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.”
