AAAAAAHHH!!!

The saying, “Europe ends at Naples. Calabria, Sicily, and all the rest belong to Africa,” can still be heard throughout Europe. Beliefs about the inherent racial inferiority of southern Italians infused Italian political debates following national unification in 1861. This preoccupation—also referred to as la questione meridionale (the southern question)—resulted in part from the history of subjugation of southern Italy on the part of northern elites and from resistance to that oppression. As northern elites attempted to “make Italians” out of the new nation’s subjects, they not only waged war on the South but sought “to separate out those who were incapable of such a conversion.” To many of Italy’s state builders, the riotous peasantry’s resistance to the nation (its taxes, conscription, and violent occupation) was proof of their savagery and backwardness. As such, southern Italy became more than a geographic space with flexible boundaries—it can include or exclude Rome and Sardinia, for example. By the end of the nineteenth century it had become a metaphor for anarchy, rebellion, poverty, and the lack of civilization—all that was anathema to the emergent nation. As the northern bourgeoisie crafted a national identity from its history of medieval city-states, the Renaissance, and the “glory” of the Roman Empire, it sought to discipline the insurrectionary and “barbarous” South. Many of the government officials who traveled throughout the South following national unification commented on southern Italians’ supposed racial inferiority. The senator Eugenio Faina, for example, noted that Sicily was unlike other regions in that it was “inhabited by rough people with primitive instincts.” As a result, the Italian state confronted southern resistance movements with martial law, violence, and by stigmatizing peasants “as criminal members of a racially inferior people who preferred the superstitions of religion to civiltà italiana.” As one government official wrote in 1861, “What barbarism! Some Italy! This is Africa: the Bedouin are the flower of civil virtue compared to these peasants.” Civilization, northern officials believed, would have to be imposed on southern peasants at gunpoint— “otherwise the tumour represented by the Southerners’ behavior would grow and infect the rest of the nation.” Government officials found support for these views from the new school of positivist anthropologists, including Cesare Lombroso (1841–1936), Guglielmo Ferrero (1871–1942), Alfredo Niceforo (1876–1960), Giuseppe Sergi (1841–1936), and Enrico Ferri (1856–1929). Together these men founded the field of criminology, providing “scientific proof” to support the ruling elite’s beliefs in biological evolution and racial determinism. In particular, they advanced an argument that supported what many northern political leaders suspected: the darker “Mediterranean” southerners were not only racially distinct from the lighter “Aryan” northerners; they possessed “inferior African blood” and demonstrated “a moral and social structure reminiscent of primitive and even quasibarbarian times, a civilization quite inferior.” Southern Italy’s history of Greek, Roman, Norman, African, and Arab invasions, and its location as a crossroads between Africa, Europe, and the East, they argued, had given shape to “a region that is a priori condemned to perpetual inferiority.”

This thing can knead bread for you. I got my dad an attachment for Father’s Day that can grind grains into flour after our blender bread fiasco. You can get an attachment that grinds meat, makes sausage, cuts pasta, grates cheese, peels vegetables.

him: you split up all the song of ice and fire books

it has occurred me during this process that apparently not everyone thinks about books by what color they are? like, literally when i’m looking for a book, i picture it in my mind. i have a very…tactile experience with the books i read and idk! i thought everyone did that lol.

This actually is interesting in terms of information-seeking behavior, which is a thing librarians think about a lot and often actually study (some library jobs require you to publish, and academic librarians, for instance, will often use the students at the college they work at to study how they search for information in order to figure out how to best provide them services).

“It’s digestible” is pertinent!! Okay, for those of you who haven’t researched Crisco for writing fic about gay sex in the mid-late 60s:

but @rhea314 you didnt include a picture of the crisco disco! AND MY GOD THE DJ BOOTH WAS A GIANT CRISCO CAN!

And in case you were still wondering, @mudwerks.. Tuna Croquettes

This post is the opposite of net zero information. Not only did I learn several new facts about gay history but also we rounded our way back to the original question of the tag line and the mini obelisks.

There is a scene in “secret diary of a call girl” that I think about a lot, I think season 2, but maybe 3 (its been over 10 years). Belle/ Hannah (Billie Piper) has a client who is also a plastic surgeon who she later visits as a potential client to get her boobs done (lifted? Perkier?) because she is getting older and her body is changing.