Under Constantine, on the eve of the catastrophe, one might believe for a moment that the overflowing barbarism could have been dammed. The cities appeared about to renew themselves with fresh life, since they had acquired under other forms a certain autonomy chiefly through the action of the Bishops, elected, as they were, by the citizens; indeed, the nomination of a Bishop by acclamation was generally the result of an authentic popular movement.
But it was too late. With their suffocating taxation and with foreign military chiefs, the Emperors had taken away every possibility of hope from the Italian cities. They had become indeed Dead Cities, as the great capitals of the East appeared to our fathers of the nineteenth century, those for example of Turkey and of Persia; Istanbul and Teheran were once metropolises not less rich and not less fair than Milan and Naples in the Middle Age. There was a Turkish art and even more surely a Persian art. But the cities were without municipal liberty, without autonomous life and therefore servile. If Byzantium before becoming Istanbul succeeded in conserving a little of its life, it was because under its Basileus the municipal tradition was not utterly destroyed, as was that of the Italian cities by the Caesars. The demi -- comparable to the "contrade" of Siena -- remained in Byzantium the focal points of municipal life as corporations, such as they are described to us in the Libro del Prefetto of the tenth century, with their relative freedom. The demi and the autonomous corporations offer us the keys of the real life of Byzantium, of its unexpected resistance and of its revolutions. But Byzantium remains an unique case, in the East; all the other metropolises, notwithstanding their occasional splendours, have been, if not inert masses, over disciplined, without an atom of the vitality that animated the anarchic Athens of Aristophanes even in its worst moments.
As for the Germanic dominations in Italy, if they were brief, and -- except the Lombard -- left no impression, it is owing to the fact that they ignored the force of the municipal life in Italy; it was a kind of inferiority complex that held the Germans back from the Italian cities, where we shall see, on the one hand the splendour of the Imperial régime, and on the other the marvellous, and for them mysterious, beginnings of the new Italian life. The wretched Germans, ignoring the cities, ingenuously applied their tribal and rural conceptions to a country where the city was everything, and it was because of this that they have left not a trace of themselves save in a type of battlements in the castles and walled cities, and a few words of military jargon.
Do the Italian cities then live? Much more: each is a world. The foreign historians who are moved to pity on account of the persistent hatreds between Italian cities, have not seen that they are concerned with the sort of passions about which they do not marvel when they break out between different nations.
In truth, of all the great peoples of Europe the Italians are the most particularist; but they know how to be so without risk, because time, sorrow and glory have made their unity indestructible.
Under Republican Rome, Italy
Under Republican Rome, Italy in reality was only an immense federation of cities, each free to administer itself in its own way within its own territory; something which reminds us of the British Empire in its most recent form, when the democratic term Commonwealth has been substituted for the haughty term Empire.The beginning of the decadence of the cities appeared in the Roman Empire in the time of Hadrian. Until then the municipia and coloniae had been governed by that wealthy and active citizen class out of which came the Fabii.
The decemviri elected from among the notables (people with very large incomes) carried out the administration from the Tribunal -- the high court of Justice. But with Hadrian the officers of the Imperial administration progressively made themselves masters of all local affairs; and under Diocletian the Totalitarian State (as one might say today) was completely established. The ancient courts, freely elected by the citizens, became corporations bound by numerous restrictions; they quickly lost all vitality; even the defensor civitatis became no more than a functionary to whom men looked -- though it was but a pretence -- for a denunciation of the errors of his superiors.
And soon, whether by encroachment of the military or by reason of the distrust of the citizens, there remained only prefectures entrusted to comites sent from the Capital. Under the Emperors of the East these comites, become even more corrupt, were called duces, whence came the title Doge which was for centuries the name of the head of the aristocratic Republics of Venice and Genoa.Thus, already under Diocletian, the Barbarians had invaded Italy; a work of the military anarchy of the third century rather than of certain starving tribes descending from Germany; out of which German vanity, and the desire of the Italians to attribute their ills to a foreign cause, have later made "the invaders" and their uncontrollable onrush.The old and empty German boast became an official dogma under Nazism, which imposed on the schools of the Reich that to the new generation they should insist on the "fundamental part which the German emigrations had in diffusing the new civilization of the Middle Age, in northern Italy, in France and in England".One might well ask what the few young Germans who seriously studied history thought, if they thought at all, when they discovered:
1. That the Goths did not know how to make their dominion in Italy last more than sixty years.
2. That in Spain they were defeated by those Semites who were the Arabs, and lost everything in a single day.
3. That. the Lombards, although invited into Italy by a part of the population, never succeeded in occupying the coasts, never dared to measure themselves with the young and growing defences of Venice, nor with the ancient walls of Rome, and that their dominion ended in confusion and contempt.
Without the decomposition provoked by the Empire when fallen on the one hand into a military anarchy and on the other into a bureaucratic despotism, the German tribes would never have succeeded in establishing themselves here at all. The Italian cities would have opposed a sufficient resistance if the Empire had not broken their vitality.
The decemviri elected from among the notables (people with very large incomes) carried out the administration from the Tribunal -- the high court of Justice. But with Hadrian the officers of the Imperial administration progressively made themselves masters of all local affairs; and under Diocletian the Totalitarian State (as one might say today) was completely established. The ancient courts, freely elected by the citizens, became corporations bound by numerous restrictions; they quickly lost all vitality; even the defensor civitatis became no more than a functionary to whom men looked -- though it was but a pretence -- for a denunciation of the errors of his superiors.
And soon, whether by encroachment of the military or by reason of the distrust of the citizens, there remained only prefectures entrusted to comites sent from the Capital. Under the Emperors of the East these comites, become even more corrupt, were called duces, whence came the title Doge which was for centuries the name of the head of the aristocratic Republics of Venice and Genoa.Thus, already under Diocletian, the Barbarians had invaded Italy; a work of the military anarchy of the third century rather than of certain starving tribes descending from Germany; out of which German vanity, and the desire of the Italians to attribute their ills to a foreign cause, have later made "the invaders" and their uncontrollable onrush.The old and empty German boast became an official dogma under Nazism, which imposed on the schools of the Reich that to the new generation they should insist on the "fundamental part which the German emigrations had in diffusing the new civilization of the Middle Age, in northern Italy, in France and in England".One might well ask what the few young Germans who seriously studied history thought, if they thought at all, when they discovered:
1. That the Goths did not know how to make their dominion in Italy last more than sixty years.
2. That in Spain they were defeated by those Semites who were the Arabs, and lost everything in a single day.
3. That. the Lombards, although invited into Italy by a part of the population, never succeeded in occupying the coasts, never dared to measure themselves with the young and growing defences of Venice, nor with the ancient walls of Rome, and that their dominion ended in confusion and contempt.
Without the decomposition provoked by the Empire when fallen on the one hand into a military anarchy and on the other into a bureaucratic despotism, the German tribes would never have succeeded in establishing themselves here at all. The Italian cities would have opposed a sufficient resistance if the Empire had not broken their vitality.
The Italy of Dante, the "Italianism" of Stendhal
Goethe himself only saw a fragment of Italy; he put aside the Middle Age with disgust, out of contempt for Germany perhaps, and Pagan -- or unconsciously Protestant -- he exaggerated his antipathy for the contribution of the Church to Italian life from the origin of the Communes onward.
Stendhal without doubt loved all Italy, the Italy of Dante and that of the eighteenth century, the Italy of the churches and the palaces and that of the by-ways and taverns. But it is not only the Italy of Stendhal that is the true and real Italy, it is Stendhal himself who is essentially an Italian character; and it is necessary, in face of the problem of Stendhal, that Italians should see things as they really are, and hold to the reality -- which is in itself fair and noble enough -- and have nothing to do with dithyrambs. The same phenomenon of ingenuous vanity appeared four generations earlier in Japan; the Japanese in the earlier years of the Meji epoch hid and destroyed their lacquers and porcelains in order to show Europeans how "modern" they were. All this is even more ridiculous than it is odious; but if one desires the truth and not mere lyricism, one must not forget that the "Italianism" of Stendhal, intense though it was, was above all due to reaction from, and disgust of, the France of the "enricbissez-vous" ; what we ought to admire most in Stendhal is the fact that he felt that the natural dignity of any man of the commonalty or of a contadino was the purest gem in the nobility of our people.
If Stendhal felt the profundity and the contrasts of our character it was because he lived in Italy as a man and not as a writer. And -- as a Stendhalian might add-he lived in loneliness. Barrès was wrong to make Stendhal a "professor of energy", in the sense of success in life; he might rather have said this of Balzac, who was ever in search of social success. The energy of Stendhal was concerned with the interior passions, not with external action.
Action never seemed worthy to him except when it did not make itself mediocre by looking for a reward. This explains perhaps the small success Stendhal had with women. He envied a man who knew how to love but not one who might have simply numerous adventures. He would have held Valmont of the Liaisons dangereuses in horror.
Byron and Chateaubriand, Lamartine and Ruskin, unlike Stendhal, never penetrated into the Italy of the mind, the heart and the spirit. Their Italy was simply a pretext for their art. Stendhal was saved by the fact that he wrote only for far-away readers; a poor Consul of France at Cività Vecchia, he was fortunate enough not to find a publisher; while from the others, the celebrated writers, many in London and Paris, demanded Odes, Memoires d'Outre Tombe and books on Venice.
The conclusion, only apparently paradoxical, is: the more a people possess a literature rich and powerful, the more its artists have fixed its character on canvas and in frescoes famous' everywhere, so much the more is this people crystallized for foreigners, enfolded in an asphyxiating mist of preconceived ideas whose prisoners they are, even when they believe themselves freed from it.
The terribilità of Dante is probably the origin of a whole series of psychological legends, as a whole side of Stendhal is only explained by his passionate love -- almost the love of a collector -for Italian chronicles of the fifteenth century. I have known certain cultured Germans who maintained that the history of England was stained with blood, with violence and treason as that of no other European nation; when I showed my astonishment, they referred me to the plays of Shakespeare.
In conclusion: for us Italians it is above all the judgment which a foreign writer and visitor pronounces on our peasants and contadini whose roots are in the soil, that is the test with us of his psychological understanding; it is not that we look for nothing but praise of our artisans and peasants : the English novels of Ouida, so much in fashion in the time of our grandparents, romances in which every piping goatherd was a hero and every gondolier a poet, sound to us as false as when in idiotic hatred of Italy some English tourist only records of all his journey that some antiquarian of the Ponte Vecchio or the Via Costantinopoli offered him a false antique and succeeded in sticking him with it.
It would be better that foreigners should resign themselves to admitting that the Italian people, in spite of all their apparent cordiality, are a closed book to them; at least until they have lived for ten years in some Italian country-side. Perhaps they would get nearer the truth if they only knew how to observe, how to look at the vintagers on the Roman hillsides, the shepherds among the Abruzzi mountains, the proprietors of half an hectare of land in Liguria and in the Lunigiana. One cannot do less than admire the perfect equilibrium of their bearing, an equilibrium quite unconscious that is not affected even when they come down into the city or have to wear the ugly cappotto of the conscript. If you look at a regiment of infantry passing down the street of some Italian city, you will receive an impression of neatness and general refinement such as you will get in no other country. He who -- like myself -- has lived beside thesemen in the relative liberty of wartime, will not have forgotten their marvellous ability to take advantage of even the rarest and most casual expedient, and even before orders have been issued, know how to judge and sum up with an astonishing exactness the real value of their leaders. Those Lombard peasants, gigantic and gay, or the Apulians, stumpy and melancholy, with whom I have passed so many days, miserable or fortunate, on the Eastern front from 1915 to 1918, seem to me the living illustrations of a phrase of Palladio's : "that man ought to look to four things, that is, the air, the water, the land and their mastery; for of these three exist by nature, and the fourth by the will and the might of man."
Stendhal without doubt loved all Italy, the Italy of Dante and that of the eighteenth century, the Italy of the churches and the palaces and that of the by-ways and taverns. But it is not only the Italy of Stendhal that is the true and real Italy, it is Stendhal himself who is essentially an Italian character; and it is necessary, in face of the problem of Stendhal, that Italians should see things as they really are, and hold to the reality -- which is in itself fair and noble enough -- and have nothing to do with dithyrambs. The same phenomenon of ingenuous vanity appeared four generations earlier in Japan; the Japanese in the earlier years of the Meji epoch hid and destroyed their lacquers and porcelains in order to show Europeans how "modern" they were. All this is even more ridiculous than it is odious; but if one desires the truth and not mere lyricism, one must not forget that the "Italianism" of Stendhal, intense though it was, was above all due to reaction from, and disgust of, the France of the "enricbissez-vous" ; what we ought to admire most in Stendhal is the fact that he felt that the natural dignity of any man of the commonalty or of a contadino was the purest gem in the nobility of our people.
If Stendhal felt the profundity and the contrasts of our character it was because he lived in Italy as a man and not as a writer. And -- as a Stendhalian might add-he lived in loneliness. Barrès was wrong to make Stendhal a "professor of energy", in the sense of success in life; he might rather have said this of Balzac, who was ever in search of social success. The energy of Stendhal was concerned with the interior passions, not with external action.
Action never seemed worthy to him except when it did not make itself mediocre by looking for a reward. This explains perhaps the small success Stendhal had with women. He envied a man who knew how to love but not one who might have simply numerous adventures. He would have held Valmont of the Liaisons dangereuses in horror.
Byron and Chateaubriand, Lamartine and Ruskin, unlike Stendhal, never penetrated into the Italy of the mind, the heart and the spirit. Their Italy was simply a pretext for their art. Stendhal was saved by the fact that he wrote only for far-away readers; a poor Consul of France at Cività Vecchia, he was fortunate enough not to find a publisher; while from the others, the celebrated writers, many in London and Paris, demanded Odes, Memoires d'Outre Tombe and books on Venice.
The conclusion, only apparently paradoxical, is: the more a people possess a literature rich and powerful, the more its artists have fixed its character on canvas and in frescoes famous' everywhere, so much the more is this people crystallized for foreigners, enfolded in an asphyxiating mist of preconceived ideas whose prisoners they are, even when they believe themselves freed from it.
The terribilità of Dante is probably the origin of a whole series of psychological legends, as a whole side of Stendhal is only explained by his passionate love -- almost the love of a collector -for Italian chronicles of the fifteenth century. I have known certain cultured Germans who maintained that the history of England was stained with blood, with violence and treason as that of no other European nation; when I showed my astonishment, they referred me to the plays of Shakespeare.
In conclusion: for us Italians it is above all the judgment which a foreign writer and visitor pronounces on our peasants and contadini whose roots are in the soil, that is the test with us of his psychological understanding; it is not that we look for nothing but praise of our artisans and peasants : the English novels of Ouida, so much in fashion in the time of our grandparents, romances in which every piping goatherd was a hero and every gondolier a poet, sound to us as false as when in idiotic hatred of Italy some English tourist only records of all his journey that some antiquarian of the Ponte Vecchio or the Via Costantinopoli offered him a false antique and succeeded in sticking him with it.
It would be better that foreigners should resign themselves to admitting that the Italian people, in spite of all their apparent cordiality, are a closed book to them; at least until they have lived for ten years in some Italian country-side. Perhaps they would get nearer the truth if they only knew how to observe, how to look at the vintagers on the Roman hillsides, the shepherds among the Abruzzi mountains, the proprietors of half an hectare of land in Liguria and in the Lunigiana. One cannot do less than admire the perfect equilibrium of their bearing, an equilibrium quite unconscious that is not affected even when they come down into the city or have to wear the ugly cappotto of the conscript. If you look at a regiment of infantry passing down the street of some Italian city, you will receive an impression of neatness and general refinement such as you will get in no other country. He who -- like myself -- has lived beside thesemen in the relative liberty of wartime, will not have forgotten their marvellous ability to take advantage of even the rarest and most casual expedient, and even before orders have been issued, know how to judge and sum up with an astonishing exactness the real value of their leaders. Those Lombard peasants, gigantic and gay, or the Apulians, stumpy and melancholy, with whom I have passed so many days, miserable or fortunate, on the Eastern front from 1915 to 1918, seem to me the living illustrations of a phrase of Palladio's : "that man ought to look to four things, that is, the air, the water, the land and their mastery; for of these three exist by nature, and the fourth by the will and the might of man."
Italy: economic and social transformation
The Southern Italians sometimes complain of the egoism of the industrial North. They ought, above all, to complain of the poets, both their own and others. Seven centuries before Christ, a Greek lyrical poet sang of Calabria as "the happiest and fairest country in the world", poor and tragic Calabria which will always be one of the most sterile countries of Europe. And it was thus for a thousand years from Virgil to Goethe. Literature was the involuntary instrument of the legend of the happy and fortunate South, which hardly troubled to move to gather the fruits of its fertile soil.
What is even more strange is that up to three generations ago the South itself believed this. It would be comic if it were not depressing to re-read today in the addresses that Naples sent to Victor Emanuel II in 1860, the description of the treasures that the ancient Kingdom of the Two Sicilies would, they said, put at the disposition of an Italy free and united. It was the result of the economic segregation in which the South had lived under the Bourbons, the result also of the extreme moderation of taxation, but above all, of the secular literary legend that had glorified various beautiful spots from Sorrento to the Conca d'Oro, but had ignored the fact that behind the orange groves and olive woods, hunger reigned; because the sun is only a deception for husbandmen without water, and in the South, in contrast with the rest of Italy, rain only falls in winter, and there is no river like the Po or even the meagre Arno, but only beds of torrents dried up in summer and deluging the plain in winter with disastrous floods. When one speaks of our South, one must never forget that the drought destroys three crops out of ten, with astronomical precision.
An historical fatality must be added to these natural conditions. The history of the North and of Central Italy is based essentially on the autonomous life of the Commune. The South, on the other hand, from the Abruzzi to Calabria, always accepted a single royal centre, first Benevento, then Naples. And this centre only managed to provide an organization that was feudal, the atmosphere of which remained, even when the system began to disappear, first politically and then legally.
It was the same in Sicily, in Sardinia, in Corsica; and the reason was always the same too : lack of industries and commerce, the only creators of that "popolo minuto" or "grasso", that from Florence to the cities of the Lombard League knew how to organize themselves against the "grandi" and against the feudatories of the castles and strongholds, obliging them to live in the cities where they were quickly tamed.
The resurrection of the South is a problem of public works, of creating artificial lakes, of reafforestation and of roads. These are essential before any agricultural reform can be undertaken with success. The misery is due to the drought. It is necessary to place at the disposal of the landless, land on which life can be supported, even though, for the first ten years, with hardship.
The problem is a difficult one, but it is the only one that really matters in Italy. An Italy, peaceful and serene, depends on a South that is happy and content. If I did not fear to seem paradoxical, I would add that one of my most profound reasons for optimism about the future of Italy is that all the great countries of Europe are full -- but not Italy; we have within our own confines an Empire, in a certain sense colonial, but whose development and security do not depend on intimidating the natives, but rather on its own natives, our co-nationals who are among the most intelligent and wide-awake of the peoples of Europe.
But the transformation cannot be limited to something merely economic or social, it must be psychological. The stupid Mussolini and his nationalists thought the only rich countries were those with coal and mines. If this were true, how is it that sandy Denmark and mountainous Switzerland have become rich? If the Italians of the North and of the South so will it, our South can multiply by a hundredfold the export of our fruits, and our wines such as vermouth and marsala, of our tunny; it can in fact become one of the richest countries of Europe. It will perhaps surprise some in the North to know that even the metallurgical Corporations of Naples and Castellamare di Stabia are in the first class for technical ability and hard work; in the last months of the German occupation it was they who hid the most precious parts of their machinery for love and loyalty to their factories. The present writer was witness of their sorrow and their disillusion when the Allies -- often because they were unable -- did not give new life to industrial Naples. Thanks to the three years I passed in America, I saw at Chicago, at Cleveland, at New Haven and at San Francisco that some of our Southerners who had arrived there without a penny had succeeded in creating serious and solid industries.
What is even more strange is that up to three generations ago the South itself believed this. It would be comic if it were not depressing to re-read today in the addresses that Naples sent to Victor Emanuel II in 1860, the description of the treasures that the ancient Kingdom of the Two Sicilies would, they said, put at the disposition of an Italy free and united. It was the result of the economic segregation in which the South had lived under the Bourbons, the result also of the extreme moderation of taxation, but above all, of the secular literary legend that had glorified various beautiful spots from Sorrento to the Conca d'Oro, but had ignored the fact that behind the orange groves and olive woods, hunger reigned; because the sun is only a deception for husbandmen without water, and in the South, in contrast with the rest of Italy, rain only falls in winter, and there is no river like the Po or even the meagre Arno, but only beds of torrents dried up in summer and deluging the plain in winter with disastrous floods. When one speaks of our South, one must never forget that the drought destroys three crops out of ten, with astronomical precision.
An historical fatality must be added to these natural conditions. The history of the North and of Central Italy is based essentially on the autonomous life of the Commune. The South, on the other hand, from the Abruzzi to Calabria, always accepted a single royal centre, first Benevento, then Naples. And this centre only managed to provide an organization that was feudal, the atmosphere of which remained, even when the system began to disappear, first politically and then legally.
It was the same in Sicily, in Sardinia, in Corsica; and the reason was always the same too : lack of industries and commerce, the only creators of that "popolo minuto" or "grasso", that from Florence to the cities of the Lombard League knew how to organize themselves against the "grandi" and against the feudatories of the castles and strongholds, obliging them to live in the cities where they were quickly tamed.
The resurrection of the South is a problem of public works, of creating artificial lakes, of reafforestation and of roads. These are essential before any agricultural reform can be undertaken with success. The misery is due to the drought. It is necessary to place at the disposal of the landless, land on which life can be supported, even though, for the first ten years, with hardship.
The problem is a difficult one, but it is the only one that really matters in Italy. An Italy, peaceful and serene, depends on a South that is happy and content. If I did not fear to seem paradoxical, I would add that one of my most profound reasons for optimism about the future of Italy is that all the great countries of Europe are full -- but not Italy; we have within our own confines an Empire, in a certain sense colonial, but whose development and security do not depend on intimidating the natives, but rather on its own natives, our co-nationals who are among the most intelligent and wide-awake of the peoples of Europe.
But the transformation cannot be limited to something merely economic or social, it must be psychological. The stupid Mussolini and his nationalists thought the only rich countries were those with coal and mines. If this were true, how is it that sandy Denmark and mountainous Switzerland have become rich? If the Italians of the North and of the South so will it, our South can multiply by a hundredfold the export of our fruits, and our wines such as vermouth and marsala, of our tunny; it can in fact become one of the richest countries of Europe. It will perhaps surprise some in the North to know that even the metallurgical Corporations of Naples and Castellamare di Stabia are in the first class for technical ability and hard work; in the last months of the German occupation it was they who hid the most precious parts of their machinery for love and loyalty to their factories. The present writer was witness of their sorrow and their disillusion when the Allies -- often because they were unable -- did not give new life to industrial Naples. Thanks to the three years I passed in America, I saw at Chicago, at Cleveland, at New Haven and at San Francisco that some of our Southerners who had arrived there without a penny had succeeded in creating serious and solid industries.
The only real difference between North and South in Italy is of the economic order
The Italian of the middle class in the South is to the Italian of the rest of Italy as the latter is to the European of the North: the accentuation of qualities and defects is identical, and there is also analogy in the legends and fictions by which we try to explain this. Amongst us Italians of the North too the old picture of the "inefficient" Southerner sometimes obtains.
One might say that for a visitor who is content with the Museum, Vesuvius, Pompeii and Capri at Naples, the small middle-class citizen, well dressed and badly nourished, who idles in the Chiaia and the Toledo, gives the impression of a man who will never accomplish anything anywhere but will pass his life in idleness: one is surprised to learn that he cares less for music than the Northerners and is content with the facile Neapolitan melodies which one takes -- and how mistakenly -- for a supposed Parthenopean light-hearted happiness. Very few "foreigners" have really intruded into the nights of Piedigrotta -- it is always night at Piedigrotta -- to discover that the gioia is confined to drunken Germans and lusty Slavs, while the Neapolitan masses, mournful, hidden in the darkness, have discarded the smile assumed for the Toledo and the Via Partenope, to bewail the mediocrity of their lives, rendered more cruel by the fact that their sufferings too are mediocre.
The old stock portrait of the "idle Southerners" is no longer in fashion. It is enough to come in contact at Milan or Genoa -why not also in New York or Buenos Aires ? -- with business men and industrials from Apulia or the Basilicata: they are silent, obstinate, very hardworking, without wit : just, in fact, the reverse of the old model.
The struggle of the Lombards with the marshes of the Po valley lasted four or five centuries; but they ended in triumph and they have made of their lands one of the richest regions of Europe. In the South the work is more heroic because one has constantly to begin again; save in two or three privileged cases, it is almost everywhere something the same as on the slopes of Vesuvius where after every eruption new vines have to be planted, in a soil empty and virgin again. The struggle of the Southern Italian with his land is one of the most splendid and rare examples of human resistance, but one hears nothing of it, the newspapers are silent and there is no propaganda about it.
The Normans came to these Neapolitan Provinces; they were one of the most daring and adventurous peoples of their time : they proved it in England, where for centuries they imposed the French tongue as the current speech. But in South Italy they soon disappeared, swallowed up by the Neapolitans. The French and the Spaniards met later the same fate. Whoever saw the Naples of 1943-5 knows that in a certain sense it was the same and the English and Americans, laughing, admitted their defeat.
If we look to the reality of history, we find that nothing at all remains of the theory of an Hellenic South fatally different from a Germanic North. And races -- if in this case one can speak of races -- are like those rivers which disappear in a flash at the bottom of a valley and after a long journey underground suddenly appear again in the form of lakes or new sources.
The only real difference between North and South in Italy is of the economic order; the land south of Rome cannot be compared for richness to that to the north. Just as the civilization of Magna Grecia was probably less brilliant than we are told, so Rome was but a cruel step-mother to the little-known South whence came disagreeable rumours of agrarian revolts, and from which before the Roman conquest fat Carthage used to recruit her mercenaries.
One might say that for a visitor who is content with the Museum, Vesuvius, Pompeii and Capri at Naples, the small middle-class citizen, well dressed and badly nourished, who idles in the Chiaia and the Toledo, gives the impression of a man who will never accomplish anything anywhere but will pass his life in idleness: one is surprised to learn that he cares less for music than the Northerners and is content with the facile Neapolitan melodies which one takes -- and how mistakenly -- for a supposed Parthenopean light-hearted happiness. Very few "foreigners" have really intruded into the nights of Piedigrotta -- it is always night at Piedigrotta -- to discover that the gioia is confined to drunken Germans and lusty Slavs, while the Neapolitan masses, mournful, hidden in the darkness, have discarded the smile assumed for the Toledo and the Via Partenope, to bewail the mediocrity of their lives, rendered more cruel by the fact that their sufferings too are mediocre.
The old stock portrait of the "idle Southerners" is no longer in fashion. It is enough to come in contact at Milan or Genoa -why not also in New York or Buenos Aires ? -- with business men and industrials from Apulia or the Basilicata: they are silent, obstinate, very hardworking, without wit : just, in fact, the reverse of the old model.
The struggle of the Lombards with the marshes of the Po valley lasted four or five centuries; but they ended in triumph and they have made of their lands one of the richest regions of Europe. In the South the work is more heroic because one has constantly to begin again; save in two or three privileged cases, it is almost everywhere something the same as on the slopes of Vesuvius where after every eruption new vines have to be planted, in a soil empty and virgin again. The struggle of the Southern Italian with his land is one of the most splendid and rare examples of human resistance, but one hears nothing of it, the newspapers are silent and there is no propaganda about it.
The Normans came to these Neapolitan Provinces; they were one of the most daring and adventurous peoples of their time : they proved it in England, where for centuries they imposed the French tongue as the current speech. But in South Italy they soon disappeared, swallowed up by the Neapolitans. The French and the Spaniards met later the same fate. Whoever saw the Naples of 1943-5 knows that in a certain sense it was the same and the English and Americans, laughing, admitted their defeat.
If we look to the reality of history, we find that nothing at all remains of the theory of an Hellenic South fatally different from a Germanic North. And races -- if in this case one can speak of races -- are like those rivers which disappear in a flash at the bottom of a valley and after a long journey underground suddenly appear again in the form of lakes or new sources.
The only real difference between North and South in Italy is of the economic order; the land south of Rome cannot be compared for richness to that to the north. Just as the civilization of Magna Grecia was probably less brilliant than we are told, so Rome was but a cruel step-mother to the little-known South whence came disagreeable rumours of agrarian revolts, and from which before the Roman conquest fat Carthage used to recruit her mercenaries.
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