An American tourist is enjoying a once-in-a-lifetime road trip through
Italy. The further South he goes, there seems to be more poverty, more abandoned buildings,
and an air of what he thinks is desperation and hopelessness. Just after he gets to Naples,
he’s beaten up and mugged for his wallet and phone, and not long after that,
he has a brush with the dreaded local mafia. It felt as if the farther down he traveled,
life just looked harder for people. It was as if the country had been divided long ago and
had settled on extreme inequality. How was this allowed to happen?
You might think we’re exaggerating, but we’ll convince you by the end of this show that the
North and South of Italy are two different worlds. We don’t mean to say that the South is any less
beautiful, or the people any less friendly, but we will say that in terms of economics,
something strange and frankly ugly has happened in Italy over many years. And
today, things are just as divided as ever. With a GDP of around $1.89 trillion in 2022,
according to World Bank numbers, Italy is certainly a wealthy nation – the 9th wealthiest
on the planet. It feels pretty rich if you visit places such as Milan, a megacity in its own right,
where a sense of prosperity seems written into the very concrete of the buildings you pass by.
Milan is Italy’s richest city. Sure, like any metropolis in the modern world,
you can find poverty, crime, and homelessness. For instance, the neighborhoods of Giambellino
and Lorenteggio look nothing like the glitz you can find elsewhere in Milan.
Filth and desperation brand many streets in these two close-by neighborhoods. It’s the
dark underbelly Italy would rather prefer that tourists never see, but you’d struggle to find
any wealthy city in the world that doesn’t have pockets where a criminally wretched inequality
is woven into the fabric of hardcore existence. Still, business is booming in cities like Milan.
Prosperity is everywhere to see, despite the odd neighborhood looking like a remnant of the
third world. But if you head down to the South, to what’s referred to as the Mezzogiorno, prosperity
will feel like an alien word. Not everywhere, but in many places. We are generalizing,
saying the North and South are totally different, but on the whole, there is a big difference.
The glamor and conspicuous spending of Milan will feel like an alien world once you’ve seen some
parts of the South. Of Italy’s 60 million-plus population, 20 million - one-third - live in this
half, comprising of Abruzzo, Apulia, Basilicata, Calabria, Campania, Molise, Sardinia, and the
place you’ve likely all heard about, Sicily. On the whole, they have a lot less money, and in
some regions, they have hardly any money at all. Despite what we’ve told you about Italy’s wealth,
some of these regions are the poorest regions in all of Europe. As we said, it’s as if someone
decided long ago that this country should be split in half, with the haves living in the
north and the have-nots populating the South. Again, this is in general. There are super-rich
folks living all over the Mezzogiorno, but this geographical, economic divide
is a real thing. As The Economist wrote in 2015, it’s a “Tale of Two Economies.”
You can see the difference on paper. In 2018, the GDP per capita in the South was just 55.2
percent and 76.7 percent of the Centre and North’s GDPs, respectively. That’s a massive difference.
Unemployment rates were and still are way worse in the South, and reports on general
well-being make the two parts of Italy look like different countries. Plenty of academic
studies have been published of late, and the divide those papers talk about is startling.
It’s a different world down there in the South, with the studies saying there were
and still are vast differences when it comes to “life expectancy, health, inequality, poverty,
social capital, and market potential.” It’s a crisis that seems intractable, but it’s not,
not really, if people in power did the right thing. It’s gotten worse lately,
though, as one recent paper explained, “The Covid‐19 crisis thus inserted
itself into the context of an already widening gap between North and South.”
You can see the divide everywhere you go. You can see the inequities in education,
in the infrastructure, and in some of the faces of the people that can’t find
decent work. There’s a quiet desperation and learned helplessness in many areas, which is
the reason why Southern Italy has been seeing many of its inhabitants moving out and trying
to find work in other countries. Others just move North to find work. This diaspora movement has
been going on for many years, which, as you’ll see later, has had devastating consequences.
There are many young folks in Southern Italy saying the same thing. “There’s nothing for me
here…I’m leaving. This government doesn’t give a damn about us.” The South is still licking
deep wounds from the 2008 financial crisis, while the North has pretty much made a full
recovery. The South is still dealing with organized crime groups, such as the Camorra,
or the Sicilian Mafia, while the North usually weeds that kind of thing out.
Don’t think for a minute these mafias are dead and gone. They’re alive and kicking the crap out
of many regions in the South today. Still, you might wonder why they exist in the first place,
which is something important in this show today. We’ll come back to this topic later.
You name it; the North has it: a large banking industry, some of the largest companies in Italy,
massive chemical firms, and huge insurance outfits. The North has a healthy automotive
industry and a bustling textile trade. It has higher paying jobs, and it has a population
who’ve been educated far better than the average southerner. When southerners do
get the best out of education, they usually skip northwards ‘cos there’s not much they
can do with a degree in their dusty hometowns. Statistically, the North has a much higher voter
turnout. 21.9 percent more people graduate from a university in the North. More people are working
in high-tech jobs there; there are more kids in childcare, more broadband connections, and it’s
above average in terms of how many doctors per 1,000 people there are. These are all markers that
academics use to understand the quality of life. The numbers differ from each region of the South,
of course, but the North-South polarity, on the whole, is evident all over the place.
Before we get into the state of the current South, where our guy in the intro just had an
introduction to some gangsters and lost his wallet to some street kids, we need to explain something
about how this Tale of Two Halves started. How did a country become divided through the middle?
It wasn’t always this divided. If you go back thousands of years, the South was renowned for
its fertile soil and for the plentiful fish in the waters. When the ancient Greeks settled there,
they had a bit of trouble at first with the natives, but they more or less worked things
out, and much of Southern Italy (not called Italy then, of course) flourished. At the time,
the Romans up north actually called Sicily and other parts of the South “Great Greece.”
Indeed, Neapolis and Naples, became a powerhouse under the majestic Greeks.
We won’t go into a full history of the South because it’s just too complicated.
What we will say is that the Romans in the North had control of the South from
time to time but lost control now and again to foreign powers. For instance, for a long time,
it was Muslims that ruled Sicily under the Moors. The Byzantine Empire, the Islamic states,
and the Normans all fought over areas of Southern Italy as the Romans in the North were
cementing their strength and building magnificent infrastructure. The South became fragmented, ruled
by so many warring factions that the ground for centuries was covered in men’s blood. In short,
it didn’t have the cohesion of the North. There wasn’t a concentration of power like in the North.
In the South, petty tyrants often ruled, making life incredibly difficult for the average person.
They pretty much invented laws as they went along, and they exploited the poor at every opportunity.
These people had only really known chaos. Even when the Romans were in power in the South in the
many years before the tyrants took over, they often planted their very wealthy people there
to run slave plantations (latifundia). A type of latifundia existed in Sicily all the way until the
20th century, which you will hear about soon. Under the Holy Roman Empire that followed
centuries later, super-powerful states formed in the North, such as those of Genoa, Venice, and
Pisa, republics that were at the time the richest places in Europe. For centuries, the Holy Roman
Empire was the most powerful political entity around, with trading creating many very wealthy
people. We are talking nine centuries of rule here, a long time to create, invent, and build.
Meanwhile, the South was a patchwork of small city-states, forever being fought over and not
easy at all for the Holy Roman Empire to conquer. We are skipping great big chunks of history here,
but we have to. We just want you to know that while much of the North and the Center of what
we now call Italy was developing, the Southern part was stuck in a cycle of regression. Even
when Napoleon conquered the northern and central parts of Italy, he did not have direct rule over
the whole South. In 1806, he dissolved the Holy Roman Empire and created the Kingdom of Italy with
him as King, and then he annexed what was then the Kingdom of Naples as part of the French Empire.
Even though Napoleon wanted to develop this part of Italy, many of the people that lived in the
South hated French rule. They fought against it at times, and then they got what they wanted in 1815
when Napoleon fell from power. All those regions of the South were handed back to the previous
rulers, but then chaos reigned once again. The South seemed to be stuck in some kind of eternal
disaster, a groundhog’s day of internal turmoil. The South never got very developed, in spite of
Napoleon’s intentions. It was always a land of the very rich and the very poor,
with an educated Middle Class hardly existing at all. Moreover, its resources over the years
had been over-exploited, and that once fine fertile land was not as great as it used to
be. With repressive regimes running the roost and hardly any trading or way to make a living,
it was at least fertile ground for uprisings. Then in 1861, great changes took place under what
Italians called the “Risorgimento” (Resurrection). This was supposed to unify Italy. Lots of people
in the North were not happy about joining with the South, people they called barbaric and
backward. After all, they said, they’ve been living in the past, thinking like peasants,
while they’d been creating powerful states at the forefront of scientific discoveries.
The Mezzogiorno, they said, we don’t need. They said you can’t modernize the South since it is
too far behind, and by trying to do so, we will put way too much economic strain on the rest of
Italy. It should be said that most of the bad things northerners said about the south
were plain falsities, such as calling the people inherently lazy. This wasn’t true,
but such is the mentality of large mobs. Once Italy was unified, the North pretty
much ignored it in regard to major political decisions, but be sure; the taxes kept being
demanded. Southerners struggled, with their soil now almost ruined, their forests heavily denuded,
and unemployment rates sky-high as owners of vast estates lived lives of luxury.
The more profitable estates were owned by Northerners, who would put people in charge
of them while they were gone. Landless peasants worked on the plantations,
so again, this looked like slavery. One thing Sicily had going for it was citrus fruits,
which were a huge money spinner, especially after the British had realized they were great for
dealing with every sailor’s biggest worry, scurvy. Northerners owned much of the agriculture, and the
Southern peasant farmers didn’t have a pot to pee in, so again there was a lot of disharmony. It
seemed all the wealth was in a few hands and those grasping fingers were all northern. On top of
this, Southern politicians were highly corrupt, as were the police. Italy might have been unified on
paper, but it was just as divided as ever. At the same time, the South was paying hefty taxes, but
it seems the development that could have happened with this money hardly ever went to the South.
And so you now have to ask yourself what happens when great swathes of people see no way out of
the darkness? They rebel, is the answer. In Southern Italy, what happened then was the
beginning of a secret kind of organized crime. These criminals, mostly peasant farmers in the
past, started extorting those who were looking after the landholdings. The plantation custodians
were given an offer they couldn’t refuse, and if they refused to pay, they were mowed down with
shotguns. The criminals would shoot police if they investigated, but the police were often paid off.
Word soon got back to the North that criminal activity under some mysterious organization was
happening. This was the start of the Sicilian Mafia, although it took a long time to figure
out anything about them because they were so secretive. These men of honor had rituals
right from the start, but everything they did was hidden deep under a thick veil. It took decades
for people to really understand there was a mafia. Famously, on February 1, 1893, after a man named
Emanuele Notarbartolo had taken notice of all this new crime and gone to investigate,
he was stabbed 27 times as the train he was traveling on went through a tunnel.
The death of this aristocrat is sometimes said to have been the first murder of an official
by the Sicilian Mafia. First, second, third, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that the mafia
grew in size and strength, with their many ranks occupied by men who’d had enough of
being peasants, had had enough of watching the aristocrats get richer as their kids starved,
and had had enough of politicians who were, in fact just as criminal as anyone,
but hardly ever went to prison. It sounds like a romantic story, but
the truth is, when the mafia got richer and had a good portion of politicians and other officials in
their pockets, they didn’t exactly concentrate on making the South a better place. Instead,
they exploited people with their many rackets, including protection rackets. Many of these
organizations popped up in the South, including the Sicilian mafia, the Basilischi, the Camorra,
the 'Ndrangheta, the Sacra Corona Unita, and more. These guys might have been a consequence of abject
unfairness, but in more ways than one, they held back Southern Italy from modernizing. They
were like termites with guns, appearing anywhere and everywhere, and they were
impossible to wipe out, despite many efforts. After WW2, Italy decided it was time to sink cash
into the development of the South, but that money, under something called “Cassa per il Mezzogiorno,”
never really went to the right places. Instead, much of it was stolen by corrupt politicians,
while the Mafia took much of the rest. The initiative didn’t end until 1993,
but at that point, there had already been many, many arrests relating to corruption. The cash
was gone, and not much had changed in the South. Many people in the South said that unification was
more of a curse than anything else. They’d have been better off under feudal lords, they said,
which was arguably wrong. Still, what really had changed over the years? For the most part,
they’d remained the agrarian poor while those in the industrialized north lived lives completely
different from theirs. Unified, maybe, but Italy was still two different nations. For years,
through the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s, they struggled to find work while the unemployment
rate in the North was only a fraction of the South’s. This was after about
$2.6 billion had been invested in the South. As an anti-mafia official once pointed out,
“In the north, you see one factory per kilometer. Here you can travel for 100
kilometers and not see one chimney stack.” He had watched as roads were only ever half-built,
as paid-for factories never opened, as promised hospitals were only ever partly finished, with
money from the contracts most of the time filling the pockets of corrupt politicians and gangsters.
It seemed that the chaos the South had known for centuries was well and truly still there.
Even now, people scratch their heads and ask why things haven’t changed. Like us today,
they blame historical foreign invasions, money-grubbing tyrants, and pervasive corruption,
which they say brought lawlessness to the South, and it’s never been fully cleansed.
Don’t get us wrong; there is some industry in the South. It has a thriving tourism industry
since it is one of the most beautiful places in the world, but don’t be fooled by the posh
hotels and mansions in the mountains; regular people’s lives are often a constant struggle.
We think an Italian Archbishop got it right when he told the New York Times:
“Here we have the culture of survival or the culture of tears - we are continuously
crying - we fix problems as they come, but we don't plan ahead.”
If you know anything about trauma and poverty, you’ll know that children who grow up among both
often fail the famous marshmallow test. They are given a choice to take some marshmallows
now or more marshmallows later. Rather than wait for more marshmallows later,
poor kids almost always take a small amount now; the opposite of richer kids. They don't trust the
future. They don't think about the future. It’s easy to criticize people that live like this
when you’ve come from a privileged background, but it’s not easy having confidence in the future when
all you’ve ever known is struggle. You take what you can because tomorrow it might not be there.
This is a problem in the South today: a lack of trust in governance. It can lead to a dog-eat-dog
existence and a sense of hopelessness. How can people build for the future when they have
no faith at all in the authorities, when they know that when they get extorted by criminals,
no one will ensure their life isn’t taken if they report it? The South has been in a vicious
cycle for centuries, and getting out of it will take a lot more than picking yourself by your
bootstraps. It’s the same with class problems the world over. People should help themselves,
but to kick things off, there needs to be some amount of top-down assistance.
That’s not happening in many parts of southern Italy, where official malfeasance and Mafia rule
make it really hard to get out of the traps of poverty. So, when as an American you visit
there today, you might meet the friendliest people you’ve ever met, have the best food,
see amazing historical sites and coastal azure waters that are so beautiful you’ll want to cry,
but don’t be surprised if today’s addicts, yesterday’s peasants,
relieve you of your iPhone and dollars, just as a mafia collection boy walks out of an extorted
restaurant with a thick wad of cash in his hands. Inside, a wife and husband embrace and cry and
wonder why no one can stop this from happening. As that anti-mafia guy said, “If you were to go
into some of our smaller villages here, you would find yourself immersed in the Middle Ages.” Some
of these problems are systemic, and they have been for centuries. “Save yourself if you can and get
out,” is what many Southerners say, which is why over the last few years and decades before,
rural towns and villages have been profoundly depopulated, leading to the so-called Southern
“brain-drain.”. Now some of these places are like ghost towns, where the aged mill
around like relics in a living museum, eminently Instagram-able for the tourists that photograph
them but eternally down on their luck, so not exactly thrilled at being gawked at and filmed.
This was brilliantly portrayed in the TV show, White Lotus, season 2.
Fiction, maybe, but pretty close to the truth.
Now you really need to hear more about those old-school mafias in “The Killing Methods in
Sicilian Mafia Families.” Or, have a look at “How the 'Great Mafia War' Killed Thousands.”