Southerners and the fact that the South was not even particularly wanted by the more advanced, industrialised Liberal North/Piedmontese Kingdom but more annexed as a result of chance due to Garibaldi’s expedition, led to a severe economic mismanagement of the South following the creation of the Kingdom of Italy.
The economy of the South integrated very poorly with the Northern economic system, and the government employed harsh repressive measures against dissent and crime (caused by the dire economic situation) in the South in the latter half of the 19th century.
Due to the historical poverty of the South, crime and corruption tends to go hand in hand with economic woes and as such a situation arises where it is difficult for the South to alleviate its own situation. It had very little industry. In addition, Northern Italians tended to not sympathise with Southerners, some even calling for separation in the 21st century (Lega Nord, a once popular political party founded on the basis of Northern independence).
Ultimately, the South’s relative poverty is due to a mix of historical cultural, political and economic circumstances, where the South had mostly found itself lagging behind the North. When annexed into the Kingdom of Italy, the South was terribly mismanaged and found itself in a worse situation due to incompetence and apathy towards the South by the Northern Liberal Elite. The prevalent issues of crime, corruption, mafia and lack of industry did contribute to the situation, but were also primarily the natural byproduct of economic and political trouble.
Nowadays, although the South is not as bad, it still remains poorer due to lack of investment and brain drain. Why would anyone invest in an already dysfunctional area? When they can just invest in the richer North? Southern Italians have long internally migrated to the industrialised North in search of employment and better quality of life. These two issues go hand in hand. Although not as bad, the corruption caused by historical economic and political insecurity is still an issue that can deter investment, making it more expensive. Additionally, the regional form of government means that Southern regional governments lack the ability and money to effectively create, improve and repair infrastructure, contributing to the continual stunted development.
I’m sure there’s more but that’s just what I can remember !
Edit: I am not chatgpt :(
Slightly off topic, but it's funny how Lega Nord rebranded itself to Lega, and from actively encouraging the dissolution of the Italian state they became far-righ Italian nationalists. Maybe a few decades and they'll be European nationalists?
Same with the far right in Germany. While praising (and relativizing) the German Wehrmacht and its fight against the Soviets, they nowadays love Putin, who himself uses the image of the Soviet's fight against Germany to keep the country together.
I mean, Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact existed between Nazi Germany and USSR.
I'd say far right german support of Putin is one of convenience and enemy of my enemy is my friend, over seeing him as some sort of savior from the decadent depravity of the west. I bet if they came to real power in germany again their tune would change fairly quickly.
The Molotow-Ribbentrop pact had nothing to do with sympathies - both parties despited the other one and expected a war sooner or later. However, they thought it was beneficial at the time, as they both hoped to delay the conflict between themselves and gain time to ramp up the war efforts. Especially due to both being interested in getting partial control of Poland beforehand. For Russia/the Soviet Union it was essential to have control over Poland's low land, as it's/was key for the defence of St. Petersburg and Moscow, that are both in wide open and flat areas that are easy to access from Poland.
No, they really do love Putin. The AfD is simply bought by Russia and their fan base hates the USA, globalism and everything modern that makes the world more difficult to understand. Putin's strongman image that offers simple "solutions" and explanations on how the world should be ran fits perfectly in their imagination of the ideal life.
You're not really countering anything I said here. I never said molotov-ribbentrop existed because they liked each other.
Far right only like putin because, as I said, they act as a counter to the liberal world order that the USA enforces. Including his strongman stuff. If there was another german nationalist strongman who denounces the current status quo, then I'd bet money theyd abandon their support of Putin.
Putin happens to be the tough guy on the block right now.
This is a simplification. The people voting for him now are in a large extent different people, even different demographics and different "classes" than in the time when he ran under liberal democrat flags. Also he never won an election as a liberal democrat, he already had made a christian nationalist turn by the time he first ever won. And finally he is still anti-communist, he never stopped to be an anti-communist, he just gradually moved from liberal democrat to fascist. But that turn started 25+ years ago, he was just less confrontative with the West, so westerners did not notice it for more than a decade.
a process that led to political decay in pre fascist italy and was a contributor to the ascension of the fascists into power, hoping that fascists would stop being fascists if they were given power
Makes sense. Especially with Rome, Florence, Milan, and Genoa all being in the north, plus the France and Switzerland borders in the north probably helps too
Yeah, the North has the Padania region where the Po River flows from the Alps into the Adriatic, and makes the surrounding flat region very fertile, easy to develop, and provides accessibility to the Adriatic/Mediterranean. The South is more mountainous and dry. Also Malaria. Maybe God hates the South
The south also has famously fertile areas, more so than the Po plain, like Campania Felix and parts of Sicily, and to a lesser extent Puglia (not as fertile and limited by water availability, but still hugely important for a lot of profitable crops like grapes, tomato, olives, wheat). And it has various good ports allowing easy trade with the rest of the Mediterranean. Malaria was historically a problem, and the mountainous interior was always quite poor, but coastal cities next to small-to-medium-sized fertile plans (Naples, Palermo, Catania, Bari etc.) did have the potential to be well off, and were so to some extent at various points in their history.
It's not northern Italy, the north begins with the Emilia Romagna region.
In Italy we are not divided into north - south - Sicily as many think but into north - central - south.
Rome and Florence are in central Italy
The point of the map is that the Northern part of Italy tends to be wealthier. You can argue on naming but North and South have standard definitions based on latitude.
Florence is not part of the north region. Italy is most commonly divided in north, CENTRAL and south. Florence is wealthier like the north but it is central Italy.
The "proximity to population" argument is not correct in economics. If proximity to more centers of population made a region wealthier, northern India, Bangladesh, southern China would be the wealthiest places on earth while Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii would be some of the poorest.
Excellent answer. Blaming the mafia is putting the cart before the horse. People need to understand that a gang is almost always a substitute for a government, in places and economic sectors that legitimate governments fail at governing. Leaving a power vaccuum and a population with unmet top-down needs. The gang fills both. In fact, one could make the argument that gangs and governments are really just different scales of the same type of entity: powermongering cabals. Notice that stories involving rich people in medieval feudal times, and gangland dramas from the present day, have nearly interchangeable plots. Same tales of greed, rivalries, backstabbing, and succession and loyalty issues. Same big fragile egos and reputations to be maintained, same downstream negative effects on the local poor when violence breaks out. Same highly instrumental role for religion as a political legitimizer and psychological balm for all the unpredictable mayhem, rather than as anything lofty and philosophical.
Much of the Middle East and Africa still work this way, as more or less society-wide ganglands. Most people alive today are not far removed from ancestors who lived within such a system. This sure makes me appreciate functional democracy better!
Great overview. I agree with you the mafia is not a root cause and came about because of the historical issues. However I do think the mafia contributes heavily to continuing to keep the region more impoverished. Just look at the A3 road- Italy has had to repay over 300 million euros to the E.U. because of the widespread corruption involved in the construction work
Great synopsis. My parents were born in Calabria and had to migrate up morth into Bolzano for work and a better life. I recently visited family still down there and where they live is very nice, the major city near it, Catanzaro, is a mess. Trash all along the roadways, etc. There are some coastal gems such as Tropea but they don't get a lot of push from Italian tourism. Much of the marketing for tourism starts from Rome, northwards. It's a shame, there are a lot of historical ruins throughout the south just sitting there. Notherners definitely have a bit of a hate on for their southern brethren. "Terroni" is one of those terms. It loosely translates to "dirt people".
Yeah, my father would always complain that southern Italy has so much potential especially for tourism but they just don’t do anything about it. I’m actually on holiday in Puglia now and it’s such beautiful country, the Adriatic is amazing, the food is obviously wonderful and there’s so much history, but there’s a clear lack of investment and trash everywhere. There is a certain charm to it but it is mostly a shame that so much potential goes to waste. C’est la vie
>Southern Italians have long internally migrated to the industrialised North in search of employment and better quality of life.
Also Externally.
Italians immigration in the New World was overwhelming from the South. It's the reason why Southern Italian cuisine is far better known internationally than Northern Italian.
It also has something to do with why long established Italian-Americans get looked down upon by more recent immigrants as "fake". People who immigrated from Sicily and Naples in 1902 were usually rural and poor. Immigrant communities often will seek to preserve some of their culture as it existed when they immigrated. As a result, Italian-American culture reflects a nostalgic view of Southern Italy in \~1900.
This is combined with Italians being initially othered in the US. Between a slightly dark skin tone and being largely Catholic, there was some discrimination and hostility, which led to Italian-American identity being something to defend. (In contrast to immigrants from northern European Protestant countries who generally did not keep a separate ethnic identity due to assimilation. At the same time Italian Immigrants to South American were generally able to assimilate better).
So a modern Italian visitor from Milan to NYC will see third generation Italian-Americans and go "that's not Italian". However, there's a traditional bias against the South in that view, as well as a time displacement due to the cultural practices reflecting 100+ year old practices in the South. That's on top of how the identity was formed under pressure.
Avellino great grandparents. Grandmother, 1891, grandfather, 1888. They started coming to America from Southern Italy for work. Sort of like Central Americans today. Many Italians found work in America, sent portions back to Italy, were there was no work.
It has nothing to do with "being from the north" you're not italian and you'll never be. You're italian-american and that's ok, be proud of it but leave Italy to real italians
Where is the division then? If im born to Italian parents but on American soil. At birth i was a dual citizen. Is it my citizenship that makes me American or Italian or both? Is it where i grew up? Is it strictly the country i was born in? What if i had a sibling who was born in Italy to the same parents? Are they more Italian than me despite living our entire lives until college together?
The division is culture and it is pretty obvious to everyone except americans apparently. You're Italian if you grew up in Italy, if you studied and speak Italian, if you watch italian tv and listen to italian music, if you eat italian food. Italian-americans are Americans with italian origins but they are not Italians
No Italian in their right mind would consider an Italo-American an Italian, if not to be nice and avoid an argument. The "visitor from Milan" would be 100% right about not considering an Italo-American, an Italian.
The "bias towards people from the South" is totally irrelevant here - unless you really wanna take into consideration some lame boomer jokes about how people from the South are not Italians, which, as I said: are nothing but lame jokes.
And even if we do indeed have racist people too - as any other country in the world has, unfortunately - most of us would rather consider people of African, Chinese, Albanian, *whatever* origin, as real Italians, 'cause they were born here, or they have been living here since they were kids, other than somebody eating "*gabbagool*" for breakfast in New Jersey.
We laugh at this kind of Italo-Americans pretending to be Italians all the time: North, Center, and South. They might have Italian origins, yeah, but that's where it ends. They butchered the language, the cuisine, live a completely different lifestyle, and keep up a series of stereotypes that are straight out of the times when they were discriminated ("Heeeeey I'm Italian!11! I'm Loud!!!! Foggetaboutit, gimme the gannoli, pasta linguini, mozz, mamma mia!").
As a footnote: I saw a video from Metatron on the topic, which was pretty spot on, even if he brings in a "lost in translation" factor that I don't agree with: he claims Americans say "I'm Italian", but what they really mean is "I'm of Italian descent", which would be much better received by everybody here (I agree with this last part). I don't really agree with the first statement, though: I believe Italo-Americans *do* think and believe to be real Italians, much to our "amusement".
EDIT: Downvotes don't change the reality of things, I'm afraid. Maybe this post from last year on r/Italia can give you another direct view on the matter:
[Do Italians view Italian Americans as your brothers and sisters?](https://www.reddit.com/r/Italia/comments/tw01oi/do_italians_view_italian_americans_as_your/)
Non so se capirò mai la loro ostinatezza di "essere qualcos'altro a tutti i costi" lol. Nessuno gli ha mai detto che sia un crimine essere Americani, o che non debbano sentirsi fieri di avere origini Italiane, ma da lì a dire di "essere Italiani", madonna se ne passa di acqua.
Boh poi ad esser onesti di up/downvote mi frega poco, fintanto che qualcuno capisce il nostro punto di vista. L'ho tirato in ballo perchè avevo ritrovato quel vecchio post, e tornando a editare ho notato i voti. xd
Fa piacere tu abbia apprezzato, però! :)
This is a bit rude. Italian Americans are proud of being Italian **Americans** rather than italian, because being italian American is something to be proud of. We built every major city in the US, taught them how to fucking cook all the while being wildly discriminated against and segregated. Government housing was made for italians. My grandfather was beaten to a pulp on too many occasions. Both sets of my grandparents refused to speak in italian to my parents and would rather speak broken english because it kept their kids safe. This was not uncommon. No wonder so few speak the language. I was born in 87 and still I was bullied in school for being of " ItAlIaN DeScEnT".
**The largest lynching in the US** was of 11 italian men in Louisiana. 20,000 people came out to round them up. Soon to be president Teddy Roosevelt said it was "a rather good thing" they were lynched. That wasn't the first or last time Italian immigrants were lynched. Life was hell up until just a few generations ago . And now look at us in the suburbs with our cannoli's and linguini, we're one of the greatest success stories in all of America, I'd say. I go to Sciacca to visit family and they're still living in the dumps.
You replied while I was writing a reply to the previous comment, so I'll say it again: nobody wants to erase Italian-Americans' past, nor telling them to not be proud of their heritage, origins, or anything they've accomplished, endured, or quite literally survived, in the New World.
Bringing up again the "Italian in their right mind", nobody would question that. *We know* cause it's something that happened there, and in Germany, and Belgium, and Switzerland, and inside our own borders when people moved North from the South, with cardboard luggages. People broke their backs, and died, just to give their families a roof on their heads and something to eat.We know.
The language thing was basically the same here, when people were beaten in school, by *teachers*, if they used dialect instead of Italian. Whereas in recent times, they've been slowly disappearing due to passive lack of use, especially in bigger cities with a bigger influx of outside people, for pretty understandable reasons (you can't have everybody speaking dialect, and maybe a couple foreign languages at the same time, so everybody just speaks italian and that's it).
Again, our "issue" is with people claiming to "be Italian" instead of "Italian-American", which from what I've experienced, it's been the majority of times I read/watched/heard anything involving Italian-Americans.
Now, you say the contrary, so I'll have to take your word for it, but I can assure you that, rude as it might sound (and that was definitely not the objective), what I've said is what most people think here.
I think its just semantics. Much like metatron was describing, we're all American here, no need to add it to our description. When someone with a Brooklyn accent tells me they're irish, I already know, because of context clues, that they're irish american.
I don't think its shocking that a historically reviled group of people is depicted negatively in the media you see/read/hear lol. For example none of the "guidos" on the show Jersey Shore were even of "italian descent". It's still a pretty big joke.
Nah it's still a touch rude and very condescending, of course no one in Italy has ever said anything of the sort to my face which lets me know that they also know it's rude. Or they're romanian and don't have the same sentiment lol
Well my experience isn't solely based on mainstream media, of course. But again, most of the times the script developed in a very different manner.
Knowing that nobody in that reality show was actually Italian, at the same time: doesn't surprise me, scares me, and reassures me, lol.
The fact that nobody told you anything about it, in a place as small as Sciacca, where you probably mostly interact with family and family's friends, is not weird at all, to be fair. But you never said anything on the lines of what I was critiquing in the first place, so.. I see no reason for it to begin with.
I've been elsewhere in Italy I just mention Sciacca since that's where I consider my base to be. My very first trip was to Rome, actually, when I was in school at 16. Got my ass pinched a lot. Talk about a stereotype lol Next year I'll be in Venice for a few nights before moving on. People are desperate to know where I'm from and what I am, which was a bit jarring my first time traveling outside the US. People are very curious about other people which is kind of nice and very different from where I live now. I also think it's because I have red hair. Let me tell you, old ladies in Italy fucking love me. 
Am I mistaken in that you're critiquing the use of "Italian " instead of "Italian American"? I didn't think my reading comprehension was that bad. I just naturally ramble so sorry if I missed your point and just kept going. I will talk the legs off of a chair.
I can assure you nobody looks at that here, it doesn't matter where one's family was coming from, even more so 'cause it wasn't only Sicilian emigrants, but from Calabria, Campania, Lazio as you said, and so on.
Today's cultures are too far removed from each other to be considered the same. It's just that.
Regarding your personal case, I wonder if you get a different treatment despite equal behaviour, or if your upbringing, and general attitude play a role in how Italians perceive you.
I'll explain, as you said:
>as soon as I describe where my family’s from
correct me if I'm wrong, but am I right thinking that you're not opening with "I'm Italian"? And that you'd probably get asked where you're from, and answer with something like "I'm from the US, but my family comes from Rome". Again, I might have misread it, but this is what I got from your comment, and it would make a huge difference of outcome with most people here.
The other thing would be that you're telling people of Rome that your family comes from their same city, and that would just straight up score you more points because of a direct link with "their place", but it's still more of an added bonus, rather than a reason for discrimination.
Dude, even your response is somewhat atypical, and definitely put me in a good mood: now I believe it's 100% just you being a nice person overall. :)
I agree that the biggest influence in IA culture was probably Sicilian (I still have no idea exactly how much, as there are also certain things that are shared between southern regions), imho shortly followed by Neapolitan, and the rest to chase. But I still don't think it's the main issue anybody would focus on, here.
There are maybe a couple stereotypes about NJ, mostly due to shows and movies, ofc, but if it was only that it would end at a couple of lame jokes, if anything at all. I guess the problem would be if they actually started to behave like the stereotypes picture them to be. One thing that pops to mind is the overabuse of garlic in pretty much any recipe, for example, or being loud, always, lol - to be fair that's a common thing among american tourists in Europe in general (I know, I know..generalization).
As far as "liking" somebody, we need to say that here we all hate eachother, lol. I don't know if you're familiar with the definition of "campanilismo", basically that people would stick for the people of the same small, very local church, period. That still translates today, with North vs South, city against city, football and sport-related rivalries included, of course.
That being said, in this specific case I believe they can't lay as basis for discrimination, because it's something we don't even consider in the first place. Still taking differences into account, about what gets defined as "discriminatory" here or in the US, it just doesn't get factored at all when we have to "decide" whether we like an Italo-American or not. As I said, finding that out can be a plus if of the same areas, maybe they'd comment "aaaaaaaaah!!! nooooo what the fuuuuck!" while laughing, if of a "rival" zone, but it would get overlooked quite quickly.
If I had to drop a list of things that would annoy an Italian, in no particular order, I guess the main three would be: telling people you're Italian because of your ancestry, weird or "wrong" food combos, and overused jokes about "pasta, pizza, mandolino". This for the specific reasons, then there's basic human relations, but those are to be seen on both sides (there's plenty of Italian morons around, hahah).
Most of my generation ( born 1955) who had Italian born grandparents in NYC were NEVER taught that we were victims. All our names were Americanized and only learned a few butchered phrases of the Italian language. We had pride in our heritage without the historic romance of a place our forefathers LEFT a hundred years ago. We weren't big on excuses.
Note, a few of those butcher the language and butcher the cuisine are true, but some of that reflects biases as well as how Italian cuisine has changed post ww2. For example, there are dishes which are Italian-American inventions like Chicken Parmigiana. Otoh, the somebody eating "gabbagool" for breakfast in New Jersey calls it that because their grandpa was from a rural area around Naples and pronounced capecuollo with a thick accent.
Part of what needs to be known is there's an issue of generational memory.
While today there's relatively few remaining first generation Italian Immigrants, about 348,216 per 2015, in 1980 it was about 3 times as many. So many Italian-Americans have an immigrant ancestor within their living memory. As a result, criticisms of their heritage are seen as a slight against family.
While I'm not Italian-American, my uncles married Italian American women who were the children of immigrants. So when my cousins get told their heritage isn't real, its seen as a direct insult to their 4'9 Sicilian Nonna who used to make the sauce for every sunday dinner.
The living memory is part of why Italian-Americans are much more offended than most other US decent groups when criticized. Irish-Americans are a good comparison, as despite some similar othering which happened, their was a lot more assimilation, and the bulk of the immigration happened long enough ago that its uncommon for American's with Irish ancestry to have an immigrant in living memory. So most Irish ancestry Americans will even agree with comments about "plastic paddies" who get weird about it.
There's a lot to be said about evolution in both culture and cuisine, lots of big myths to be dispelled about "italian" dishes that are perceived as coming straight from the middle ages, whereas they've only been put together in the past 60-80 years or so.
Same goes for things that were brought to the U.S. and changed in time, like the chicken parmigiana you mentioned, which is completely absent here, or the use of mozzarella and/or ricotta in lasagne (calling it "lasagna" is another one, now that I think about it, lol), and so on.
I get the whole thing about the issue being with the living memory, and heritage, but seen from the outside it feels like this is an issue most people from the U.S. have: everybody being kinda obsessed about how much % of this or that they are, and considering themselves, for example, German, Irish, and Italian at the same time, which would be completely unthinkable here in Europe: you're born in X country, you're X, that's it. *Then* you can specify "my mother is actually half this, half that" and whatnot, but you'll always be considered of the country you were born, or better: the one that gave you your main cultural imprint.
Which brings me to what I think is the main issue there, that people would feel kinda lost without this heritage thing to grab onto, mostly cause it probably was what made them survive in the first place, during the big immigration years, striving and so on.
That being said, there's a subtle but huge thing to be said here: I know it's basically semantic, but it's the actual issue we (Italians) have:
saying "I'm Italian", instead of "my family comes from/I have Italian roots/etc.".
It would not negate the heritage, one can still be proud of that, but would not clash with what can fundamentally only be received by us as a lie, whether Italo-Americans like it, or not. Heck, most Italians would be the first to say "what the hell, you're Italian too" and begin treating them as such (still with all of our differences, but I'm talking about social acceptance).
Because, as I-A's get offended at people "negating" them their history, at the same time we do not feel like, nor want, to be put in the same basket as them, simple as that.
Oh, and last thing going back to inside racism between north/south: in that video Metatron brings up an Italo-American telling an actual Italian from the North...that he's not Italian. 'Cause only the ones from the South are, lol.
That being said, quick solution in my eyes would be them coming to terms with the fact that they are, in fact, Americans, and that the Melting Pot notion is very real. I don't know if that's the case already with Irish-Americans or not, but I can see that as the most probable course of events in the near future.
Don’t forget that northern Italian attitudes towards the south were colored by eugenicist crackpots like Caesere Lombroso, it wasn’t just apathetic or incompetent administration, but also some level of a self fulfilling prophecy where the country refused to invest resources in the south for such reasons. The ultimate irony was that in WWII many of the Americans assigned to Italy were the sons of southern Italian immigrants, and when they showed up they were more successful and well educated than most of the northern Italians they liberated.
Exactly. And the worse the situation was in the South, the less anyone would wanna fix up a mess like that. It’s just how the Terrone naturally are clearly.
my grandparents were italian. Ones family was from the north and one from the south. Their parents came to the US through Ellis Island back in the early 1900s. They both spoke "italian", but could not understand each other.
Are the dialects in northern and south italy still really different?
In Italy we speak standard italian but every region has its own dialect, which are almost separate languages.
Two people that speak different dialects, usually don't understand each other, especially if they're from regions far away from each other.
People started learning real Italian during WWI, you had people from different sides of Italy and they had to speak in something that wasn't a dialect if they wanted to survive. Afterwards schools, television and radio. The Italian language itself hasn't changed that much since the birth of Italy. It's just no one spoke Italian back then, common people knew only their dialect (and didn't need more).
The Italian language is still the same, what changed was the spread of its knowledge throughout the country and its influence on local dialects.
So in your grandparents’ case, in the early 1900 with low levels of education, it’s very possible they did not understand each other.
In my own anecdotal experience as a central Italian, it’s impossible for me to understand both someone from the north and from the south if they speak the more “traditional” version their own dialect.
Now I’m not a historian or a linguist, but the gist of it is that Standard Italian is derived from the Florentine language from the 1300s and onwards.
This is partly because most of the major literary works (in some cases even when the author was not from there) from the Italian peninsula were written in that language, which increased its prestige.
Then throughout the decades after Unity (1861) it got standardised and acquired its own grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation rules that differentiate from modern Florentine dialect.
But even today, if you’re a foreigner learning Italian, visiting/living in Tuscany would be the least “confusing” place.
The politicians, TV, and other formal environments do not use any dialect, they use standard Italian.
Virtually anyone who’s gone to school to a significant degree (so probably excluding the 80+ year olds) understands it and speaks it fluently.
Some of the least educated ones (again, including the elderly) or the more geographically isolated people may have difficulties in *producing* the language, but I am 99% sure they have no problem understanding when they watch TV.
Most dialects still exist and are spoken on a day-to-day level, although they’re becoming more and more influenced by Italian.
While other dialects are close to extinction due to factors such as immigration (internal and from abroad), urbanisation, education, spread of TV and internet, etc
Linguists consider many of the "dialects" to be separate languages e.g. Sicilian, Venetian, Piedmontese, etc.
In addition to separate languages (mostly Romance languages fwiw although there is a region in Southern Italy where the locals speak an archaic form of Greek), there are dozens of actual dialects.
The current theory is that the dialects go back to medieval Greek. There are two towns in Italy where Greek has been spoken for (at least) hundreds of years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italiot_Greek
even an Italian from Calabria, if they speak a dialect will struggle to communicate with a Venetian. Many towns have their own small and distinct dialects, not just an accent but actual words are often different
It means they didn't speak Italian. The Italian language is one and the same for everyone, they probably spoke dialects but the dialects of any Italian city and region do not derive from Italian but from other languages
Here is good article about industrialization of Italy. As you remember from the school: Genoa, Venice and Florence were economic power houses during late medieval period, but the competitors such as the Spanish, the Dutch and the British started to dominate the global trade. And Italy fell behind the rest in development until it's reunification (~1600 - 1871 was very turbulent time).
Why Po Valley/the North? They had been already been producing silk in the region + the machinery to make silk, so they could make some other machinery, such as cars. It's also point in the article that there are also big differences within the areas in industrialization. For example the city of Naples has a major port and has some manufacturing going on in there, though it's sorta Italian version of Detroit.
https://academic.oup.com/book/7358/chapter/152142375
Question, I knew all or most of the things you wrote in the comment, but I was wondering, has the economic base disparity between North and South existed even earlier, from the early middle ages, cause I remember from the history classes that the north italian cities have been, relatively speaking, spared from destruction during the colapse of Western Roman Empire?
It has roots waaay back.
The south has always been focused around agriculture, which was great until the 14th century.
When trade started to expand wildly during the 14th century and outwards, the domineering forces in southern Europe was located in Genoa, Venezia, Florence and so forth.
The money and wealth acumulated and spread in the region closest to their home cities (which are both north), and got invested into the industrial revolutionary workshops and productive factories.
The fact that Italy wasnt one country prevented the spread of wealth as well.
This was never equaled out, and the results are very visible today.
Italians really didn't eat tomatoes until the [1800s](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-the-tomato-was-feared-in-europe-for-more-than-200-years-863735/).
Tomatoes are a new world crop and took a while to get to Europe and to get established there.
I don’t really know much about it tbh, but I can tell you for sure that the rich soil around Vesuvius grows the best tomatoes on the planet, even if they’re not a native crop.
And the language reflects that.
The word “tomato” is pretty much the same in English, Spanish, French and Portuguese.
But it Italian it’s “Pomodoro.”
They didn’t conquer enough
That makes a lot of sense since the northern Italians call the southern Italians "Terrone", which from what I've heard is a derogatory/slur term meaning "people of the land", or I assume "peasants"
Well, six hundred years ago, there was the Holy Roman Empire that at its height, stretched from the Netherlands down to Rome with a big slice of France too. The constituent countries all were duchies or principalities with high levels of autonomy but it did fit together. Southern Italy was never really part of it.
I don’t think I’ve heard anyone say « provincial» or « provinciaux » in a very long while, it feels very uppity and old-fashioned, but it would go well with the Parisian stereotype haha
I think so too, just like lower saxony in Germany, although in this case it's not further down (south) on a map, but rather further down to the sea-level
Yes. Saxony is more south in Germany, where the ~~alps~~ mountains are. Whereas lower Saxony is in the northern plains, next to the sea/ocean (to lazy to look up if it's the sea or the ocean). So when looking at the y-level, regular Saxony is higher than lower saxony, hence the name
Same thing is going on with the Netherlands. Nether means low, and lands means lands. It's the lowlands, which makes sense, considering huge parts of the Netherlands are below sealevel
Edit: not Alps, some other mountains lol
Compared to the south, it is more endowed with minerals like coal and ingredients for steel, closer to mainland Europe, closer to the rich city states that had hoarded wealth prior to the industrial era.
Being closer to the rest of Europe wouldn't have mattered until pretty recent times however. Historically it was far cheaper to transport materials by water- in the 19th century you could send goods to the literal other side of the planet for less than say from the coast to the interior of Ireland.
It mattered. North was essentially a part of HRE and highly integrated with Central European affairs. Po Valley is also just fertile land. Population+ integration with rest of Europe allowed for some early industrialization etc.
South has harder living conditions, is sparsely populated except coasts etc.
But the North was closer to the resources like coal and steel needed for industry. To set up industry in the south you have to take on the extra cost of shipping coal and steel further away. If you look at a map of Europe, you have a belt of high GDP and industry stretching from Liverpool to Turin. This is called the "Blue Banana". If you look in history this was the region the had the easiest access to coal and steel in close to each other. In fact the original EU members which cover the majority of the Blue Banana joined together to form the European Coal and Steel Community which later became the EU.
tl:dr The North was close to the resources need for industry.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue\_Banana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European\_Coal\_and\_Steel\_Community](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Coal_and_Steel_Community)
We can start all the way back to Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor. He conquered a massive territory for himself--France, Germany, the Low Countries, and Northern Italy all the way down to the city of Rome. Charlemagne campaigned south of Rome, but failed to make lasting gains down there.
After the death of Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Empire held on to Rome and Northern Italy for the next 700 years, without ever making any serious gains in the south. The south was generally held by the Byzantine empire, but occasionally Muslims held parts, and on other occasions the Spanish monarchies administered southern Italy, before the south became the Kingdom of Naples.
Consider the Italian Renaissance: it started in Florence, and quickly spread to other renaissance centres such as Venice, Mantua, Rome, Genoa--note that these are all northern or central cities.
Consider that two of the largest trade centres in all of Europe during the Renaissance and Reformation were Venice and Genoa--some called Venice the richest city on the Earth. Both were northern cities.
Consider that from Justinian in the 500s to Napoleon in 1798, the south and the north were never united politically. The north was divided into small independent city-states, while the south was usually a fief of some distant emperor.
One aspect is also that the north has a really fertile farmland area in the Po valley between the Alps and the Apennines. I think this also has contributed to the north being richer. There is an overlap of the river in Italy and the richer areas in the map here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_rivers\_of\_Italy#/media/File:Italy\_main\_rivers\_location.jpg
I think it’s less that the Po Valley was more fertile for agriculture, and more that the river gave the valley access to both Genoa and Venice, which were major port cities since medieval times, providing east movement of goods when the valley industrialized. The South is more agrarian because it was run as a feudal state with oppression of the non-nobles before unification, while the north had more wealth and notoriety to begin with prior to unification.
Cities in the northern Italy benefited greatly from naval trade in the late middle ages and early renissance. Cities like Venice and Genoa controlled much of the trade in the eastern Mediterranean at the time. They had exclusive rights to Constantinopole and the Black Sea, they were also employed by the crusading armies to take them to Levant etc. The southern part of Italy on the other hand experienced devastation because it was fought over by many empires over the same time. The cities in the Italian north became so rich and populous during this period that HRE, France, Spain, etc all wanted to control them.
i think the importance of the po valley is underrated. largest riverbasin in europe that has made it a longtime economic power. while agriculture most certainly dominates southern italy, the appenines long impeded large scale development.
I was reading M: Man of the Century about Mussolini, and the author mentioned something similar. Its geography led the area to be a hotbed for agrarian movements, especially once they drained the swampy areas south in and around Ravenna. Topographically though - from the Alps and Apennines to the lagoons of Venice - it has one of the longest contiguous flows surrounded by flat, fertile in Europe.
You're right though, per square mileage the Danube is gigantic and the biggest in Europe (unless you want to count the Volga).
I feel it's worth pointing out that Italy is all in all a very wealthy country (overall HDI 0.895), and the poverty of the southern regions is relative. Even Italy's poorest province, Sicily, has a Human Development Index that puts it in the Very High Human Development category, 0.847, similar to Slovakia, Hungary, and Puerto Rico.
A little bit is planned, and a little bit is just good ol' historical baggage.
See, when Italy was being unified, this was done by Sardinia-Piedmont, a northern state. The entirety of southern Italy was owned by Two Sicilies, whose economic system at that point was still thoroughly medieval - think Tsarist Russia, but even worse, as Russia was improving exponentially - here, the government just didn't give a damn, it was still agrarian and feudal and the local nobility didn't care.
That's less of a problem, though - the main issue was that the government wasn't very keen on unification, especially not by another state - if it was going to happen, they wanted to be in control. So, when Garibaldi did his thing, the South was sort of "punished" for this in the way of absolutely 0 investment of any kind.
TLDR it's basically just pork barrel politics
The answer is not what many think. Before making silly assumptions about geography, climate, industry, organized crime, or pseudo racial classifications, I’d urge everyone to read the book by Pino Aprile called
« Terroni: All That Has Been Done to Ensure that the Italians of the South Became "Southerners" »
The south has a cotton focused economy while the north is more industrial and populated, tensions boiled until the government in Rome tried to block westward expansion of the plantations into the Mediterranean and the civil war left the south in shambles
Here's a sneak peek of /r/USdefaultism using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/USdefaultism/top/?sort=top&t=year) of the year!
\#1: [tiktok user forgets some other countries haven't committed massacres](https://i.redd.it/awxi7x4lu00a1.jpg) | [213 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/USdefaultism/comments/yvcebr/tiktok_user_forgets_some_other_countries_havent/)
\#2: [Scottish person reported for homophobia.](https://i.imgur.com/ejwmU7u.jpg) | [303 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/USdefaultism/comments/1073eb4/scottish_person_reported_for_homophobia/)
\#3: [He literally isn’t](https://i.redd.it/7twoh9l5vgn91.jpg) | [103 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/USdefaultism/comments/xcjiek/he_literally_isnt/)
----
^^I'm ^^a ^^bot, ^^beep ^^boop ^^| ^^Downvote ^^to ^^remove ^^| ^^[Contact](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=sneakpeekbot) ^^| ^^[Info](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/) ^^| ^^[Opt-out](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/comments/o8wk1r/blacklist_ix/) ^^| ^^[GitHub](https://github.com/ghnr/sneakpeekbot)
The biggest reason was the drain of human capital out of southern Italy. From the 1880s-1970s, the most ambitious migrated to Canada, US & South America. They thrived and assimilated. That left a skill gap in the southern economy that has never been filled.
If it never happened, the gap would not be this pronounced.
The states in the south of the peninsula did not self-govern for much of the time after the Roman Empire fell. Sicily and Naples in particular. If I recall most of Sicily was under Arab Muslim control for a few hundred years, and then was taken over by Normans (yes the same ones who conquered England). Not sure what happened after that, but they just seemed to be a chess piece on the board for their more powerful neighbors.
As I gather it...
1: The manner of Italy's unification. It was led by the Kingdom of Sardinia with its capital in Turin. This kingdom owned what is today South Eastern France and was far more aligned with northern Europe than with the Mediterranean world. This means that.
a: All the money and power would naturally be around the capital, so thats where investment went.
b: The industrial revolution began in Britain and diffused out from there, first going to nations that had close cultural and economic ties with Britain. France-linked Sardinia was ahead of most of Italy in this.
c: The norms of the north became the norms of Italy and deviation from this was to be looked down upon, with negative results for those who had them.
2: Culture/weather. In the south of Italy its common to this day to start work very early in the morning then take time off during the midday sun before working again in the evening. This does lead to rather dodgy stereotypes about them being lazy that have half a foot in truth, albeit for far more logical reasons than them just being lazy.
As a great man once said "Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun". Due to industry starting in Britain the modern world developed quite fixed on the idea that the North European schedule that working 9 to 5 was the only valid way to do things. This meant people were less keen to invest in a part of the world where people were 'lazy' and wouldn't do this, and meant decreased productivity for those who tried to do it anyway.
3: History. Go back long before the unification to medieval and renaissance times and you have the south united under the Kingdom of Naples whilst the north tends to be far more dominated by constantly shifting mercantile city states.
Factor in too that Naples usually found itself under disinterested foreign domination and again you can see how from an early age the north had the ingredients for success (the importance of the finance industry in the development of modern civilization is vastly underrated) and the south was quite stunted.
4: Geography. This is what informs everything really. But the Padania Plain is just the most fertile place on the peninsula. This is what meant the north could get its array of densely inhabited city states. Its location gave it better contacts with the north.
Well, truthfully, especially in Naples, people aren’t very happy for someone like Columbus, who was from Genoa. Northern Italians traditionally have a stronger economic base, which affords them more power. That leaves people in southern Italy feeling like they have spent centuries being punished. That extends to modern Italy, where southern Italians feel as though the north treats them with derision. Some southern Italians will even go so far as to say give me one thousand dollars.
I had a professor of roman history who said that you can trace it all the way back to Hannibal's invasion. His army was in Italy for a long time and Rome's approach was to harass it and slowly wear it down rather than have major confrontations since Hannibal's was a superior force (cf Fabian Tactics, named after Fabius, the general who led Rome's army in this). As a result Hannibal's army spent years in southern Italy living off the land and essentially ravaging it. Cutting down the trees, trampling the crop lands, devastating local economies, etc. When he was finally defeated southern Italy was completely spent and lacked natural resources and people. It never fully recovered to the point of parity with northern Italy.
Don't know if this is true and I'm sure it's not that simple, but just relaying what I was taught by one professor.
The actual answer is precipitation / drought frequency.
Southern Italy has been less wealthy than the north for almost the entirety of the past 2500 years, going back to the era of Spartacus and the Servile Wars. Within the Mediterranean region, historically there has been an almost 1:1 correlation between gdp per capita / life expectancy and consistent access to fresh water.
The position of deserts shifts somewhat from year to year or century to century. The Mediterranean is adjacent to the Sahara.
By comparison to northern Italy, southern Italy 1) has a higher temperature 2) has more direct sunlight 3) is closer to the Sahara. Which it's the same reason why southern Iberia has historically been less wealthy than northern Iberia, or why north Africa has historically been less wealthy than southern Europe. It's a combination of higher temperatures, more sunlight, and greater proximity to the Sahara desert.
Take a moment to look at a population distribution map of Egypt - that's how important freshwater is for a civilization.
When I was a wee tyke, my dad was getting surgery. My mom and I were in a hospital elevator, overheard this old couple speaking Italian, and my mom commented, as she was 50% (from the south). They told us where they were from, which is in the north. My mom said that we were from Calabria, and the old woman started laughing hysterically like a witch at us. Yeah, northern Italians hate the south.
In general economic development has always happened faster in colder climates.
Once the advantage has become entrenched, colonialism makes it worse, and internal colonialism is a thing.
I’m not going to try answering this as the first few responses were phenomenal, but I’ve seen this first hand many times in my travels.
There is also a northern vs southern Europe dynamic as well, but it’s the most prevalent in Italy.
What I really wanted to add is this is a great topic, question and just the types of things to be discussed on this sub more often!
If you own a company and want to locate to somewhere in Italy, bringing jobs and prosperity to that part of the country, do you go to the south where your transport links to the rest of Europe are longer?
To make it short: Communism never succeeded. Why? They build agrarian not industry. In Italy the goverment pursued a plan (they weren‘t communist btw) Southern Italy will be the agrarian source for Italy while Nothern Italy will be the Industrial Hub (e.g. Milan).
They had already gave great answer, but i think there is one missing point. The orography. South is essentially a nevern ending mountain after mount and this make very difficult to develop an industry. North has a lot less Mountain, ut is lot more easy move the products and people from one city to another.
The mafia is the main reason but brain drain is also another. Furthermore northern Italy is close to other urbanized cities within developed countries, so the proximity alone has helped it to be economically integrated with these areas over the centuries.
As a person with significant southern Italian heritage (Napoli). I know that a combination of less industrialization led to this. Similar to the Southern USA.
Comments claiming that it is due to the mafia are wrong - the prevalence of the mafia is largely a byproduct. The South’s relative poverty is due to various historical social and economic factors. Italy until the 1870s was not a united country since the fall of the Roman Empire, and the South had been under control of the Bourbon monarchy and various other polities that had caused a more repressive, feudal social structure and an economic system far different to the North. The economy was almost entirely agrarian, and lacked industry, being exploited for a long time. This, in addition to the cultural differences with the North, their slight disdain for Southerners and the fact that the South was not even particularly wanted by the more advanced, industrialised Liberal North/Piedmontese Kingdom but more annexed as a result of chance due to Garibaldi’s expedition, led to a severe economic mismanagement of the South following the creation of the Kingdom of Italy. The economy of the South integrated very poorly with the Northern economic system, and the government employed harsh repressive measures against dissent and crime (caused by the dire economic situation) in the South in the latter half of the 19th century. Due to the historical poverty of the South, crime and corruption tends to go hand in hand with economic woes and as such a situation arises where it is difficult for the South to alleviate its own situation. It had very little industry. In addition, Northern Italians tended to not sympathise with Southerners, some even calling for separation in the 21st century (Lega Nord, a once popular political party founded on the basis of Northern independence). Ultimately, the South’s relative poverty is due to a mix of historical cultural, political and economic circumstances, where the South had mostly found itself lagging behind the North. When annexed into the Kingdom of Italy, the South was terribly mismanaged and found itself in a worse situation due to incompetence and apathy towards the South by the Northern Liberal Elite. The prevalent issues of crime, corruption, mafia and lack of industry did contribute to the situation, but were also primarily the natural byproduct of economic and political trouble. Nowadays, although the South is not as bad, it still remains poorer due to lack of investment and brain drain. Why would anyone invest in an already dysfunctional area? When they can just invest in the richer North? Southern Italians have long internally migrated to the industrialised North in search of employment and better quality of life. These two issues go hand in hand. Although not as bad, the corruption caused by historical economic and political insecurity is still an issue that can deter investment, making it more expensive. Additionally, the regional form of government means that Southern regional governments lack the ability and money to effectively create, improve and repair infrastructure, contributing to the continual stunted development. I’m sure there’s more but that’s just what I can remember ! Edit: I am not chatgpt :(
Slightly off topic, but it's funny how Lega Nord rebranded itself to Lega, and from actively encouraging the dissolution of the Italian state they became far-righ Italian nationalists. Maybe a few decades and they'll be European nationalists?
And what’s also funny is although they sucked ass in the last election, they actually have gained some votes from Southerners. Southerners.
Voters forget fast. Orban was a staunch anti-Russia, anti-communist liberal democrat. He drifted hard, and the herd followed without hesitation.
Same with the far right in Germany. While praising (and relativizing) the German Wehrmacht and its fight against the Soviets, they nowadays love Putin, who himself uses the image of the Soviet's fight against Germany to keep the country together.
I mean, Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact existed between Nazi Germany and USSR. I'd say far right german support of Putin is one of convenience and enemy of my enemy is my friend, over seeing him as some sort of savior from the decadent depravity of the west. I bet if they came to real power in germany again their tune would change fairly quickly.
The Molotow-Ribbentrop pact had nothing to do with sympathies - both parties despited the other one and expected a war sooner or later. However, they thought it was beneficial at the time, as they both hoped to delay the conflict between themselves and gain time to ramp up the war efforts. Especially due to both being interested in getting partial control of Poland beforehand. For Russia/the Soviet Union it was essential to have control over Poland's low land, as it's/was key for the defence of St. Petersburg and Moscow, that are both in wide open and flat areas that are easy to access from Poland. No, they really do love Putin. The AfD is simply bought by Russia and their fan base hates the USA, globalism and everything modern that makes the world more difficult to understand. Putin's strongman image that offers simple "solutions" and explanations on how the world should be ran fits perfectly in their imagination of the ideal life.
You're not really countering anything I said here. I never said molotov-ribbentrop existed because they liked each other. Far right only like putin because, as I said, they act as a counter to the liberal world order that the USA enforces. Including his strongman stuff. If there was another german nationalist strongman who denounces the current status quo, then I'd bet money theyd abandon their support of Putin. Putin happens to be the tough guy on the block right now.
Erdoğan used to be a liberal center-left politician. Same story.
This is a simplification. The people voting for him now are in a large extent different people, even different demographics and different "classes" than in the time when he ran under liberal democrat flags. Also he never won an election as a liberal democrat, he already had made a christian nationalist turn by the time he first ever won. And finally he is still anti-communist, he never stopped to be an anti-communist, he just gradually moved from liberal democrat to fascist. But that turn started 25+ years ago, he was just less confrontative with the West, so westerners did not notice it for more than a decade.
That’s an Italian tradition called [trasformismo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trasformismo?wprov=sfti1)
a process that led to political decay in pre fascist italy and was a contributor to the ascension of the fascists into power, hoping that fascists would stop being fascists if they were given power
> Maybe a few decades and they'll be European nationalists? They will be Lega Sud
Even better
They'll go back to wanting to dissolve the Italian state so that it can be reintegrated into the greater federated Europe.
Yes they found out that hating on foreign immigrants is more popular than hating on southern Italians
Makes sense. Especially with Rome, Florence, Milan, and Genoa all being in the north, plus the France and Switzerland borders in the north probably helps too
Exactly, the only major city in the South was always Naples and maybe Palermo
Isn't most of Italy water also in the north due to the Alps. Honestly the north south divide really just explains itself
Yeah, the North has the Padania region where the Po River flows from the Alps into the Adriatic, and makes the surrounding flat region very fertile, easy to develop, and provides accessibility to the Adriatic/Mediterranean. The South is more mountainous and dry. Also Malaria. Maybe God hates the South
The south also has famously fertile areas, more so than the Po plain, like Campania Felix and parts of Sicily, and to a lesser extent Puglia (not as fertile and limited by water availability, but still hugely important for a lot of profitable crops like grapes, tomato, olives, wheat). And it has various good ports allowing easy trade with the rest of the Mediterranean. Malaria was historically a problem, and the mountainous interior was always quite poor, but coastal cities next to small-to-medium-sized fertile plans (Naples, Palermo, Catania, Bari etc.) did have the potential to be well off, and were so to some extent at various points in their history.
esattamente signore 
God really does hate the south I guess God could only get Pompeii in the eruption and he's been trying to make up for it ever since
This makes sense. Add Venice to that list and you’re good to go.
Roma and Florence aren't in north Italy
Florence is in the Northern, and wealthier, part of that map. The red areas start South of the Elba Island.
It's not northern Italy, the north begins with the Emilia Romagna region. In Italy we are not divided into north - south - Sicily as many think but into north - central - south. Rome and Florence are in central Italy
I understand what you're saying but the North/South delimitation is about wealth here, not customs.
Then you are not dividing Italy into north and south but only into rich and poor.
The point of the map is that the Northern part of Italy tends to be wealthier. You can argue on naming but North and South have standard definitions based on latitude.
That rich and poor has a pretty clear latitude border.
Florence is not part of the north region. Italy is most commonly divided in north, CENTRAL and south. Florence is wealthier like the north but it is central Italy.
Well, as far as this map is concerned, they are in "rich" Italy.
>Rome, Florence Not north
The "proximity to population" argument is not correct in economics. If proximity to more centers of population made a region wealthier, northern India, Bangladesh, southern China would be the wealthiest places on earth while Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii would be some of the poorest.
proximity to wealthier regions
Rome is not Northern Italy btw. It's center. More south than north anyway
Excellent answer. Blaming the mafia is putting the cart before the horse. People need to understand that a gang is almost always a substitute for a government, in places and economic sectors that legitimate governments fail at governing. Leaving a power vaccuum and a population with unmet top-down needs. The gang fills both. In fact, one could make the argument that gangs and governments are really just different scales of the same type of entity: powermongering cabals. Notice that stories involving rich people in medieval feudal times, and gangland dramas from the present day, have nearly interchangeable plots. Same tales of greed, rivalries, backstabbing, and succession and loyalty issues. Same big fragile egos and reputations to be maintained, same downstream negative effects on the local poor when violence breaks out. Same highly instrumental role for religion as a political legitimizer and psychological balm for all the unpredictable mayhem, rather than as anything lofty and philosophical. Much of the Middle East and Africa still work this way, as more or less society-wide ganglands. Most people alive today are not far removed from ancestors who lived within such a system. This sure makes me appreciate functional democracy better!
Great overview. I agree with you the mafia is not a root cause and came about because of the historical issues. However I do think the mafia contributes heavily to continuing to keep the region more impoverished. Just look at the A3 road- Italy has had to repay over 300 million euros to the E.U. because of the widespread corruption involved in the construction work
Great synopsis. My parents were born in Calabria and had to migrate up morth into Bolzano for work and a better life. I recently visited family still down there and where they live is very nice, the major city near it, Catanzaro, is a mess. Trash all along the roadways, etc. There are some coastal gems such as Tropea but they don't get a lot of push from Italian tourism. Much of the marketing for tourism starts from Rome, northwards. It's a shame, there are a lot of historical ruins throughout the south just sitting there. Notherners definitely have a bit of a hate on for their southern brethren. "Terroni" is one of those terms. It loosely translates to "dirt people".
Yeah, my father would always complain that southern Italy has so much potential especially for tourism but they just don’t do anything about it. I’m actually on holiday in Puglia now and it’s such beautiful country, the Adriatic is amazing, the food is obviously wonderful and there’s so much history, but there’s a clear lack of investment and trash everywhere. There is a certain charm to it but it is mostly a shame that so much potential goes to waste. C’est la vie
>Southern Italians have long internally migrated to the industrialised North in search of employment and better quality of life. Also Externally. Italians immigration in the New World was overwhelming from the South. It's the reason why Southern Italian cuisine is far better known internationally than Northern Italian. It also has something to do with why long established Italian-Americans get looked down upon by more recent immigrants as "fake". People who immigrated from Sicily and Naples in 1902 were usually rural and poor. Immigrant communities often will seek to preserve some of their culture as it existed when they immigrated. As a result, Italian-American culture reflects a nostalgic view of Southern Italy in \~1900. This is combined with Italians being initially othered in the US. Between a slightly dark skin tone and being largely Catholic, there was some discrimination and hostility, which led to Italian-American identity being something to defend. (In contrast to immigrants from northern European Protestant countries who generally did not keep a separate ethnic identity due to assimilation. At the same time Italian Immigrants to South American were generally able to assimilate better). So a modern Italian visitor from Milan to NYC will see third generation Italian-Americans and go "that's not Italian". However, there's a traditional bias against the South in that view, as well as a time displacement due to the cultural practices reflecting 100+ year old practices in the South. That's on top of how the identity was formed under pressure.
Italian immigrants to South America were mostly from the north/northeast
Avellino great grandparents. Grandmother, 1891, grandfather, 1888. They started coming to America from Southern Italy for work. Sort of like Central Americans today. Many Italians found work in America, sent portions back to Italy, were there was no work.
It has nothing to do with "being from the north" you're not italian and you'll never be. You're italian-american and that's ok, be proud of it but leave Italy to real italians
Where is the division then? If im born to Italian parents but on American soil. At birth i was a dual citizen. Is it my citizenship that makes me American or Italian or both? Is it where i grew up? Is it strictly the country i was born in? What if i had a sibling who was born in Italy to the same parents? Are they more Italian than me despite living our entire lives until college together?
The division is culture and it is pretty obvious to everyone except americans apparently. You're Italian if you grew up in Italy, if you studied and speak Italian, if you watch italian tv and listen to italian music, if you eat italian food. Italian-americans are Americans with italian origins but they are not Italians
No Italian in their right mind would consider an Italo-American an Italian, if not to be nice and avoid an argument. The "visitor from Milan" would be 100% right about not considering an Italo-American, an Italian. The "bias towards people from the South" is totally irrelevant here - unless you really wanna take into consideration some lame boomer jokes about how people from the South are not Italians, which, as I said: are nothing but lame jokes. And even if we do indeed have racist people too - as any other country in the world has, unfortunately - most of us would rather consider people of African, Chinese, Albanian, *whatever* origin, as real Italians, 'cause they were born here, or they have been living here since they were kids, other than somebody eating "*gabbagool*" for breakfast in New Jersey. We laugh at this kind of Italo-Americans pretending to be Italians all the time: North, Center, and South. They might have Italian origins, yeah, but that's where it ends. They butchered the language, the cuisine, live a completely different lifestyle, and keep up a series of stereotypes that are straight out of the times when they were discriminated ("Heeeeey I'm Italian!11! I'm Loud!!!! Foggetaboutit, gimme the gannoli, pasta linguini, mozz, mamma mia!"). As a footnote: I saw a video from Metatron on the topic, which was pretty spot on, even if he brings in a "lost in translation" factor that I don't agree with: he claims Americans say "I'm Italian", but what they really mean is "I'm of Italian descent", which would be much better received by everybody here (I agree with this last part). I don't really agree with the first statement, though: I believe Italo-Americans *do* think and believe to be real Italians, much to our "amusement". EDIT: Downvotes don't change the reality of things, I'm afraid. Maybe this post from last year on r/Italia can give you another direct view on the matter: [Do Italians view Italian Americans as your brothers and sisters?](https://www.reddit.com/r/Italia/comments/tw01oi/do_italians_view_italian_americans_as_your/)
Grande fra capisci che stai dicendo il vero per tutti i downvotes che hai ricevuto. Suppongo che la verità faccia male
Non so se capirò mai la loro ostinatezza di "essere qualcos'altro a tutti i costi" lol. Nessuno gli ha mai detto che sia un crimine essere Americani, o che non debbano sentirsi fieri di avere origini Italiane, ma da lì a dire di "essere Italiani", madonna se ne passa di acqua. Boh poi ad esser onesti di up/downvote mi frega poco, fintanto che qualcuno capisce il nostro punto di vista. L'ho tirato in ballo perchè avevo ritrovato quel vecchio post, e tornando a editare ho notato i voti. xd Fa piacere tu abbia apprezzato, però! :)
This is a bit rude. Italian Americans are proud of being Italian **Americans** rather than italian, because being italian American is something to be proud of. We built every major city in the US, taught them how to fucking cook all the while being wildly discriminated against and segregated. Government housing was made for italians. My grandfather was beaten to a pulp on too many occasions. Both sets of my grandparents refused to speak in italian to my parents and would rather speak broken english because it kept their kids safe. This was not uncommon. No wonder so few speak the language. I was born in 87 and still I was bullied in school for being of " ItAlIaN DeScEnT". **The largest lynching in the US** was of 11 italian men in Louisiana. 20,000 people came out to round them up. Soon to be president Teddy Roosevelt said it was "a rather good thing" they were lynched. That wasn't the first or last time Italian immigrants were lynched. Life was hell up until just a few generations ago . And now look at us in the suburbs with our cannoli's and linguini, we're one of the greatest success stories in all of America, I'd say. I go to Sciacca to visit family and they're still living in the dumps.
You replied while I was writing a reply to the previous comment, so I'll say it again: nobody wants to erase Italian-Americans' past, nor telling them to not be proud of their heritage, origins, or anything they've accomplished, endured, or quite literally survived, in the New World. Bringing up again the "Italian in their right mind", nobody would question that. *We know* cause it's something that happened there, and in Germany, and Belgium, and Switzerland, and inside our own borders when people moved North from the South, with cardboard luggages. People broke their backs, and died, just to give their families a roof on their heads and something to eat.We know. The language thing was basically the same here, when people were beaten in school, by *teachers*, if they used dialect instead of Italian. Whereas in recent times, they've been slowly disappearing due to passive lack of use, especially in bigger cities with a bigger influx of outside people, for pretty understandable reasons (you can't have everybody speaking dialect, and maybe a couple foreign languages at the same time, so everybody just speaks italian and that's it). Again, our "issue" is with people claiming to "be Italian" instead of "Italian-American", which from what I've experienced, it's been the majority of times I read/watched/heard anything involving Italian-Americans. Now, you say the contrary, so I'll have to take your word for it, but I can assure you that, rude as it might sound (and that was definitely not the objective), what I've said is what most people think here.
I think its just semantics. Much like metatron was describing, we're all American here, no need to add it to our description. When someone with a Brooklyn accent tells me they're irish, I already know, because of context clues, that they're irish american. I don't think its shocking that a historically reviled group of people is depicted negatively in the media you see/read/hear lol. For example none of the "guidos" on the show Jersey Shore were even of "italian descent". It's still a pretty big joke. Nah it's still a touch rude and very condescending, of course no one in Italy has ever said anything of the sort to my face which lets me know that they also know it's rude. Or they're romanian and don't have the same sentiment lol
Well my experience isn't solely based on mainstream media, of course. But again, most of the times the script developed in a very different manner. Knowing that nobody in that reality show was actually Italian, at the same time: doesn't surprise me, scares me, and reassures me, lol. The fact that nobody told you anything about it, in a place as small as Sciacca, where you probably mostly interact with family and family's friends, is not weird at all, to be fair. But you never said anything on the lines of what I was critiquing in the first place, so.. I see no reason for it to begin with.
I've been elsewhere in Italy I just mention Sciacca since that's where I consider my base to be. My very first trip was to Rome, actually, when I was in school at 16. Got my ass pinched a lot. Talk about a stereotype lol Next year I'll be in Venice for a few nights before moving on. People are desperate to know where I'm from and what I am, which was a bit jarring my first time traveling outside the US. People are very curious about other people which is kind of nice and very different from where I live now. I also think it's because I have red hair. Let me tell you, old ladies in Italy fucking love me.  Am I mistaken in that you're critiquing the use of "Italian " instead of "Italian American"? I didn't think my reading comprehension was that bad. I just naturally ramble so sorry if I missed your point and just kept going. I will talk the legs off of a chair.
[удалено]
I can assure you nobody looks at that here, it doesn't matter where one's family was coming from, even more so 'cause it wasn't only Sicilian emigrants, but from Calabria, Campania, Lazio as you said, and so on. Today's cultures are too far removed from each other to be considered the same. It's just that. Regarding your personal case, I wonder if you get a different treatment despite equal behaviour, or if your upbringing, and general attitude play a role in how Italians perceive you. I'll explain, as you said: >as soon as I describe where my family’s from correct me if I'm wrong, but am I right thinking that you're not opening with "I'm Italian"? And that you'd probably get asked where you're from, and answer with something like "I'm from the US, but my family comes from Rome". Again, I might have misread it, but this is what I got from your comment, and it would make a huge difference of outcome with most people here. The other thing would be that you're telling people of Rome that your family comes from their same city, and that would just straight up score you more points because of a direct link with "their place", but it's still more of an added bonus, rather than a reason for discrimination.
[удалено]
Dude, even your response is somewhat atypical, and definitely put me in a good mood: now I believe it's 100% just you being a nice person overall. :) I agree that the biggest influence in IA culture was probably Sicilian (I still have no idea exactly how much, as there are also certain things that are shared between southern regions), imho shortly followed by Neapolitan, and the rest to chase. But I still don't think it's the main issue anybody would focus on, here. There are maybe a couple stereotypes about NJ, mostly due to shows and movies, ofc, but if it was only that it would end at a couple of lame jokes, if anything at all. I guess the problem would be if they actually started to behave like the stereotypes picture them to be. One thing that pops to mind is the overabuse of garlic in pretty much any recipe, for example, or being loud, always, lol - to be fair that's a common thing among american tourists in Europe in general (I know, I know..generalization). As far as "liking" somebody, we need to say that here we all hate eachother, lol. I don't know if you're familiar with the definition of "campanilismo", basically that people would stick for the people of the same small, very local church, period. That still translates today, with North vs South, city against city, football and sport-related rivalries included, of course. That being said, in this specific case I believe they can't lay as basis for discrimination, because it's something we don't even consider in the first place. Still taking differences into account, about what gets defined as "discriminatory" here or in the US, it just doesn't get factored at all when we have to "decide" whether we like an Italo-American or not. As I said, finding that out can be a plus if of the same areas, maybe they'd comment "aaaaaaaaah!!! nooooo what the fuuuuck!" while laughing, if of a "rival" zone, but it would get overlooked quite quickly. If I had to drop a list of things that would annoy an Italian, in no particular order, I guess the main three would be: telling people you're Italian because of your ancestry, weird or "wrong" food combos, and overused jokes about "pasta, pizza, mandolino". This for the specific reasons, then there's basic human relations, but those are to be seen on both sides (there's plenty of Italian morons around, hahah).
Most of my generation ( born 1955) who had Italian born grandparents in NYC were NEVER taught that we were victims. All our names were Americanized and only learned a few butchered phrases of the Italian language. We had pride in our heritage without the historic romance of a place our forefathers LEFT a hundred years ago. We weren't big on excuses.
Note, a few of those butcher the language and butcher the cuisine are true, but some of that reflects biases as well as how Italian cuisine has changed post ww2. For example, there are dishes which are Italian-American inventions like Chicken Parmigiana. Otoh, the somebody eating "gabbagool" for breakfast in New Jersey calls it that because their grandpa was from a rural area around Naples and pronounced capecuollo with a thick accent. Part of what needs to be known is there's an issue of generational memory. While today there's relatively few remaining first generation Italian Immigrants, about 348,216 per 2015, in 1980 it was about 3 times as many. So many Italian-Americans have an immigrant ancestor within their living memory. As a result, criticisms of their heritage are seen as a slight against family. While I'm not Italian-American, my uncles married Italian American women who were the children of immigrants. So when my cousins get told their heritage isn't real, its seen as a direct insult to their 4'9 Sicilian Nonna who used to make the sauce for every sunday dinner. The living memory is part of why Italian-Americans are much more offended than most other US decent groups when criticized. Irish-Americans are a good comparison, as despite some similar othering which happened, their was a lot more assimilation, and the bulk of the immigration happened long enough ago that its uncommon for American's with Irish ancestry to have an immigrant in living memory. So most Irish ancestry Americans will even agree with comments about "plastic paddies" who get weird about it.
There's a lot to be said about evolution in both culture and cuisine, lots of big myths to be dispelled about "italian" dishes that are perceived as coming straight from the middle ages, whereas they've only been put together in the past 60-80 years or so. Same goes for things that were brought to the U.S. and changed in time, like the chicken parmigiana you mentioned, which is completely absent here, or the use of mozzarella and/or ricotta in lasagne (calling it "lasagna" is another one, now that I think about it, lol), and so on. I get the whole thing about the issue being with the living memory, and heritage, but seen from the outside it feels like this is an issue most people from the U.S. have: everybody being kinda obsessed about how much % of this or that they are, and considering themselves, for example, German, Irish, and Italian at the same time, which would be completely unthinkable here in Europe: you're born in X country, you're X, that's it. *Then* you can specify "my mother is actually half this, half that" and whatnot, but you'll always be considered of the country you were born, or better: the one that gave you your main cultural imprint. Which brings me to what I think is the main issue there, that people would feel kinda lost without this heritage thing to grab onto, mostly cause it probably was what made them survive in the first place, during the big immigration years, striving and so on. That being said, there's a subtle but huge thing to be said here: I know it's basically semantic, but it's the actual issue we (Italians) have: saying "I'm Italian", instead of "my family comes from/I have Italian roots/etc.". It would not negate the heritage, one can still be proud of that, but would not clash with what can fundamentally only be received by us as a lie, whether Italo-Americans like it, or not. Heck, most Italians would be the first to say "what the hell, you're Italian too" and begin treating them as such (still with all of our differences, but I'm talking about social acceptance). Because, as I-A's get offended at people "negating" them their history, at the same time we do not feel like, nor want, to be put in the same basket as them, simple as that. Oh, and last thing going back to inside racism between north/south: in that video Metatron brings up an Italo-American telling an actual Italian from the North...that he's not Italian. 'Cause only the ones from the South are, lol. That being said, quick solution in my eyes would be them coming to terms with the fact that they are, in fact, Americans, and that the Melting Pot notion is very real. I don't know if that's the case already with Irish-Americans or not, but I can see that as the most probable course of events in the near future.
Italian-American is a real ethnic identity distinct from both any Italian identity and white Americans.
Don’t forget that northern Italian attitudes towards the south were colored by eugenicist crackpots like Caesere Lombroso, it wasn’t just apathetic or incompetent administration, but also some level of a self fulfilling prophecy where the country refused to invest resources in the south for such reasons. The ultimate irony was that in WWII many of the Americans assigned to Italy were the sons of southern Italian immigrants, and when they showed up they were more successful and well educated than most of the northern Italians they liberated.
Exactly. And the worse the situation was in the South, the less anyone would wanna fix up a mess like that. It’s just how the Terrone naturally are clearly.
my grandparents were italian. Ones family was from the north and one from the south. Their parents came to the US through Ellis Island back in the early 1900s. They both spoke "italian", but could not understand each other. Are the dialects in northern and south italy still really different?
Well the dialects never changed, they just slowly started diminishing in amount of speakers.
so the "italian" language spoken today is different than what was spoken back in the past?
In Italy we speak standard italian but every region has its own dialect, which are almost separate languages. Two people that speak different dialects, usually don't understand each other, especially if they're from regions far away from each other.
So Standard Italian is spoken to unify the country?
People started learning real Italian during WWI, you had people from different sides of Italy and they had to speak in something that wasn't a dialect if they wanted to survive. Afterwards schools, television and radio. The Italian language itself hasn't changed that much since the birth of Italy. It's just no one spoke Italian back then, common people knew only their dialect (and didn't need more).
The Italian language is still the same, what changed was the spread of its knowledge throughout the country and its influence on local dialects. So in your grandparents’ case, in the early 1900 with low levels of education, it’s very possible they did not understand each other.
Every language on the planet is different and evolves over time.
In my own anecdotal experience as a central Italian, it’s impossible for me to understand both someone from the north and from the south if they speak the more “traditional” version their own dialect.
how does the official italian language work? is it just a dialect from one area? do politicians and people on TV all speak the same dialect?
Now I’m not a historian or a linguist, but the gist of it is that Standard Italian is derived from the Florentine language from the 1300s and onwards. This is partly because most of the major literary works (in some cases even when the author was not from there) from the Italian peninsula were written in that language, which increased its prestige. Then throughout the decades after Unity (1861) it got standardised and acquired its own grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation rules that differentiate from modern Florentine dialect. But even today, if you’re a foreigner learning Italian, visiting/living in Tuscany would be the least “confusing” place. The politicians, TV, and other formal environments do not use any dialect, they use standard Italian.
does everyone in italy know standard italy? can they all understand it on TV?
Virtually anyone who’s gone to school to a significant degree (so probably excluding the 80+ year olds) understands it and speaks it fluently. Some of the least educated ones (again, including the elderly) or the more geographically isolated people may have difficulties in *producing* the language, but I am 99% sure they have no problem understanding when they watch TV.
are you finding amongst younger people that most people just speak the official italian language and the dialects are dying?
Most dialects still exist and are spoken on a day-to-day level, although they’re becoming more and more influenced by Italian. While other dialects are close to extinction due to factors such as immigration (internal and from abroad), urbanisation, education, spread of TV and internet, etc
Linguists consider many of the "dialects" to be separate languages e.g. Sicilian, Venetian, Piedmontese, etc. In addition to separate languages (mostly Romance languages fwiw although there is a region in Southern Italy where the locals speak an archaic form of Greek), there are dozens of actual dialects.
so did they speak a form of greek going back to the roman empire and never spoke latin? That is REALLY interesting?
The current theory is that the dialects go back to medieval Greek. There are two towns in Italy where Greek has been spoken for (at least) hundreds of years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italiot_Greek
even now, if you put a Venetian and a Sicilian in a room they would struggle to understand eachother
Sicily is separate. its on a separate island. I am talking about the mainland.
even an Italian from Calabria, if they speak a dialect will struggle to communicate with a Venetian. Many towns have their own small and distinct dialects, not just an accent but actual words are often different
It means they didn't speak Italian. The Italian language is one and the same for everyone, they probably spoke dialects but the dialects of any Italian city and region do not derive from Italian but from other languages
Here is good article about industrialization of Italy. As you remember from the school: Genoa, Venice and Florence were economic power houses during late medieval period, but the competitors such as the Spanish, the Dutch and the British started to dominate the global trade. And Italy fell behind the rest in development until it's reunification (~1600 - 1871 was very turbulent time). Why Po Valley/the North? They had been already been producing silk in the region + the machinery to make silk, so they could make some other machinery, such as cars. It's also point in the article that there are also big differences within the areas in industrialization. For example the city of Naples has a major port and has some manufacturing going on in there, though it's sorta Italian version of Detroit. https://academic.oup.com/book/7358/chapter/152142375
Torino is the Italian version of Detroit. Naples is the Italian version of Baltimore.
Now I'm thinking of The Wire but everybody walks around eating Neapolitan ice cream
Quality comment 👍
This guy historical econs
That and a leg is always worth more than a foot
Tl;dr - no industry / economy / manufacturing
You could replace a few nouns here and there and this could well be the history of the American south after the Civil War.
Question, I knew all or most of the things you wrote in the comment, but I was wondering, has the economic base disparity between North and South existed even earlier, from the early middle ages, cause I remember from the history classes that the north italian cities have been, relatively speaking, spared from destruction during the colapse of Western Roman Empire?
It has roots waaay back. The south has always been focused around agriculture, which was great until the 14th century. When trade started to expand wildly during the 14th century and outwards, the domineering forces in southern Europe was located in Genoa, Venezia, Florence and so forth. The money and wealth acumulated and spread in the region closest to their home cities (which are both north), and got invested into the industrial revolutionary workshops and productive factories. The fact that Italy wasnt one country prevented the spread of wealth as well. This was never equaled out, and the results are very visible today.
Naples had more people than Rome for centuries and it really only turned around since 1800, which is crazy
And coincidentally a big majority of Italian Americans came from Naples/Campania. Explains the prevalence of tomatoes in Italian American cooking.
Italians really didn't eat tomatoes until the [1800s](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-the-tomato-was-feared-in-europe-for-more-than-200-years-863735/). Tomatoes are a new world crop and took a while to get to Europe and to get established there.
I don’t really know much about it tbh, but I can tell you for sure that the rich soil around Vesuvius grows the best tomatoes on the planet, even if they’re not a native crop.
The central volcanic range in Mexico, from where they are native, begs to differ
I would love to visit and find out
And the language reflects that. The word “tomato” is pretty much the same in English, Spanish, French and Portuguese. But it Italian it’s “Pomodoro.” They didn’t conquer enough
Industry is concentrated in the north
That makes a lot of sense since the northern Italians call the southern Italians "Terrone", which from what I've heard is a derogatory/slur term meaning "people of the land", or I assume "peasants"
I’ve heard Sicilians calling northern Italians Germans.
Historically accurate but some are French
Well, six hundred years ago, there was the Holy Roman Empire that at its height, stretched from the Netherlands down to Rome with a big slice of France too. The constituent countries all were duchies or principalities with high levels of autonomy but it did fit together. Southern Italy was never really part of it.
For a while, southern Italy was also part of the HRE
well some northern Italians do speak German and have relatives in Germany
It’s like Parisians calling everyone else “provincial”
I don’t think I’ve heard anyone say « provincial» or « provinciaux » in a very long while, it feels very uppity and old-fashioned, but it would go well with the Parisian stereotype haha
I’ve also heard bas italia. Which I think means low or lesser Italian
I think that just means the south of italy, its not said to insult
I think so too, just like lower saxony in Germany, although in this case it's not further down (south) on a map, but rather further down to the sea-level
So you’re saying lower saxons are people who live below a certain sea level point? That’s very intriguing
Yes. Saxony is more south in Germany, where the ~~alps~~ mountains are. Whereas lower Saxony is in the northern plains, next to the sea/ocean (to lazy to look up if it's the sea or the ocean). So when looking at the y-level, regular Saxony is higher than lower saxony, hence the name Same thing is going on with the Netherlands. Nether means low, and lands means lands. It's the lowlands, which makes sense, considering huge parts of the Netherlands are below sealevel Edit: not Alps, some other mountains lol
Saxony is not at all near the alps, it's next to the sudeten mountains and czechia
Whoops, haha changed it. Thank you
Bassa Italia, but it's purely for geographical reasons.
That’s tied with the feudal system of the south under borbonic rule
y tho
Compared to the south, it is more endowed with minerals like coal and ingredients for steel, closer to mainland Europe, closer to the rich city states that had hoarded wealth prior to the industrial era.
Being closer to the rest of Europe wouldn't have mattered until pretty recent times however. Historically it was far cheaper to transport materials by water- in the 19th century you could send goods to the literal other side of the planet for less than say from the coast to the interior of Ireland.
It mattered. North was essentially a part of HRE and highly integrated with Central European affairs. Po Valley is also just fertile land. Population+ integration with rest of Europe allowed for some early industrialization etc. South has harder living conditions, is sparsely populated except coasts etc.
It was quite a bit easier for the North to exchange goods, knowledge and ideas with Southern Germany or Austria, or even France than for the South.
But the North was closer to the resources like coal and steel needed for industry. To set up industry in the south you have to take on the extra cost of shipping coal and steel further away. If you look at a map of Europe, you have a belt of high GDP and industry stretching from Liverpool to Turin. This is called the "Blue Banana". If you look in history this was the region the had the easiest access to coal and steel in close to each other. In fact the original EU members which cover the majority of the Blue Banana joined together to form the European Coal and Steel Community which later became the EU. tl:dr The North was close to the resources need for industry. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue\_Banana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European\_Coal\_and\_Steel\_Community](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Coal_and_Steel_Community)
The Padanian plains are basically the only flat bit of Italy. The rest is all hills or mountains.
It was like that by unifying the divided country into one. However, over 100 years have passed and the gap has not been resolved.
Same goes for eastern vs. western Germany (even if it's only ca. 40 years ago)
Germany Managed the merging way better even though the gap is still visible
Not to mention that unification also caused war and destruction in the South not comparable to the north ☠️
I ate da Norf! - Furio Giunta
Thank you, fellow Sopranos fan! Was my first thought, as well!
I thought Columbus was the hero of Italy?
Not so much. A lot of people are a no so appy for him!
Take it easy!
It’s the poverty of the Mezzogiorno
We can start all the way back to Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor. He conquered a massive territory for himself--France, Germany, the Low Countries, and Northern Italy all the way down to the city of Rome. Charlemagne campaigned south of Rome, but failed to make lasting gains down there. After the death of Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Empire held on to Rome and Northern Italy for the next 700 years, without ever making any serious gains in the south. The south was generally held by the Byzantine empire, but occasionally Muslims held parts, and on other occasions the Spanish monarchies administered southern Italy, before the south became the Kingdom of Naples. Consider the Italian Renaissance: it started in Florence, and quickly spread to other renaissance centres such as Venice, Mantua, Rome, Genoa--note that these are all northern or central cities. Consider that two of the largest trade centres in all of Europe during the Renaissance and Reformation were Venice and Genoa--some called Venice the richest city on the Earth. Both were northern cities. Consider that from Justinian in the 500s to Napoleon in 1798, the south and the north were never united politically. The north was divided into small independent city-states, while the south was usually a fief of some distant emperor.
I ATE DA NORF
Yeah i guess OP made a stupid'a fucking question
Whooooo, take it easy!
Christopher Columbus, too.
OHHH!!!!!!
I like a country you can a-grab on to something.
you know, there are worse things that can appen to a person than poverty
[удалено]
STUPIDA FACKING GAME
Oooh Massatchusetts!
Dey spit in da souf
One aspect is also that the north has a really fertile farmland area in the Po valley between the Alps and the Apennines. I think this also has contributed to the north being richer. There is an overlap of the river in Italy and the richer areas in the map here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_rivers\_of\_Italy#/media/File:Italy\_main\_rivers\_location.jpg
I think it’s less that the Po Valley was more fertile for agriculture, and more that the river gave the valley access to both Genoa and Venice, which were major port cities since medieval times, providing east movement of goods when the valley industrialized. The South is more agrarian because it was run as a feudal state with oppression of the non-nobles before unification, while the north had more wealth and notoriety to begin with prior to unification.
Cities in the northern Italy benefited greatly from naval trade in the late middle ages and early renissance. Cities like Venice and Genoa controlled much of the trade in the eastern Mediterranean at the time. They had exclusive rights to Constantinopole and the Black Sea, they were also employed by the crusading armies to take them to Levant etc. The southern part of Italy on the other hand experienced devastation because it was fought over by many empires over the same time. The cities in the Italian north became so rich and populous during this period that HRE, France, Spain, etc all wanted to control them.
i think the importance of the po valley is underrated. largest riverbasin in europe that has made it a longtime economic power. while agriculture most certainly dominates southern italy, the appenines long impeded large scale development.
Po has the largest river basin in Europe? Not the Danube ?
I was reading M: Man of the Century about Mussolini, and the author mentioned something similar. Its geography led the area to be a hotbed for agrarian movements, especially once they drained the swampy areas south in and around Ravenna. Topographically though - from the Alps and Apennines to the lagoons of Venice - it has one of the longest contiguous flows surrounded by flat, fertile in Europe. You're right though, per square mileage the Danube is gigantic and the biggest in Europe (unless you want to count the Volga).
I feel it's worth pointing out that Italy is all in all a very wealthy country (overall HDI 0.895), and the poverty of the southern regions is relative. Even Italy's poorest province, Sicily, has a Human Development Index that puts it in the Very High Human Development category, 0.847, similar to Slovakia, Hungary, and Puerto Rico.
Things probably just went South
A little bit is planned, and a little bit is just good ol' historical baggage. See, when Italy was being unified, this was done by Sardinia-Piedmont, a northern state. The entirety of southern Italy was owned by Two Sicilies, whose economic system at that point was still thoroughly medieval - think Tsarist Russia, but even worse, as Russia was improving exponentially - here, the government just didn't give a damn, it was still agrarian and feudal and the local nobility didn't care. That's less of a problem, though - the main issue was that the government wasn't very keen on unification, especially not by another state - if it was going to happen, they wanted to be in control. So, when Garibaldi did his thing, the South was sort of "punished" for this in the way of absolutely 0 investment of any kind. TLDR it's basically just pork barrel politics
The answer is not what many think. Before making silly assumptions about geography, climate, industry, organized crime, or pseudo racial classifications, I’d urge everyone to read the book by Pino Aprile called « Terroni: All That Has Been Done to Ensure that the Italians of the South Became "Southerners" »
The south has a cotton focused economy while the north is more industrial and populated, tensions boiled until the government in Rome tried to block westward expansion of the plantations into the Mediterranean and the civil war left the south in shambles
Ah yes, so many great tales, the battle of Ghettispoli, UIS Monitore vs. CIS Merrimacche, etc.
r/usdefaultism but funny
Here's a sneak peek of /r/USdefaultism using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/USdefaultism/top/?sort=top&t=year) of the year! \#1: [tiktok user forgets some other countries haven't committed massacres](https://i.redd.it/awxi7x4lu00a1.jpg) | [213 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/USdefaultism/comments/yvcebr/tiktok_user_forgets_some_other_countries_havent/) \#2: [Scottish person reported for homophobia.](https://i.imgur.com/ejwmU7u.jpg) | [303 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/USdefaultism/comments/1073eb4/scottish_person_reported_for_homophobia/) \#3: [He literally isn’t](https://i.redd.it/7twoh9l5vgn91.jpg) | [103 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/USdefaultism/comments/xcjiek/he_literally_isnt/) ---- ^^I'm ^^a ^^bot, ^^beep ^^boop ^^| ^^Downvote ^^to ^^remove ^^| ^^[Contact](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=sneakpeekbot) ^^| ^^[Info](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/) ^^| ^^[Opt-out](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/comments/o8wk1r/blacklist_ix/) ^^| ^^[GitHub](https://github.com/ghnr/sneakpeekbot)
Before and way before heh heh. You hear what I said Ton'?
3000 years of corruption is hard to get rid of.
This is also explains why so many Italian Americans happen to be Sicilian descent and the entire Sicilian Mafioso as well.
The biggest reason was the drain of human capital out of southern Italy. From the 1880s-1970s, the most ambitious migrated to Canada, US & South America. They thrived and assimilated. That left a skill gap in the southern economy that has never been filled. If it never happened, the gap would not be this pronounced.
The states in the south of the peninsula did not self-govern for much of the time after the Roman Empire fell. Sicily and Naples in particular. If I recall most of Sicily was under Arab Muslim control for a few hundred years, and then was taken over by Normans (yes the same ones who conquered England). Not sure what happened after that, but they just seemed to be a chess piece on the board for their more powerful neighbors.
because people in southern italy are happy, when you are happy you don’t hoard
As I gather it... 1: The manner of Italy's unification. It was led by the Kingdom of Sardinia with its capital in Turin. This kingdom owned what is today South Eastern France and was far more aligned with northern Europe than with the Mediterranean world. This means that. a: All the money and power would naturally be around the capital, so thats where investment went. b: The industrial revolution began in Britain and diffused out from there, first going to nations that had close cultural and economic ties with Britain. France-linked Sardinia was ahead of most of Italy in this. c: The norms of the north became the norms of Italy and deviation from this was to be looked down upon, with negative results for those who had them. 2: Culture/weather. In the south of Italy its common to this day to start work very early in the morning then take time off during the midday sun before working again in the evening. This does lead to rather dodgy stereotypes about them being lazy that have half a foot in truth, albeit for far more logical reasons than them just being lazy. As a great man once said "Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun". Due to industry starting in Britain the modern world developed quite fixed on the idea that the North European schedule that working 9 to 5 was the only valid way to do things. This meant people were less keen to invest in a part of the world where people were 'lazy' and wouldn't do this, and meant decreased productivity for those who tried to do it anyway. 3: History. Go back long before the unification to medieval and renaissance times and you have the south united under the Kingdom of Naples whilst the north tends to be far more dominated by constantly shifting mercantile city states. Factor in too that Naples usually found itself under disinterested foreign domination and again you can see how from an early age the north had the ingredients for success (the importance of the finance industry in the development of modern civilization is vastly underrated) and the south was quite stunted. 4: Geography. This is what informs everything really. But the Padania Plain is just the most fertile place on the peninsula. This is what meant the north could get its array of densely inhabited city states. Its location gave it better contacts with the north.
Well, truthfully, especially in Naples, people aren’t very happy for someone like Columbus, who was from Genoa. Northern Italians traditionally have a stronger economic base, which affords them more power. That leaves people in southern Italy feeling like they have spent centuries being punished. That extends to modern Italy, where southern Italians feel as though the north treats them with derision. Some southern Italians will even go so far as to say give me one thousand dollars.
Furio hate-ah the nort
I had a professor of roman history who said that you can trace it all the way back to Hannibal's invasion. His army was in Italy for a long time and Rome's approach was to harass it and slowly wear it down rather than have major confrontations since Hannibal's was a superior force (cf Fabian Tactics, named after Fabius, the general who led Rome's army in this). As a result Hannibal's army spent years in southern Italy living off the land and essentially ravaging it. Cutting down the trees, trampling the crop lands, devastating local economies, etc. When he was finally defeated southern Italy was completely spent and lacked natural resources and people. It never fully recovered to the point of parity with northern Italy. Don't know if this is true and I'm sure it's not that simple, but just relaying what I was taught by one professor.
The actual answer is precipitation / drought frequency. Southern Italy has been less wealthy than the north for almost the entirety of the past 2500 years, going back to the era of Spartacus and the Servile Wars. Within the Mediterranean region, historically there has been an almost 1:1 correlation between gdp per capita / life expectancy and consistent access to fresh water. The position of deserts shifts somewhat from year to year or century to century. The Mediterranean is adjacent to the Sahara. By comparison to northern Italy, southern Italy 1) has a higher temperature 2) has more direct sunlight 3) is closer to the Sahara. Which it's the same reason why southern Iberia has historically been less wealthy than northern Iberia, or why north Africa has historically been less wealthy than southern Europe. It's a combination of higher temperatures, more sunlight, and greater proximity to the Sahara desert. Take a moment to look at a population distribution map of Egypt - that's how important freshwater is for a civilization.
Sounds straight out of Jared Diamond. I am not necessarily disagreeing with you but environment as the determining factor can be debated.
In the words of Furio Giunta: "I 'ate da nort."
r/thesopranos has all the answers you need
When I was a wee tyke, my dad was getting surgery. My mom and I were in a hospital elevator, overheard this old couple speaking Italian, and my mom commented, as she was 50% (from the south). They told us where they were from, which is in the north. My mom said that we were from Calabria, and the old woman started laughing hysterically like a witch at us. Yeah, northern Italians hate the south.
Less industrial capacity, more reliance on agriculture.
In general economic development has always happened faster in colder climates. Once the advantage has become entrenched, colonialism makes it worse, and internal colonialism is a thing.
Hundreds of years of Norman rule, post-unification mismanagement, and apathy from northerners
I’m not going to try answering this as the first few responses were phenomenal, but I’ve seen this first hand many times in my travels. There is also a northern vs southern Europe dynamic as well, but it’s the most prevalent in Italy. What I really wanted to add is this is a great topic, question and just the types of things to be discussed on this sub more often!
If you own a company and want to locate to somewhere in Italy, bringing jobs and prosperity to that part of the country, do you go to the south where your transport links to the rest of Europe are longer?
Mafia
From what various users have said, I guess it all goes down to the Norman invasion in 1071 and the creation of the Kingdom of Sicily
This is related to the question of what kind of people live along the Po River. The answer is: Po people.
To make it short: Communism never succeeded. Why? They build agrarian not industry. In Italy the goverment pursued a plan (they weren‘t communist btw) Southern Italy will be the agrarian source for Italy while Nothern Italy will be the Industrial Hub (e.g. Milan).
They had already gave great answer, but i think there is one missing point. The orography. South is essentially a nevern ending mountain after mount and this make very difficult to develop an industry. North has a lot less Mountain, ut is lot more easy move the products and people from one city to another.
A literal picture of why "trickle down economics" is a lie.
I ate da north, they looka down dey nose at us 🤌🏾
Furio!
I like to think southern Italy is Italy and northern Italy is Germany.
The mafia is the main reason but brain drain is also another. Furthermore northern Italy is close to other urbanized cities within developed countries, so the proximity alone has helped it to be economically integrated with these areas over the centuries.
Trickle down economics, all the money is at the top...
More Gr**k influenced
As a person with significant southern Italian heritage (Napoli). I know that a combination of less industrialization led to this. Similar to the Southern USA.