Southern Italy

Greek temple of Hera, Selinunte, Sicily.

Southern Italy under Augustus

Ancient Greek colonies and their dialect groupings in Southern Italy.[20]

  Northwestern Greek

  Achaean

  Doric

  Ionian

In the 8th and 7th centuries BCE, for various reasons, including demographic crisis (famine, overcrowding, etc.), the search for new commercial outlets and ports, and expulsion from their homeland, Greeks began to settle in Southern Italy.[21] Also during this period, Greek colonies were established in places as widely separated as the eastern coast of the Black Sea, Eastern Libya and Massalia (Marseille). They included settlements in Sicily and the southern part of the Italian Peninsula. The first Greek settlers found Italy inhabited by three major populations: Ausones, Oenotrians and Iapyges (these last ones were subdivided into three tribes: Daunians, Peucetians and Messapians). The relationships between the Greek settlers and the native peoples were initially hostile (especially with the Iapygian tribes). The Hellenic influence eventually shaped their culture and way of life.

The Romans used to call the area of Sicily and coastal Southern Italy Magna Graecia ("Great Greece") since it was so densely inhabited by the Greeks; the ancient geographers differed on whether the term included Sicily or merely Apulia and Calabria—Strabo being the most prominent advocate of the wider definitions.

With this colonisation, Greek culture was exported to Italy, in its dialects of the Ancient Greek language, its religious rites and its traditions of the independent polis. An original Hellenic civilization soon developed, later interacting with the native Italic and Latin civilisations. The most important cultural transplant was the Chalcidean/Cumaean variety of the Greek alphabet, which was adopted by the Etruscans; the Old Italic alphabet subsequently evolved into the Latin alphabet, which became the most widely used alphabet in the world.

Many of the new Hellenic cities became very rich and powerful, like Neapolis (Νεάπολις, Naples, "New City"), Syrakousai (Συράκουσαι, Syracuse), Akragas (Ἀκράγας, Agrigento), and Sybaris (Σύβαρις, Sibari). Other cities in Magna Graecia included Tarentum (Τάρας), Metapontum (Μεταπόντιον), Heraclea (Ἡράκλεια), Epizephyrian Locri (Λοκροὶ Ἐπιζεφύριοι), Rhegium (Ῥήγιον), Croton (Κρότων), Thurii (Θούριοι), Elea (Ἐλέα), Nola (Νῶλα), Syessa (Σύεσσα), Bari (Βάριον), and others.

After Pyrrhus of Epirus failed in his attempt to stop the spread of Roman hegemony in 282 BCE, the south fell under Roman domination and remained in such a position throughout the barbarian invasions (the Gladiator War is a notable suspension of imperial control). It was restored to Eastern Roman control in the 530s after the fall of Rome in the West in 476, and some form of imperial authority survived until the 1070s. Total East Roman rule was ended by the Lombards by Zotto's conquest in the final quarter of the 6th century.

The Kingdom of Sicily at its greatest extent, during the 12th century.

Following the Gothic War (535–554), and until the arrival of the Normans, much of Southern Italy's destiny was linked to the fortunes of the Eastern Empire, even though Byzantine domination was challenged in the 9th century by the Lombards, who annexed the area of Cosenza to their Duchy of Benevento. Consequently, the Lombard and the Byzantine areas became influenced by Eastern monasticism, and much of Southern Italy experienced a slow process of orientalisation in religious life (rites, cults and liturgy), which accompanied a spread of Eastern churches and monasteries that preserved and transmitted the Greek and Hellenistic tradition (the Cattolica monastery in Stilo is the most representative of these Byzantine monuments). From then to the Norman conquest of the 11th century, the south of the peninsula was constantly plunged into wars between the Byzantines, Lombardy, and the Aghlabid Dynasty. The latter established two Emirates in southern Italy: the Emirate of Sicily and, for 25 years, the Emirate of Bari. Amalfi, an independent republic from the 7th century until 1075, and to a lesser extent Gaeta, Molfetta and Trani, rivalled other Italian maritime republics in their domestic prosperity and maritime importance.

Southern Italy in 1112.

From 999 to 1139, the Normans occupied all the Lombard and Byzantine possessions in Southern Italy, ending a millennium of imperial Roman rule in Italy, and eventually expelled the Muslims from Sicily. The Norman Kingdom of Sicily under Roger II was characterised by its competent governance, multi-ethnic nature and religious tolerance. Normans, Jews, Muslim Arabs, Byzantine Greeks, Lombards and "native" Sicilians lived in relative harmony.[22] However, the Norman domination lasted only several decades before it formally ended in 1198 with the reign of Constance of Sicily, and was replaced by that of the Swabian Hohenstaufen dynasty, thanks to Constance's marriage to Henry VI, member of this family.

Castel del Monte, built by Frederick II between 1240 and 1250 in Andria, Apulia.

In Sicily, King Frederick II endorsed a deep reform of the laws culminating with the promulgation of the Constitutions of Melfi (1231, also known as Liber Augustalis), a collection of laws for his realm that was remarkable for its time and was a source of inspiration for a long time after.[23] It made the Kingdom of Sicily a centralised state and established the primacy of written law. With relatively small modifications, the Liber Augustalis remained the basis of Sicilian law until 1819. His royal court in Palermo, from around 1220 to his death, saw the first use of a literary form of an Italo-Romance language, Sicilian, that had a significant influence on what was to become the modern Italian language. During this period, he also built the Castel del Monte, and in 1224, he founded the University of Naples, now called, after him, Università Federico II.[24]

In 1266, conflict between the Hohenstaufen house and the Papacy led to Sicily's conquest by Charles I, Duke of Anjou. Opposition to French officialdom and taxation combined with incitement of rebellion by agents from the Byzantine Empire and the Crown of Aragon led to the Sicilian Vespers insurrection and successful invasion by king Peter III of Aragon in 1282. The resulting War of the Sicilian Vespers lasted until the Peace of Caltabellotta in 1302, dividing the old Kingdom of Sicily in two. The island of Sicily called the "Kingdom of Sicily beyond the Lighthouse" or the Kingdom of Trinacria, went to Frederick III of the House of Barcelona, who had been ruling it. The peninsular territories, contemporaneously called Kingdom of Sicily, but called Kingdom of Naples by modern scholarship, went to Charles II of the House of Anjou, who had likewise been ruling it. Thus, the peace was formal recognition of an uneasy status quo.[25] Despite the king of Spain being able to seize both the two crowns starting from the 16th century, the administrations of the two halves of the Kingdom of Sicily remained separated until 1816 when they were reunited in the Kingdom of Two Sicilies.

The Kingdom of Sicily in 1154.

In 1442, however, Alfonso V conquered the Kingdom of Naples and unified Sicily and Naples once again as dependencies of the Crown of Aragon. At his death in 1458, the kingdom was again split Ferrante, Alfonso's illegitimate son, inherited Naples. When Ferrante died in 1494, Charles VIII of France invaded Italy, using the Angevin claim to the throne of Naples, which his father had inherited on the death of King René's nephew in 1481, as a pretext, thus beginning the Italian Wars. Charles VIII expelled Alfonso II of Naples from Naples in 1495. However, he was soon forced to withdraw due to the support of Ferdinand II of Aragon to his cousin, Alfonso II's son Ferrantino. Ferrantino was restored to the throne but died in 1496 and was succeeded by his uncle, Frederick IV. The French, however, did not give up their claim and, in 1501, agreed to a partition of the kingdom with Ferdinand of Aragon, who abandoned his cousin, King Frederick. The deal soon fell through, however, and the Crown of Aragon and France resumed their war over the kingdom, ultimately resulting in an Aragonese victory leaving Ferdinand in control of the kingdom by 1504.

The kingdom remained disputed between France and Spain for the next several decades. The French efforts to gain control of it became feebler as the decades went on, and Spanish control was never genuinely endangered. The French finally abandoned their claims to the kingdom by the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559. With the Treaty of London (1557), the new client state of the so-called Presidi ("state of the garrisons") was established and governed directly by Spain, as part of the Kingdom of Naples.

Castel Nuovo, Naples: initiated by the Anjou, it was heavily altered as it served as Spanish headquarters until the 18th century.

The administration of the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily, as well as the Duchy of Milan, was run by the Council of Italy. The island of Sardinia, which had fully come to be under Iberian sovereignty in 1409 upon the fall of the last indigenous state, was an integral part of the Council of Aragon instead and remained as such until the first years of the XVIII° century, when Sardinia was ceded to Austria and eventually handed over to the Alpine-based House of Savoy in 1720.

After the War of the Spanish Succession in the early 18th century, possession of the kingdom again changed hands. Under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, Naples was given to Charles VI, the Holy Roman Emperor. He also gained control of Sicily in 1720, but Austrian rule did not last long. Both Naples and Sicily were conquered by a Spanish army during the War of the Polish Succession in 1734, and Charles, Duke of Parma, a younger son of King Philip V of Spain was installed as King of Naples and Sicily from 1735. When Charles inherited the Spanish throne from his older half-brother in 1759, he left Naples and Sicily to his younger son, Ferdinand IV. Despite the two kingdoms being in a personal union under the House of Bourbon from 1735 onwards, they remained constitutionally separated.

A 19th century map of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

Being a member of the House of Bourbon, King Ferdinand IV was a natural opponent of the French Revolution and Napoleon. In January 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte, in the name of the French Republic, captured Naples and proclaimed the Parthenopaean Republic, a French client state, as successor to the kingdom. King Ferdinand fled from Naples to Sicily until June of that year. In 1806, Bonaparte, by then French Emperor, again dethroned King Ferdinand and appointed his brother, Joseph Bonaparte, as King of Naples. In the Edict of Bayonne of 1808, Napoleon removed Joseph to Spain and appointed his brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, as King of the Two Sicilies, though this meant control only of the mainland portion of the kingdom.[26][27] Throughout this Napoleonic interruption, King Ferdinand remained in Sicily, with Palermo as his capital.

After Napoleon's defeat, King Ferdinand IV was restored by the Congress of Vienna of 1815 as Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies. He established a concordat with the Papal States, which previously had a claim to the land.[28] There were several rebellions on the island of Sicily against the King Ferdinand II, but the end of the kingdom was only brought about by the Expedition of the Thousand in 1860, led by Garibaldi, an icon of the Italian unification, with the support of the House of Savoy and their Kingdom of Sardinia with its economic, political and cultural powerhouse in Northern Italy. The expedition resulted in a striking series of defeats for the Sicilian armies against the growing troops of Garibaldi. After the capture of Palermo and Sicily, he disembarked in Calabria and moved towards Naples, while in the meantime the Piedmontese also invaded the Kingdom from the Marche. The last battles fought were that of the Volturnus in 1860 and the siege of Gaeta, where King Francis II had sought shelter, hoping for French help, which never came. The last towns to resist Garibaldi's expedition were Messina (which capitulated on 13 March 1861) and Civitella del Tronto (which capitulated on 20 March 1861). The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was dissolved and annexed to the new Kingdom of Italy, founded in the same year.

At the time of Italian unification, the gap between the former Northern states of Italy and the Southern two Sicilies was significant: Northern Italy had about 75,500 kilometers of roads and 2,316 kilometers of railroads, combined with a wide range of canals connected to rivers for freight transportation; iron and steel production was 17,000 tons per year. By contrast, in the former Bourbon Southern state, there were 14,700 kilometers of roads, 184 kilometers of railroads (only around Naples), no canals connected to rivers and iron and steel production was 1,500 tons per year.

Map of the Bourbon-led Kingdom of the Two Sicilies from 1853, seven years before the annexation by the House of Savoy.

In 1860, illiteracy rates on the Italian peninsula averaged 75%, with the lowest level of 54% in the northwestern Kingdom of Sardinia (also known as "Piedmont"), and the highest in the south, where illiteracy in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies reached 87%.[29]

In 1860 the southern merchant navy amounted to 260,000 tons, whereas the northern merchant navy came to 347,000 tons, apart from the Venetian navy annexed in 1866 and assessed at 46,000 tons. In 1860 the whole Italian merchant navy was the fourth largest in Europe at about 607,000 tons.[30] The Southern merchant navy was made up of sailing vessels mainly for fishing and coastal shipping in the Mediterranean Sea and it had very few steamships, even if one of the first steamers was built and fitted out in Naples in 1818. Both merchant and military navy were insufficient compared to the great coastal extent of Southern Italy defined by the Italian historian Raffaele De Cesare: "… a great pier towards the South".[31]

In the article "This is Not Italy! Ruling and Representing the South", it is clear how the Northern elites considered the South. The Piedmontese North felt the need to invade the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and establish a new form of governance based on the Northern system, since they viewed the South as under-developed and lacking in social capital. These views of the South can largely be attributed to the letters of correspondents in southern Italy who sent biased letters to leaders of the North, specifically Camillo Benso, urging the invasion and reformation of the South. Although these views of the South were condescending, they also came with a genuine belief that in order to create a unified Italy, help from the North was necessary. Viewing southern Italy as barbaric served as a sort of justification to allow the "civilized, Piedmontese north" (167) to intervene. Another view however was marked by disdain for Southern Italy. According to the article, "such manifestations of the south's difference threaten the glowing and gloating sense of northern superiority" (167). These viewpoints clearly indicate the divide between Northern and Southern Italy in the 1860s.[32]

In an attempt to explain the striking difference between the annexed territory of the former Two Sicilies and the economic and political powerhouse centred in the North, racist theories were postulated, suggesting that such a divide had its roots in the coexistence of two mostly incompatible races.[33]

Denis Mack Smith, British historian, describes the radical difference between Northern and the newly annexed Southern Italy in 1860, for these two halves were on quite different levels of civilization, pointing out that the Bourbon in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies were staunch supporters of a feudal system and that they had feared the traffic of ideas and had tried to keep their subjects insulated from the agricultural and industrial revolutions of northern Europe.[34]

The above-mentioned study by Denis Mack Smith is confirmed by the Italian historian and left wing politician Antonio Gramsci in his book "The Southern Question", by which the author emphasizes the "absolutely antithetical conditions" of Northern and Southern Italy at the time of Italian unification in 1861, when South and North were united again after more than one thousand years.

Gramsci remarks that, in the North of Italy, the historical period of the Comunes had given a special boost to history and in Northern Italy existed an economic organization similar to that of the other states of Europe, propitious to further development of capitalism and industry, whereas in Southern Italy history had been different and the fatherly Bourbon administrations produced nothing of value; the bourgeois class did not exist, agriculture was primitive and insufficient to satisfy the local market, there were no roads, no ports, the few waterways that the region had were not exploited, due to its special geographical features.[35]

A band of Southern Italian briganti ("brigands") from Basilicata, ca. 1860

The living conditions of the people of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies are also illustrated by Raffaele De Cesare,[36] who reports that the king of Naples Ferdinand II had no interest in doing useful works to improve the neglected condition of public hygiene, particularly in the provinces where scarcity of sewer systems and often water shortages were known issues. [37]

The problem of brigandage is explained in the book Heroes and Brigands by the southern Italian historian and politician Francesco Saverio Nitti, outlining that brigandage was endemic in Southern Italy, since the Bourbons themselves relied on it as their military agent.[38] Unlike Southern Italy, there was little brigandage in the other annexed states of northern and central Italy, like the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia, the Duchy of Parma, the Duchy of Modena, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and the Papal States.

According to the southern Italian historian Giustino Fortunato,[39] and Italian institutional sources[40] the problems of Southern Italy existed way before Italian unification, and Giustino Fortunato emphasizes that the Bourbons were not the only ones responsible for the problems of the South, which had ancient and deep origins also in previous centuries of poverty and isolation, caused by foreign domination and foreign governments.

In literature, the period of 1860 was depicted by Sicilian writer Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa in his famous novel Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), set in Sicily at the time of Italian unification. In a famous final scene, Prince Salina, when invited to join the senate of unified Italy, tells a high-ranking Piedmontese officer "…the Sicilian will never want to change, because the Sicilian feels perfect…" With these and other words the author underscores the problem Sicilians had, having to change their old lifestyle while remaining on their island. The novel was adapted by Luchino Visconti for his homonymous 1963 film The Leopard.

The southern economy greatly suffered after the Italian unification and the process of industrialisation was interrupted. Poverty and organised crime were long-standing issues in Southern Italy as well and it got worse after unification. Cavour stated the basic problem was poor government, and believed the solution lay in the strict application of the Piedmontese legal system. The main result was an upsurge in brigandage.[41] Because of this, the South experienced great economic difficulties resulting in massive emigration leading to a worldwide Italian diaspora, especially to North America, South America, Australia, and other parts of Europe. Many natives also relocated to the industrial cities in northern Italy, such as Genoa, Milan and Turin. A relative process of industrialisation has developed in some areas of the "Mezzogiorno" after World War II. In the 1946 referendum after the war, the region voted to keep the monarchy, with its greatest support coming in Campania. Politically, it was at odds with northern Italy, which won the referendum to establish a republic.[42] Today, the South remains less economically developed than the northern and central regions, which enjoyed an "economic miracle" in the 1950s and 1960s and became highly industrialized.