Towards a Unified Italy

Historical, Cultural, and Literary Perspectives on the Southern Question

Salvatore DiMaria

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319907666
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Italie

Since unification in 1860, Italy has remained bitterly divided between the rich North and the underdeveloped South. This book examines the historical, literary, and cultural contexts that have informed and inflamed the debate on the Southern Question for over a century. It brings together analysis of cinema, literature, and newspaper archives to reconsider the myths and stereotypes that both Northerners and Southerners deploy in their narratives. Salvatore DiMaria offers a masterful assessment of the entangled issues that have produced the South's image as impoverished and backwards, such as organized crime, illiteracy, and mass emigration. Documenting the state's largely failed efforts to bring the South into its socio-economic fold, DiMaria also points to the future, arguing that the European Union and globalization are transformative forces that may finally produce a unified Italy.

© The Author(s) 2018

Salvatore DiMariaTowards a Unified ItalyItalian and Italian American Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90766-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: The Southern Question

Salvatore DiMaria¹

(1)

University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA

Salvatore DiMaria

End Abstract

This study advances the long-running debate on the Southern Question that has bitterly divided Italy between a rich North and an underdeveloped South, or Mezzogiorno.¹ More specifically, it strives to tell the story of how Northern and Southern Italy were politically unified into one State and why its peoples remained divided both culturally and economically. Since 1860, when the Kingdom of Italy was first created following the annexation of the South, cultural rifts, regional factionalism, and toxic prejudice have torn the country apart. Though linked by history and geography, nineteenth-century Italy was a patchwork of diverse peoples who were fiercely loyal to their respective regions and spoke dialects unintelligible to outsiders. Pointedly, the Northern statesman Massimo D’Azeglio, on congratulating King Victor Emmanuel II on the unification of Italy, reportedly remarked that having made Italy, “we must now make the Italians.” This task proved stubbornly elusive, as resentment and recrimination exacerbated the rift. The gap grew ever wider as each side bolstered its position with its own version of the past and began to hurl libelous charges and epithets to the other. Northern Italians saw their Southern counterparts as lazy, boorish, and prone to crime. The South, in turn, accused the North of having forcibly annexed it and destroyed its prosperity. Truth and understanding has often been the first casualty of this antagonism. This is due in part to the myriad of books and movies on cultural phenomena, such as emigration and organized crime. Their particular perspectives and conclusions have muddled the debate and, in some instances, stoked animosity. This book, based on careful research into the central elements of Italian culture and history that are deployed by both sides in the debate, strives to show a more realistic and comprehensive picture of the roles that both North and South played in creating modern Italy. In doing so, it takes issue with those who persist in seeing Italy as a divided society mired hopelessly in crime and corruption and offers, instead, a cautiously optimistic view of a country that is poised to shed its negative reputation, overcome its divisive past, and finally “make the Italians.”

Arguments fueling the present debate often rest on preconceived perspectives of the historical events that led to the annexation and to the rise of the parties’ vexed relationship. The facts, data, and scholarship driving my analysis help to zoom in on the actual causes that created and continued to stoke the controversy. Accordingly, I begin by placing the parties’ respective arguments in their rightful cultural and historical context, thus stripping them of bias and assigning blame where it lies. I find that the fault lies in part with the failure of the North (the Kingdom of Italy) to fulfill its moral obligation to reconstruct the region it had destabilized by forcefully annexing it, and in part with the Southern elite’s aversion to changes that might have placed the South on a path of socio-economic development. The discussion leads to the cautiously optimistic conclusion that the debate is losing momentum as the country is becoming ever more homogeneous. In fact, it is beginning to address in earnest some of the issues that fostered the old animosity, most notably infrastructure and organized crime. This development is largely the result of the great pressure arising from the confluence of internal and external forces. Immigration, globalization , and digital technology are forcing cultural changes and legislative reforms that in the past the establishment lacked the political courage to support. Bureaucratic and social reforms are beginning to show their positive impact on the country’s socio-economic spectrum. These developments support the notion that Italy is becoming a truly unified nation, a goal that has eluded the country’s leaders since 1860.

The book begins with a discussion of dubious claims about events that led to the 1860 annexation, progresses to an overview of major cultural and economic issues, and ends with an analysis of present-day Italy. It does not dwell on detailed accounts of incidents and personages already extensively treated by a vast scholarship both in Italian and in various other languages. Instead, it focuses on the causes and effects of phenomena with great social significance, such as illiteracy, emigration, justice or lack thereof, and collusion between the State and the criminal element. The discussion takes into account archival evidence, economic data, newspaper reports, and relevant past and present scholarship. It also draws on the manner in which poets and novelists, dramatists and filmmakers, chose to portray selected historical facts and characters in the fictional world of their works. These include renowned authors such as Verga, Capuana, Pirandello, De Roberto, Tomasi di Lampedusa, Levi, Sciascia, Camilleri, and other less-known writers. In some cases, the analysis includes filmic dramatizations of notorious individuals or spectacular events such as the film Il giorno di San Sebastiano, a faithful representation of the 1893 Caltavuturo massacre, and Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano. This 1962 documentary-style movie deals with the famed bandit’s bloody exploits and the collusion between the State and the mafia in post-World War II Sicily. In the last section, the discussion relies mostly on contemporary data and reports gleaned from major newspapers and magazines, including La Repubblica, Il corriere della sera, The Economist, The New York Times, and The Journal of American History.

The Debate

The debate has its roots in the 1860s unification of Italy with its capital in Turin under King Victor Emmanuel II of the House of Savoy, previously King of Sardinia and Piedmont. The first hints of the controversy appeared in the negative impressions that Northern officials had of the Southerners at the time of the annexation. General Enrico Cialdini, one of the commanders of the Northern forces in the South, thought that the Bedouins of Africa were “milk and honey” compared with the Southern “boors.” As far as the Garibaldian general Nino Bixio was concerned, the Southerners should all be sent to Africa to be civilized. The unification also unsettled Massimo D’Azeglio, who feared that merging with the Neapolitans was like sleeping with lepers.² Others described the region as “a sort of Affrica [with two f’s] populated by uncivilized tribes that had no honor and no ideals” (Del Boca, 98). The issue took on a scientific veneer at the end of the nineteenth century when positivist anthropologists bolstered these negative views with their findings and theories. Anthropologists led by the Veronese Cesare Lombroso found “unmistakable” evidence that the Southerners were of an inferior race. They argued that the cranial measurements taken from some Southern outlaws revealed that Southerners in general exhibited residual characteristics of a primitive race and were, thus, incapable of assimilating civilized living standards. For them, the Southerners would always remain predisposed to criminal violence and devoid of any strong civic and moral sense. These assumptions earned credence not only in Northern Italy, but also abroad. In the United States, for instance, discrimination against Southern Italian emigrants during the late 1800s and well into the nineteenth century became so pervasive that many suffered unspeakable indignities and, in some instances, physical violence.

Southern scholars and politicians challenged the positivists’ theories. They argued that one must look for the cause of the South’s underdevelopment not in specious sciences like craniology, but in the region’s culture and history. Dismissing the findings as anthropological tales, or “romanzi antropologici,” the Sicilian Member of Parliament Napoleone Colajanni attributed the South’s backwardness to centuries of feudal vassalage. He insisted that the South was not the cursed race, or “razza maledetta,” that the anthropologists made it out to be, but a people capable of emancipation once outside the environment that oppressed it. He invited his opponents to think of the economic, social, and political successes that many Southern emigrants had achieved abroad.³ The Southerner’s backwardness, he concluded, was not the logical manifestation of a primitive nature, but the inevitable outcome of an oppressive social system. The Sicilian novelist Tomasi di Lampedusa made a similar argument in his Il gattopardo (1958), which takes place during the 1860 annexation. The novel’s main character, Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, expounding on the Sicilian ethos, tells his Piedmontese guest, Chevalley, that the Sicilians can be emancipated if they are taken out of their stifling environment at a very young age, “molto giovani” (213). The Members of Parliament Franchetti and Sonnino, the two Tuscan scholars who in 1876 ventured on foot and on horseback through the Sicilian hinterland, described the area’s oppressive environment in their report. They found a wretched people living in a state of semi-slavery. In their words, the people, mostly peasants, were illiterate, lived in abject poverty, and were tyrannized by abusive feudal traditions still practiced by the professional and propertied classes.⁴

The debate was left smoldering as the country’s attention turned to more pressing realities, notably World War I and Mussolini’s dictatorship (1922–43). It re-emerged in the 1950s, when the country witnessed a great exodus from the unproductive farms of the rural South to the humming factories of the North. The Northerners viewed the uncouth emigrants with contempt, called them boors, or terun (dialect for terroni), and in many instances refused them lodging or employment. But it was in the 1990s, with the birth of the new political party Northern League, or Lega Nord, that the controversy flared up with unprecedented virulence. In need of a political identity, the League’s ideologues chose to define their party by recalling their region’s glorious past. The word Lega is, in fact, an obvious evocation of the celebrated Lega di Legnano, the historical coalition of the Lombard communes that defeated the Emperor Barbarossa in the twelfth century. But for the promoters of the movement, the memory of the heroic past was not enough. It was also necessary to define the party in a context that would speak to the present. In other words, they were in search of an identity that was also current and relevant. Accordingly, they chose to focus on the contrast between South and North: the first, backward, lazy, terun, and criminal or mafioso; the second, just the opposite: industrious, entrepreneurial, and civic-minded. And so they, the elected race of the civilized and the industrious, distinguished themselves from the “cursed race” or razza maledetta. Their diatribes against the South encouraged their followers, known as leghisti, to indulge in abominable cheers such as “Go earthquake!” or “Forza Terremoto!” while residents of L’Aquila, a city in Abbruzzo, perished under the rubble of the 2009 devastating earthquake. Others, cheering “Go Etna! Go Vesuvius!” or “Forza Etna, Forza Vesuvio!”, invoked the volcanic destruction of the entire South. At the 2015 conference on women in business that took place in Milan, appropriately called “From Puglia to Milan,” the delegation from Puglia was “welcomed” by a big sign that read “TERUN.”⁵ Similarly, Northern soccer fans often sang hateful songs against their Neapolitan rivals. In one particular tune, they chanted that Neapolitans never wash and that their stench is so bad that even the dogs run away.⁶

The South’s response to the League’s attacks came in an avalanche of inflammatory media weblogs and a series of books and conferences. They all condemned the racist North and commemorated the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which the Bourbon dynasty had ruled for over a century prior to the 1860 annexation. In his Terroni, Pino Aprile observed that since 2001 there had been more than 700 conferences and a large number of new weekly and monthly publications (290). In these forums, the Northerners of today and the Piedmontese of the Risorgimento (roughly the three decades following the unification) were attacked with the same zeal that inspired leghista racism. Many attributed the South’s underdevelopment to the Piedmontese troops who invaded the Mezzogiorno, plundered its resources, and abandoned it to a future of backwardness and injustice. They concentrated their attack on two major fronts: one of self-celebration, the other of denunciation. The first laid claim to the high culture of the South, where people lived comfortably before the annexation; the second blamed the North for the devastation it wrought on the region. The activist Antonio Ciano became the front and center of this offensive with his book I Savoia e il massacro del Sud (1996), a point of reference for other Southern apologists.⁷ He recalled with pride that before the unification a flourishing industry in the South competed in European markets, winning prizes in exhibitions in London and Paris. The first Italian railroad was inaugurated in 1839 under King Ferdinand II, and powerful ship engines were built at the shipyard of Castellammare di Stabia on the Neapolitan coast. The kingdom’s many shipyards, Ciano declared, were renowned all over the world and provided jobs for thousands of workers (81).⁸ He praised the South’s public education, especially that of ancient Sicily, where Pythagoras and Archimedes taught. He also noted that under the Bourbons higher education was a priority, pointing to the excellence of the University of Palermo and the schools and academies in the city of Naples.

The controversy became as widespread as it was emotionally overheated. People with access to the Internet could easily express their opinions and vent th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: The Southern Question
• 2. In Defense of Garibaldi
• 3. Brigands: Criminals or Patriots?
• 4. The Underdeveloped South
• 5. Emigration
• 6. Italy’s Scourge: The Four Mafias
• 7. A Failed Reconstruction
• 8. Toward Making the Italians
• Back Matter