Southern Italians Research Articles

Colonialismo italiano e questione meridionale: amnesie, memorie competitive e alleanze intersezionali ai margini di una comunità immaginata bianca1

This article examines the intertwined histories of “internal colonialism” in Southern Italy and Italian colonialism in Africa, addressing the question of Italy’s national amnesia in relation to these topics. Drawing on Michael Rothberg’s “multidirectional memory” framework, the essay explores how the two historical issues mentioned above risk becoming competitive memories in contemporary public history debates. To develop this argument, the essay presents two case studies. The first is Pino Aprile’s Contro l’oblio. Giorno della Memoria per le vittime meridionali dell’Unità d’Italia. The book exemplifies competitive memory in the broader context of the neo-Bourbon approach to the Southern Question. The literal use of concepts such as colonialism and racism as metaphors for the Southern Italian condition risks creating self-apologetic narratives driven by “white anxiety,” absolving Southern Italians from their historical involvement in colonialism and contemporary racial privileges. The second case study examines the Museo Cesare Lombroso in Turin as an archive of Italian antiblackness. This section proposes the museum as a potential site for multidirectional memories, focusing on the interplay between the racialized representation of Southern Italians and Italian colonial racism. The goal is to articulate these two memories without overlapping them, emphasizing different historical responsibilities and contemporary privileges. The article underscores why intersectionality and positionality are critical to analyze the complexities of racial and colonial histories and their relevance to contemporary social justice struggles.

Letter from the Editor

Letter from the Editor

“Dolce vita” and Italian Anxieties (Social Chaos, Emigration, Revolution) between the 1910s and early 20s

Lawrence’s travel book, Twilight in Italy offers a good introduction to life in Italy before WW1. That is when, for the first time abroad, he and Frieda stayed in Gargnano by Lake Garda, (3rd September 1912 - 11th April 1913). Observing people there excited Lawrence’s interest in national character both in comparison with other Europeans and southern Italians. Lawrence had a particular instinct for perceiving the mood of Italy and its people as they were experiencing a major economic crisis which was soon to lead to the political unrest and the social turmoil of the “biennio rosso” (1919-1920). Indeed, there was a growing conviction on the part of the Italian working class that a socialist revolution was inevitable. However, in March 1919 Mussolini launched his Fascist movement and, in the autumn of 1920, his Fascist squads began their punitive expeditions resulting in an absolute social chaos. A number of Lawrence’s writings reflect his disillusion with post-war Italy. He did not miss the frustration that people showed, following the “unfair” treatment Italy received in the Versailles Treaty (1919). The emigration issue emerges too when the chauffeur of the bus he and Frieda are travelling on begs him to find him a job as a driver in England. Lawrence thinks then that emigrating had become some sort of disease, “Andare fuori dall’Italia. To go out of Italy. To go out-away—to go away—to go away. It has become a craving, a neurasthenia with them.” (“Sea and Sardinia”).

Assessing temporal and geographic contacts across the Adriatic Sea through the analysis of genome-wide data from Southern Italy

Southern Italy was characterised by a complex prehistory that started with different Palaeolithic cultures, later followed by the Neolithization and the demic dispersal from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe during the Bronze Age. Archaeological and historical evidences point to a link between Southern Italians and the Balkans still present in modern times. To shed light on these dynamics, we analysed around 700 South Mediterranean genomes combined with informative ancient DNAs. Our findings revealed high affinities of South-Eastern Italians with modern Eastern Peloponnesians, and a closer affinity of ancient Greek genomes with those from specific regions of South Italy than modern Greek genomes. The higher similarity could be associated with a Bronze Age component ultimately originating from the Caucasus with high Iranian and Anatolian Neolithic ancestries. Furthermore, extremely differentiated allele frequencies among Northern and Southern Italy revealed putatively adapted SNPs in genes involved in alcohol metabolism, nevi features and immunological traits.

The Italian Empire and the Great War by Vanda Wilcox

The Maghreb Review, Vol. 47, 1, 2022 © The Maghreb Review 2022 This publication is printed on FSC Mix paper from responsible sources BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS Books reviewed in The Maghreb Review can be ordered from The Maghreb Bookshop. Our catalogue is also available on our website: www.maghrebbookshop.com VANDA WILCOX, THE ITALIAN EMPIRE AND THE GREAT WAR. OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2021. In October 1911 Italy declared war on the Ottoman Empire and mounted a massive seaborne invasion of Turkish Tripolitania and Cyrenaica across the central Mediterranean. If at that time Italy was generally seen as ‘the least of the Great Powers’, so its prime foreign policy objective seemed to be the achievement of Great Power status by taking on no less an opponent than Turkey and seizing its last remaining North African possessions. But what was expected to be a swift and simple campaign, a mere ‘military parade’, turned into a vicious and prolonged war of colonial conquest. And, as Vanda Wilcox argues in her new study of the Italian empire, the story of Italy and the First World War actually begins with the war against Ottoman Turkey in 1911, after which Italy was to experience more than a decade of conflict, ending only in 1923-4 (or up to 1932 in the case of Libya). During the Libyan war the Italians for the first time used many of the latest tools of twentieth century technology – barbed wire and machine guns, motor transport, aircraft (both airships and aeroplanes, tried and tested for reconnaissance, target-spotting, strafing and bombing) and (thanks to Guglielmo Marconi) wireless. Yet Wilcox asserts that among the obvious defects of this imperial venture into Libya were an essentially inept military machine and precarious state finances, both with serious implications for Italy’s forthcoming performance in the First World War. Intriguingly, she argues that the Italo-Turkish war of 1911-12, and the two Balkan wars of 1912-13 are integral to an understanding of how the First World War began, and also many aspects of how it was fought. She suggests that ‘it was the succession of defeats suffered by the Ottomans in North Africa and the Balkans which began the process of destabilising the precarious European balance of power’. (p.13) (Here there seems to be an echo of events that led up to the Second World War, notably the international crisis provoked by Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935.) Wilcox also suggests that for Italy the most important legacy of the Italo-Turkish war was the experience of ‘unprecedented’ cross-party mobilisation. ‘This both demonstrated the new power of the media and mass culture to shape public opinion and indicated that the process of ‘creating Italians’ was well under way. Fatally, however, the 114 CURATED BY MOHAMED BEN-MADANI experience taught that the shared causes around which Italians could coalesce were expansionism and war.’ (p.39) Here the implications for the rise of Fascism are clear. Then, because this is a contemporary book, much space has to be devoted to issues of race and Italian ‘whiteness’ in the context of the Libyan experience. Yet given Italy’s own history of repeated invasions, partitions and foreign subjection and rule, Italians tend to be defined less by physical, racial characteristics than by culture (in the broadest sense), language and religion. And in any case the similarity in appearance of many northern Libyans and southern Italians often leaves little room for active ‘racial’ discrimination, at least on grounds of physical appearance. This book offers an arresting and important thesis, which indeed suggests that this is a subject that deserves further and wider study. The Libyan side of the story is perhaps presented with less assurance than the other issues (for instance, the common religion of Turks, Berbers and Arabs, and the allimportant role of the Sanusi religious confraternity might usefully have been given more weight). Also reliance on contemporary Italian ‘historians’ such as Angelo del Boca and his following tends to distort and even falsify much of the the Italian colonial record in Libya in particular and in Africa in general. For the writers of this school can find little good at all, no merit...

Genetic history of Calabrian Greeks reveals ancient events and long term isolation in the Aspromonte area of Southern Italy

Calabrian Greeks are an enigmatic population that have preserved and evolved a unique variety of language, Greco, survived in the isolated Aspromonte mountain area of Southern Italy. To understand their genetic ancestry and explore possible effects of geographic and cultural isolation, we genome-wide genotyped a large set of South Italian samples including both communities that still speak Greco nowadays and those that lost the use of this language earlier in time. Comparisons with modern and ancient populations highlighted ancient, long-lasting genetic links with Eastern Mediterranean and Caucasian/Near-Eastern groups as ancestral sources of Southern Italians. Our results suggest that the Aspromonte communities might be interpreted as genetically drifted remnants that departed from such ancient genetic background as a consequence of long-term isolation. Specific patterns of population structuring and higher levels of genetic drift were indeed observed in these populations, reflecting geographic isolation amplified by cultural differences in the groups that still conserve the Greco language. Isolation and drift also affected the current genetic differentiation at specific gene pathways, prompting for future genome-wide association studies aimed at exploring trait-related loci that have drifted up in frequency in these isolated groups.

'Mezzogiorno di fuoco e sangue': Narratives of Organized Crime and Stereotypes of the South in Songs from Northern and Central Italy

Popular Italian culture has grown ever more interested in the interpenetration between organized crime, state activities and transnational economic processes. However, while these narratives productively analyse—and denounce—the macroeconomic processes underscoring illegal and harmful practices, they also often complement such economic analyses by perpetuating stereotypical characterizations of the people involved in the crimes. In this article, I analyse popular music across five decades, in order to assess the ways in which the denunciation of state crime is persistently connected with cliched representations of the modes of existence that allegedly characterize Southern Italian populations. Focussing on acclaimed political songs by Northern and Central Italian acts, namely I Giganti, Fabrizio De Andre, Litfiba, Frankie Hi-NRG and Fabrizio Moro, the article identifies the textual, musical and extra-musical elements that resort to stereotyping Southern Italians in order to make a point about state-driven illegality. I argue that this type of ethnically biased narrative may paradoxically result in a symbolic absolution of the State, in a way that all responsibility for illicit and harmful practices is attributed to Southern communities.

New data on agro-pastoral diets in southern Italy from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age

The socio-cultural and economic developments that took place from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age are poorly understood, despite the fact that they were essential for the establishment of fully agro-pastoral economies in Europe. In this study, we aim to assess dietary changes in communities living in southern Italy during this period by examining stable carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios on human bone collagen. In particular, we investigated skeletal remains from seven sites in the southern Italian regions of Calabria (Grotta della Monaca, Grotta di Donna Marsilia and Grotta dell’Antenato), Basilicata (Murgia Timone, Grotta Funeraria and Toppo d’Aguzzo) and Apulia (Ipogeo dei Bronzi) to explore possible variations in diet between different geographic areas and periods. The results of the analysis on bone collagen extracts from 33 human and 12 faunal (sheep, dog, cattle and pigs) specimens attest that the diets of prehistoric southern Italians were mixed and based on the consumption of terrestrial resources, including generally moderate proportions of animal protein (e.g. meat and dairy products) and of C3 plants (e.g. cereals and legumes). Minor differences in the proportion of consumed meat are mostly dependent on the nature of regional environments, with individuals from Basilicata relying more on animal protein than those from Calabria and Apulia. Our study provides insights into the dietary habits of southern Italian populations during the prehistoric period that witnessed an increase both in agriculture and in pastoralism.

Does the out‐group recognize our mental skills? Cross‐group friendships, extended contact, and the expectation of humanizing perceptions from the out‐group

AbstractRecent research has shown the negative effect of meta‐dehumanization: the perception that out‐group members deny a fully human status to the in‐group. So far, no strategies have been investigated that allow the improvement of humanity meta‐attributions. In this work, we focused on the two mind perception dimensions: agency (e.g., the capacity of planning actions) and experience (e.g., the capacity of feeling emotions), and investigated whether direct and indirect intergroup friendships are associated with the expectation that the out‐group will recognize our mental capacities. A survey was conducted considering the relationship between two regional groups in Italy (Northern and Southern Italians). Participants were Northern university students. A two‐level mediation model was tested, in which the exogenous variables were cross‐group friendship and extended contact, the first‐level mediators were IOS (the inclusion of the out‐group in the self mechanism), in‐group and out‐group norms, and the second‐level mediators were anxiety, empathy, and trust toward the out‐group. The dependent variables were the evaluations of agency and experience regarding one's group (Northerners) expected by Southerners. Models were estimated by path analysis with observed variables. To replicate prior findings, the attributions of agency and experience to the out‐group (Southerners) were also assessed. Results showed that both direct and indirect friendships are related to more positive meta‐attributions through the mediation of affective and cognitive factors. Findings have practical implications: contact may favor the expectation of being perceived both as moral agents and as moral patients, thus improving intergroup relations.

The Mediterranean Diet And Cardioprotection: Historical Overview And Current Research.

Ancient Greece was the cradle of the Mediterranean food tradition, characterized by the Mediterranean “eternal trinity” wheat - olive oil - wine, the very essence of the country’s traditional agricultural and dietary regime, enriched by a culture of sharing and commensality. This food model, subsequently adopted and spread by the Romans, was rediscovered at the end of the Second World War by two American researchers, Leland Allbaugh and Ancel Keys. With the famous Seven Countries Study, Keys demonstrated for the first time that populations practicing a Mediterranean diet - such as the Greeks and southern Italians - showed low mortality rates from ischemic heart disease compared to the peoples of Northern Europe and North America. Since then, numerous subsequent epidemiological studies and randomized clinical trials have confirmed the beneficial effects of the Mediterranean diet both in primary and secondary prevention of cardiovascular diseases. This review will focus on the origins of the Mediterranean diet from its roots and its relationship to cardiovascular disease, with a brief overview of the nutritional mechanisms that influence atherosclerosis.

Franks, Greeks, and Saracens: violence, empire, and religion in early medieval southern Italy

This paper examines the violence between Carolingians, Saracens, and Byzantines in southern Italy during the second half of the ninth century. Traditionally these conflicts have been viewed as violence between Muslims and Christians. This paper argues that contemporary southern Italians did not perceive this violence to be religiously motivated, because they did not understand Saracens to be Muslims. Instead, these tensions were about local and foreign claims to political authority and control of territory.

Economic fears of mass migration from southern Italy in early twentieth century America

ABSTRACTEconomic fears in the early twentieth century America about Italian immigration united trade unions and white collar workers and were motivated by reasons that ranged from the belief that migrants were disrupting the labour market and were temporary opportunist earners, unwilling to integrate and living in isolated communities, to the idea that southern Italians did not offer sufficient human capital: they were mainly illiterate, and had high dropout rates in schools, and were widely believed to have children with mental disabilities. These American fears were wildly overstated, however. First, Southern Italian migrants had to undergo a two-stage positive selection for literacy, while, secondly only 28.4 per cent of the massive incoming flow of Italians decided to stay; most Italian immigrants chose to return to their country of origin and the minority who remained did not delay long to join in the American melting pot.

Italia come Africa e Africa come Italia: movimenti migratori, confini reali, espansioni immaginarie da S.T. Coleridge a Erri De Luca

Author(s): Cazzato, Luigi | Abstract: This article tackles the question of the territorial boundaries of “italianita,” i.e. defining a place for Italy, through the analysis of some key moments in its discursive construction in modernity. I begin by summarizing the results of my long-standing research into the origins and diffusion of what is named “meridionism,” claiming that the territorialization of Italian-ness starts with the diffusion of the discursive metaphor of “(Southern) Italy equals Africa” in the 19th century, which fostered the racial profiling of Southern Italians as Africans within. This process, I propose, finds its completion in the present migration movements that have brought about the actual arrival of Africa in Southern Italy. By contrast, the bulk of the article focuses on the discursive reversal of that equation in the prophetic works of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s and Erri De Luca.

The class attainment and the career mobility of southern italians in northern Italy and in west Germany. A comparison between internal and international migrants

Abstract This paper studies the class attainment of a single group of migrants, the Southern Italians, to two destinations: Northern Italy and West Germany. It analyses whether the labour market trajectories vary among institutional contexts or follow the same integration pathway across different receiving societies. In doing so, this study expands the literature in two directions. On the one hand, it stresses the importance of macro-features of the host society for studying migrants' integration processes. On the other hand, it highlights similarities and differences between internal and international migration. The paper reports empirical analyses based on the Longitudinal Survey on Italian Households (ILHS) and the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). The results show that the inclusion of Southern migrants, both internal and international, took place at lower levels of the class structure. The greater rigidity and the strong emphasis on vocational training of the German labour market pushed Southern migrants into the unskilled urban working class. In Northern Italy, by contrast, the possibility of entering the public sector facilitated their inclusion in the middle classes. Despite those differences, in both destinations, Southern migrants had fewer opportunities of upward social mobility than the native population.

Institutions, Norms, and Accountability: A Corruption Experiment with Northern and Southern Italians

AbstractAnti-corruption research has highlighted the potential for grassroots monitoring to improve governance outcomes, but the conditions under which citizens are willing to report bribery remain under-studied. Are individuals from some societies socialized into a “culture of corruption” that makes them more accepting of malfeasance, or is the failure to denounce wrongdoing simply a response to low-quality enforcement institutions? I conduct a laboratory experiment to examine how the propensity to report corruption differs between Northern and Southern Italians, two populations experiencing different levels of corruption in everyday life. For each group, I experimentally manipulate the quality of enforcement institutions. When given high-quality institutions, all participants are more willing to report corruption. Moreover, Southerners and Northerners behave similarly when placed within the same institutional environments. These results suggest that high-corruption societies are not “culturally” predisposed to tolerate malfeasance. Rather, improving the capacity of enforcement institutions may significantly strengthen accountability norms.

From 'A Frontier Land' to 'A Piece of North Africa in Italy': The Changing Politics of 'Tunisianness' in Mazara del Vallo, Sicily

AbstractThis article analyzes the conditions leading to the ‘ethnic packaging' of the Casbah neighborhood in Mazara del Vallo, Sicily, and the economic and political struggles that ensued. By studying the changing relationship between the neighborhood's built environment, the racialization of Tunisian migrants and the town's transitioning economy, it analyzes transformations of the Casbah from a working‐class Sicilian neighborhood, to an ‘insanitary' Tunisian ghetto, to a showcase of the town's Mediterranean multiculturalism. Through this analysis, the article makes three arguments. Firstly, by showing that ‘ethnic packaging' does not always lead to gentrification but may engender other types of conflict, it argues that the ‘marketization' of urban diversity has a variety of consequences tied to cities' positions in broader geographies of uneven development. Secondly, by showing that the changing racialization of Tunisian migrants was produced both through changes to Mazara's built environment and through shifting territorial relations within Italy and across the Mediterranean, it develops a multi‐scalar analysis of racialization. Thirdly, by showing that Sicilian depictions of Tunisian migrants changed according to shifting understandings of Sicilian modernity vis‐à‐vis the north of Italy, it argues that Italian immigration discourses develop in relation to internal forms of ‘othering' of southern Italians.

Divided Nation: The North-South Cleavage in Italian Tax Compliance

It is well known that tax compliance is low in Italy, and lower in the South than in the North. Many scholars have examined Italian taxpayer behavior, mainly using experiments and surveys. However, little attention has been given to the historical circumstances that have shaped divergent taxpayer behavior by Northern and Southern Italians. This article uses historical data from Italian unification through the Second Republic to assess the effects of Italy’s major formal institutions (the church, state, and political parties) and informal institutions (clientelism) on Italian tax behavior. It argues that nineteenth-century unification had significant repercussions on the two most important institutions in Italy—the Catholic Church and the state—and hence led to two different kinds of clientelism. Since Southern clientelism favored private interests and Northern clientelism led to the construction of public institutions, this created two different tax compliance environments.

Mediating and moderating processes in the relationship between multicultural ideology and attitudes towards immigrants in emerging adults

Few studies examine intercultural relations in emerging adulthood. Framed from the perspective of the Mutual Intercultural Relations in Plural Societies (MIRIPS) project, the current paper examined the mediating role of tolerance and perceived consequences of immigration in the relationship between multicultural ideology and attitudes towards immigrants. Additionally, the moderating role of context was analysed. A two-group structural equation modelling was performed on data collected from 305 Italian emerging adults living both in northern and in southern Italy with different socio-political climates towards immigrants. In both groups, tolerance and perceived consequences of immigration mediated the relationship between multicultural ideology and attitudes towards immigrants. Also, this indirect relationship was significantly higher for the northern than southern Italians. These findings provide provisional evidence of mediating and moderating processes in the relationship between multicultural ideology and attitudes towards immigrants and suggest important implications for practitioners interested in promoting intercultural relations among emerging adults.

Front and Back Covers, Volume 32, Number 3. June 2016

Front and back cover caption, volume 32 issue 3Front coverSTANDSTILLBehzad Sarmadi tells the story of Dubai's descent into an economic crisis in 2009 by seizing on the financial concept of ‘standstill’.The government of Dubai publicly (and unilaterally) invoked this concept in late 2009 so as to pause the debt obligations of a ‘government‐related’ corporation in the face of immanent bankruptcy.This figurative use of standstill by the city‐state, however, soon manifested itself in the city. Cars once owned by over‐indebted foreign residents began to accumulate dust on the sides of roads and parking lots as they were abandoned to literally stand still.Sarmadi examines this process by repurposing the notion of standstill as a tool with which to ethnographically link the structural dimensions of a financial crisis and its lived experience.Back coverDISEASES OF THE SOUTHAt night the chimneys of the Ilva steelworks loom behind a residential building in Taranto, southern Italy. The largest steelworks in Europe, and one of the few former state factories still standing in southern Italy, Ilva provides much needed employment in an impoverished region. However, it is also one of the worst polluters in Italy. Epidemiological studies have shown a high incidence of pulmonary cancers in the area, prompting Italian legal authorities to put the owners on trial for illegal polluting emissions.In spite of the unhealthy environment both in Taranto and in toxic waste‐ridden Terra dei fuochi, near Naples, the state's dominant message is for its residents to adopt ‘healthier lifestyles’. Biomedicine emphasizes individual, lifestyle‐linked factors of disease. Yet such an emphasis diminishes some of the most obvious underlying factors, such as pollution, over which individuals have little or no control, and which affects entire territories and populations. When a population is stigmatized or racialized as ‘backwards’, as southern Italians are, even the most obvious environmental injustices can be obfuscated in this way.In southern Italy, as in other areas hit by environmental injustice, marginality is compounded by a stigma that demonizes as irrational local environmental movements fighting pollution on their own doorstep. Effectively, people are blamed for aiding and abetting their own diseases.While the health‐or‐jobs dilemma is a classic issue of industrialization, companies have even more power to pollute once they are the only source of jobs left.

Patterns of Pugilism: Rocco e i suoi fratelli (1960) and the Boxing Film

Visconti's family melodrama reflects boxing's ascendency in Italian popular culture in the 1940s and 1950s, fuelled by the favourable results of Italian boxers in the ring and numerous Hollywood and Italian boxing films in theatres. An examination of this cinematic intertext in the preparation, production, and presentation of the film reveals a disruption to any ontological link between the film and the migrant crisis, introducing generic codes not normally associated with an auteur like Visconti. Moreover, attention to the body of the boxers redirects criticisms that Visconti embedded a personal, racist perspective on southern Italians within Rocco e i suoi fratelli. How this cinematic archetype was deployed to narrativize a hot-button social issue highlights the limits of the canonical means for interpreting the film: neorealism, adaptation, and impegno.