Why Is North Italy So Different From South?
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Few countries evoke a more vivid mental image than Italy: pizza, pasta, stylish supercars, luxury fashion brands, passionate locals and iconic architecture are all emblematic of one of the world’s most famous countries.
To Italians themselves, however, the situation is much murkier. In fact, many Italians will tell you that “Italy” really refers to two very different countries that happen to share a peninsula: the North and the South. It might surprise outsiders to know that Northern independence has been a prominent force in Italian politics for decades, and that many of Italy’s most recognizable stereotypes only apply in one half of the country; for example, all Italian car companies (Ferrari, Lamborghini, Maserati, Alfa Romeo, Pagani, Fiat etc) are based in the North, while mafia activity is a largely Southern affair.
Understanding this divide is crucial to understanding modern Italian society, so let’s dive into a little history of when the divide emerged, and how it manifests in different aspects of Italian society today, from food to democracy.
How it all started
Go far enough back in history, and Southern Italy is the rich half: about 2800 years ago, its central location in the Mediterranean and fertile agriculture attracted large numbers of Greek settlers. Besides establishing many cities and ports, the Greeks left a cultural legacy that remains to this day; a handful of towns in Southern Italy still speak a dialect of Greek. (It’s not uncommon to hear Northern Italians describe Southern Italians as “more Greek than Italian”; in turn, Southerners often refer to Northerners as being “basically Austrian”). Meanwhile, the North of Italy was inhabited in ancient times by a number of tribes, such as the Etruscans, the Ligures and the Veneti, as well as Celts invading from the area of modern France.
This era of (fairly violent) coexistence in the North, and of Greek control in the South, came to an end in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC as the Roman Republic overwhelmed the entire peninsula. Under Roman rule, the South would become known for vast slave plantations (latifundia) owned by aristocrats, and slave insurrections were common; the North, on the other hand, developed a more military character over time, providing vast reserves of manpower to repel raids and supply Rome’s wars of expansion at the northern borders, whereas the South was protected by the Mediterranean, with most of Rome’s more formidable overseas opponents (such as Carthage and various Greek cities) having been defeated much earlier.
In the centuries following the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD, the Italian peninsula experienced a series of invaders, including the Lombards, the Franks, the Eastern Roman Empire, Islamic Caliphates and the Normans. The South was particularly exposed to these invasions due to its location in the middle of the extremely fractured Mediterranean, but all of Italy suffered in this period.
Things changed in the High Middle Ages. The South continued to be battered by invasions until the 13th century, which would begin a period of relatively stable but autocratic control under Spanish kings. The North at this time was supposedly under the control of the German-based Holy Roman Empire, but the empire’s weakness and instability would allow for the emergence and independence of several small but extremely wealthy and powerful Italian merchant republics, such as those in Venice, Pisa and Genoa, as well as important inland locations connected to the coast by canals, such as Milan and Bologna (the site of the world’s oldest still-operating university).
The coastal republics were some of the richest places in the world at this time, and controlled colonies across the Mediterranean (such as Cyprus, Malta, Sardinia, Corsica, the Peloponnese peninsula of Greece and the coast of Croatia). They fought against much larger powers like the Ottoman empire, exerting influence through diplomacy, assassination, marriage, bribery and outright military force, enabled by proto-industrial technology. The Arsenal of Venice, for example, was capable of producing a new warship every day, allowing the diminutive city-state to deploy vast armadas to protect its commercial interests.
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