Italian and Italian American Studies
Stanislao G. Pugliese
Hofstra University
Series Editor
This publishing initiative seeks to bring the latest scholarship in Italian and Italian American
history, literature, cinema, and cultural studies to a large audience of specialists, general
readers, and students. I&IAS will feature works on modern Italy (Renaissance to the present)
and Italian American culture and society by established scholars as well as new voices in the
academy. This endeavor will help to shape the evolving fields of Italian and Italian American
Studies by re-emphasizing the connection between the two. The following editorial board of
esteemed senior scholars are advisors to the series editor.
REBECCA WEST
University of Chicago
JOHN A. DAVIS
University of Connecticut
FRED GARDAPHÉ
Stony Brook University
PHILIP V. CANNISTRARO
Queens College and the Graduate School, CUNY
JOSEPHINE GATTUSO HENDIN
New York University
VICTORIA DeGRAZIA
Columbia University
Queer Italia: Same-Sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film
edited by Gary P. Cestaro
July 2004
Frank Sinatra: History, Identity, and Italian American Culture
edited by Stanislao G. Pugliese
October 2004
The Legacy of Primo Levi
edited by Stanislao G. Pugliese
December 2004
Italian Colonialism
edited by Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller
July 2005
Mussolini's Rome: Rebuilding the Eternal City
Borden W. Painter Jr.
July 2005
Representing Sacco and Vanzetti
edited by Jerome A. Delamater and Mary Ann Trasciatti
September 2005
Carlo Tresca: Portrait of a Rebel
by Nunzio Pernicone
October 2005
Italy in the Age of Pinocchio: Children and Danger in the Liberal Era
Carl Ipsen
April 2006
The Empire of Stereotypes: Germaine de Staël and the Idea of Italy
Robert Casillo
May 2006
Race and the Nation in Liberal Italy, 1861–1911: Meridionalism, Empire, and Diaspora
Aliza S. Wong
October 2006
Women in Italy, 1946–1960: An Interdisciplinary Study
edited by Penelope Morris
October 2006
A New Guide to Italian Cinema
Carlo Celli and Marga Cottino-Jones
November 2006
Debating Divorce in Italy: Marriage and the Making of Modern Italians, 1860–1974
Mark Seymour
December 2006
Race and the Nation in Liberal
Italy, 1861–1911
Meridionalism, Empire,
and Diaspora
Aliza S.Wong
RACE AND THE NATION IN LIBERAL ITALY, 1861–1911
© Aliza S. Wong, 2006.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published in 2006 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™
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Companies and representatives throughout the world.
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave
Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.
Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom
and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European
Union and other countries.
ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–7421–1
ISBN-10: 1–4039–7421–7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wong, Aliza S.
Race and the nation in liberal Italy, 1861–1911 : meridionalism,
empire, and diaspora / Aliza S. Wong
p. cm.––(Italian and Italian American studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–7421–1
ISBN-10: 1–4039–7421–7
1. National characteristics, Italian. 2. Italy––History––1870–1914.
3. Prejudices––Italy––History. 4. Racism––Italy––History. 5. Italy,
Northern––Ethnic relations––History. 6. Italy, Southern––Ethnic
relations––History. 7. Italy––Emigration and immigration––History.
I. Title. II. Italian and Italian American studies (Palgrave Macmillan (Firm))
DG442.W658 2006
305.80094509034––dc22
2006043173
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: October 2006
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.
For my father, Wai S. Wong, and my mother, Ming Y. Wong.
For Stefano and for Luca.
And in loving memory of Doriana Ramirez, my friend. 1962–2005
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Contents
Acknowledgments
ix
Introduction Complexities of Language: Lexicons
of Race, Nation, and Identity
1
1. The Dawning of the Mezzogiorno: The South in
the Construction of Italy
11
2. Making the South “Italian”: Writing the Post-Risorgimento
Southern Question
25
3. Science and the Codification of Race: Physiognomy and
the Politics of Southern Identity
47
4. Civilizing the Southerner, Taming the African:
Imperial Endeavor and Discourses of Race
79
5. Politics and Permeability: Italian Emigration and
Understandings of Difference
113
Conclusion Land of Emigration, Land
of Immigration: Toward a New Diasporic Italy
149
Notes
155
Bibliography
199
Index
215
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Acknowledgments
any people have contributed to the successful completion of this
book—more people, on both sides of the ocean, have offered their
support, their encouragement, and their thoughtful consideration than I
can possibly enumerate. I am forever indebted to Steven Epstein and
Evelyn Hu-DeHart for their unwavering support and confidence. Alan
Reinerman, Charles Killinger, and Dora Dumont helped me to consider
carefully the questions of identity formation in nineteenth-century Italy.
Alex Grab has been a source of tremendous support and encouragement
in Milan and in the United States. Alexander De Grand with his generosity, humility, and intellect inspires me to redefine what it means to be a
historian. I have imposed too much on his time and he has allowed me to
profit too much from his extensive knowledge. Carol Helstosky has been
incredibly giving—her mentoring and friendship have been invaluable.
My friends and colleagues at Texas Tech University have been very
supportive and have offered some very insightful suggestions on reconceptualizing my work. David Troyansky, John Howe, Ron Rainger, Catherine
Miller, Ed Steinhart, Mark Stoll, Patricia Pelley, Jeffrey Mosher, Allan
Kuethe, Bruce Daniels, Tita Chico, and Megan Nelson have helped me to
hone my skills as a scholar and teacher. I am especially grateful for the
generous support of Vice Provost Jim Brink, who reaffirms his commitment to research time and again.
To the Fulbright Commission without whose support this work would
never have been completed, I am thankful for the opportunity to work in
Italy and even more appreciative of the warm welcome and sincere efforts
of the staff in Rome.
Without the generous support of Angelo Moioli and Giuseppe De Luca
at the University of Milan, my work in the archives and libraries would
have been infinitely more complicated. I am indebted to Federico Ghezzi,
Vittorio Beonio-Brocchieri, Marco Mozzati, and Laura Balbo for their
support in the research of this project. I am grateful to Maria Grazia and
Carlo Capra, Elena Brambilla, Lucia Sebastiani, Maria Canella, Stefano
Levati, and Giovanni Liva for allowing me to experience Italian collegiality
firsthand.
To Giuseppe and Anna D’Amico, who sustained and supported me during my sojourns in Italy, I am forever grateful. To Paul Deslandes, who
M
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
x
keeps me human, scholar, colleague, friend, I am forever indebted. To
Wade and Alina Wong, who remind me of the rootedness of diaspora, I am
forever beholden.
My parents, who came from distant lands and experienced being the
Other, have always encouraged me, supported me, believed in me. To my
mother, who used to stay up late with me until I finished my homework, I
offer my sincerest admiration. To my father, who reads all my work,
dictionary by his side, I offer my sincerest esteem.
To Luca, my little boy, who asks me to read to him from this
manuscript, what he fondly calls “his book,” I am in awe. And to Stefano,
my partner, my friend, I am unworthy.
Introduction
Complexities of Language:
Lexicons of Race, Nation,
and Identity
aola Russomando, a middle-school teacher in Milan integrally involved
in an experimental program designed to integrate Chinese Italian
children into the Italian school system while encouraging them to maintain
their own cultural identities, explained her method of demonstrating
different temperatures to her students. She placed a glass each of cold,
tepid, and hot water on a table. One student dipped her hand into the cold
water and then immediately into the tepid. She found the tepid water hot.
Another student dipped his hand into the hot water and then immediately
into the tepid. He found the tepid water cold. The same glass of water, yet
two different perceptions of temperature. “How can this be?” she asked
the class, and they discussed the effect of experience and environment on
perspective. “This is a rather simplistic way of explaining a very complex
issue,” she explained, “yet it illustrates perfectly that it is not so much
difference which distinguishes us from one another, but rather distance,
whether near or far, from the subject.”1 These distances, between race,
identity, nation, and nationalism, are the primary focus of this project.
Understandings of race and citizenship have been shaped and transformed
in the last twenty-five years by the influx of immigrants of color and the
increased contact and exchange with people of other cultures.
Although the Kingdom of Italy was founded in 1861, it is questionable
whether the construction of an Italian national collective has yet been fully
accomplished and stabilized. The current political situation continues to
be tenuous as the coalition between the Lega Nord, Alleanza Nazionale,
and Forza Italia becomes strained over questions of immigration, economic
approaches, and governmental systems that could allow northern Italy
further independence from the wayward south. Tensions between rival
P
2
INTRODUCTION
regions and cities, between the north and the south still exist and manifest
themselves within popular culture. A few years ago, at a soccer game at San
Siro stadium in Milan, a banner with the words “Benvenuti in Europa”
greeted the opposing team from Naples. Upon their return to the south,
the Neapolitan players responded wryly, “Turin, Milan, Verona, that is Italy.
So we are content to be in Africa.”2 At the 2000 San Remo Music Festival,
news channels described the winner of the young artist award as having an
“Italian” father and a “Sicilian” mother. The fact that Sicilian still did not
mean Italian escaped the notice of the general public.
Even today, the perceived cultural divide between northern and southern Italy, the stereotypes and myths, remains present in political and social
debates, in popular representations of the mafia and the Mezzogiorno, in
jokes, racial epithets, and cultural slurs. It continues to have resonance
even in the presence of extracomunitari, literally those who are “outside the
community,” but a term understood to mean, more often than not, people
of color, immigrants, settlers, and members of diaspora. As a taxi driver in
Milan explained to me, he could get used to seeing immigrants of color on
the streets of the city (they would never be Italian), but he could never
accept the Sicilian, the “terrone,”3 living next door.
Race and the Nation in Liberal Italy, 1861–1911: Meridionalism, Empire,
and Diaspora examines the origins of the divisions between northern and
southern Italy. It explores the ways in which the language used to describe
different conceptions of race contributed to Italian nationalist discourses
during the liberal period. Nineteenth-century Italian understandings of
race and identity were shaped and transformed by different nationalist
movements in Italy. The historical framework of the fashioning of this
southern discourse parallels the tenuous development of Italian nationalism,
from its cultural linguistic origins to its ethnic and biological extremes,
and the imagining of race. The development of nationalism, from its conception as a common cultural affinity in the mid-nineteenth century to the
beginnings of its more extreme form as a racial and biological distinction
as expressed in the science of physiognomy, helped to define and solidify
Italian perceptions of self and national identity, race, and otherness.
Conceptions of race continued to change and develop as Italy became
increasingly aware of its place in Europe, its role as a nation and as an
imperial power, and the struggles of its citizenry to define Italian national
identity.
While many scholars have studied Italian nationalism and imperialism,
the ethnic and racial tensions between northern and southern Italy, and the
ensuing science of physiognomy that biologically differentiated northerners
from southerners, this study attempts to connect these historical movements and demonstrate the ways in which they were informed by larger
INTRODUCTION
3
notions of race and “otherness.” Indeed, these very different languages and
vocabularies developed, changed, and were manipulated into expressing
and legitimating other national discourses. Italy and its southern question
debate effectively illustrate how a discourse, familiar, popular, and pervasive,
engages with other political issues, transforming their dissemination and
description and ultimately facilitating their development and dissolution.
Much of the work on the construction of the southern question has
veered either toward an explanation that renders racial prejudice the motivating factor in its conception, or one that sees ethnocentrism, and racism
therein as a subset that can encompass different discourses of difference, as
the primary motive behind the bitter duality of meridionalism. John Dickie
argues that works that see racism as “a single and unchanging thesis according to which race is the causa causarum in human affairs”4 are problematic
in that they do not fully permit a larger political, economic, cultural, or even
regional perspective on the bipolarity within a nation. Ethnocentrism, as the
context for analysis of meridionalism, instead allows for the analysis of myriad expressions of difference and divergence. As a subset of ethnocentrism
then the study of racism, “redefined as a range of discourses (racisms) that
produce many concepts of race,”5 involves a more complicated reading of
stereotypes, myths, and prejudices. The south, as Dickie effectively describes,
is a concept, an imagined space with an imagined community.6 How that
space is imagined and who has the privilege of imagining it are central in
examining the creation of the south. As Nelson Moe quite effectively asks
in the title of his introduction, “How did southern Italy become the
south?”7 Understanding ethnocentrism as a primary motivating factor in
the creation of the south then involves the close reading of myriad social
and cultural institutions. Certainly, attributing the southern question
merely to a display of racial prejudice can be one-dimensional and ethnocentrism allows for the broadening of the discussion to more effectively
debate the representation of difference; however, more recent studies that
define ethnocentrism as “essentialized difference between geographical
entities or between socially and culturally defined groups”8 can also be
limited by their more modern models of difference and alterity. Understanding race as a useful subset of the larger category of ethnocentrist
analysis is a powerful and effective discursive tool. However, comparisons
of racial difference, assertions of biological inferiority, and the positing of
the southern question itself were due not only to the fact, as Nelson Moe
contends, that “Africa was the worst that could be said about the south.”9
Undoubtedly, Italians understood that comparisons with Africa, the
Middle East, and the Orient were not meant to be complementary, but
neither were the larger discussions of race, otherness, and biological
hierarchies lost in the formation of meridionalist discourse.
4
INTRODUCTION
It is undeniable that ethnocentrism played a central role in shaping the
animosity, often aggressive and hostile, between the north and the south,
and that the reconceptualization of expressing difference as a subset of
ethnocentrism opens up a realm of new analytical possibilities. Yet one
cannot discount that the appropriation of racial discourse from that of
imperialism, spiritual ascendancy, civil production, and even racial prejudice was deliberate in nature, that it spoke not only to regional conflicts
but to real understandings of difference, of raceness, that, in fact, race, if
not racism, played an equal role in the construction of the southern question. For the makers of the southern question, for those who appropriated
the language and reworked the vocabulary, race had an essential function
and meaning in the discourse. Southerners were not only imagined as
being African-like, they were actually akin to Africans, their very vicinity to
the “darker continents” had tainted these would-be Italians, their very
history of contact and connection had “colored” their progeny. They had
African, Arab blood coursing through their veins, the physical, social,
economic, cultural manifestations of raceness visible in society. The long
legacy of contact and cultural interaction complicated understandings of
regional and ethnic diversity—the possibilities of racial intermixing, of
miscegenation was not imagined, but in fact was written into the very history
of the land itself. At times, southerners were even worse than Africans—
despite their proximity to Europeans, despite their drop of “white” European
blood, they were perceived as unable, and the nation itself ineffective, in
making southern Italians Italian.
Race is a complicated category and its definition shifts as the southern
question discourse develops; however, it also serves as a powerful signifier
in examining the ways in which Italians discussed the fashioning of
citizens, the inculcation of national identity, and the cultural bounds of the
nation. The making of Italy and subsequently of Italians (as famously
attributed to Massimo D’Azeglio) created a complex discursive space in
which political actors from left and right, writers, scientists, scholars, journalists, both foreign and Italian, interacted. As Silvana Patriarca effectively
demonstrates, patriots of the Risorgimento, in order to bring to fruition
the political unification of the nation, had to negotiate both the existing
European stereotypes of indolence, violence, and moral reprobation and
the Italian process of “ ‘self-Othering,’ an absorption and redeployment of
negative stereotypes relating to the Italian people as a whole (especially the
indolent southerner stereotype) and coexisting with the patriotic denunciation of the foreigners’ misrepresentations of Italy.”10 Metaphors, tropes, and
idioms work in language to organize cultural constructs and to categorize
and prioritize social practice. Historical actors then “perform rather complex
operations with the language/s available to them, while at the same time
their thinking is limited by the dominant metaphors and vocabularies.”11
INTRODUCTION
5
Language and idiom become spaces of contestation and construction and
play a very real, decisive role in the construction of the southern question
and unified Italy.12 Language, as a tool for contestation and consensus, can
be manipulated and appropriated, can transform and be transformed.
Patriarca, for example, examines the ways in which Italian nationalists
negotiated European stereotypes of Italy such as indolence and feminization to construct a national political rhetoric.13 To construct the nation,
nationalists worked also on metaphor and idiom, defended themselves
from the European tropes of immorality and emasculation, and formed a
political language that could inspire military action, legislative reform,
economic development, and national allegiance.
The language of the southern question then is a culmination of myriad
discourses, of the negotiation of different political concerns, social awareness, and cultural preoccupations. This book will follow the development
of meridionalist language and examine the ways in which very different
discussions, on racial science, imperialism, diaspora, become couched in
the same vocabulary of the southern question. The lexicon of the southern
question becomes the most familiar, most accessible idiom with which
to discuss other discourses of difference. If the first and primary idea of
difference from Unification arose from the difficulties of melding two very
diverse and disparate regions, then later discussions of difference would
borrow and appropriate from the collective language of meridionalism.
In attempting to define the newly unified Italy, writers and political
actors of the period constructed racial and cultural “others” against whom
they could express their fears, grievances, and concerns about Italy. Jane
Schneider uses Edward Said’s powerful theory of Orientalism as a method
of understanding the internal other-ing of the south in Italy.14 Edward Said
argues that the West created an oppositional, alien “Oriental Other” in
which it revealed more about itself and its preoccupations than about the
Middle East.15 The making of this “Orient” as an exotic, mysterious, sensual space ridden with immorality and superstition was in direct contrast
to the implied making of the “West” as a rational, industrial, modern space
of progress. Said convincingly contends an “oppositional” Orient was
essential to the conceptualization of nation. In Italy, in addition to imagining the distant “Other,” Italians also found the alien within their own
national borders. This southern other played an integral role in the development of patriotic and moral, imperialist, and immigration discourses
during the liberal period. This “median category” discussed by Said
assuages the need for the familiar in the foreign as
[s]omething patently foreign and distant acquires, for one reason or another,
a status more rather than less familiar. One tends to stop judging things either
as completely novel or as completely well-known: a new median category
6
INTRODUCTION
emerges, a category that allows one to see new things, things seen for the first
time, as versions of a previously known thing . . . The Orient at large,
therefore, vacillates between the West’s contempt for what is familiar and its
shivers of delight in—or fear of—novelty.16
The development of meridionalist discourse relied heavily on ethnocentric
stereotypes, and many scholars have followed the cultural and racial language
of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to its teleological end in
Fascism and Nazism. As noted by John Dickie, some of these writers
attributed this racism to ignorance, although, Dickie echoes Said, “people
are prejudiced because of the way they organize what they do know rather
than because of what they do not.”17 The organization of this presumed
knowledge results in the development and heavily contested discourse of
meridionalism as it manifests itself in novels, political debates, newspapers,
and magazines. As identified by Nelson Moe, this neo-Orientalist discourse within Italy itself operates on two parameters. Northerners, in their
attempt to have Italy included within the larger imperialist, industrial,
progress-driven Europe, found Italy’s weakness in the distant south, a
place less civilized and thus further from the European core, and displaced
the failures of the country onto its most sensitive and volatile region. At the
same time, some southerners began to articulate the northerners’ meridionalist discourse, criticizing their native society and culture, and lent
credence to the political and cultural debates.18 The dual-edgedness of
displacement and complicity illustrates how “Orientalism can work within
a country to reinforce the wider geopolitical and geo-cultural ambitions of
the great powers,” creating what Milica Bakic-Hayden refers to as “nesting
Orientalisms.”19
The south would continue to figure in Italian politics, featuring in the
rhetoric of politicians, in the ideologies of intellectuals, and in the imaginations of artists and writers. The language of meridionalism, of internal
difference and othering, would inform other discourses that were brought
forth to the Italian public. The vocabulary and metaphor that came into
usage through efforts by meridionalists to explain and understand the
southern question provided a basis for expressing diversity that would prove
constructive to debates concerning emigration, colonialism, physiognomy,
and later, fascist agenda.
Writer and politicians who invoked the language of the southern question
were attempting to respond to the age-old demands of the Italian people to
create a national entity that could embrace its diversity while at the same
time construct a formidable unity. The very permeability and malleability
of the vocabulary of the southern question served as an impetus for its
appropriation to describe many types of Otherness—the use of gender to
INTRODUCTION
7
describe the south, the pathologicization of the Mezzogiorno in relation
to the science of physiognomy, the debates over internal and external
colonization, preoccupations on creating a sense of Italianness within and
without national borders. The old discussion of southern inefficiency and
inferiority stands center stage as the catalyst for other discussions of
conquest, displacement, and imbalance. The perceived “weakness” of the
south, its very dolce far niente-ness, becomes its very strength as it is the
southern question vocabulary that transforms the ways in which discourses
of difference are spoken.
The chapters of this book examine the different ways in which concepts of
race and ethnicity transform as the different processes of nationalism gain
influence in Italy. While the first two chapters serve as a synthesis of the
development of the language of the southern question, the remaining chapters illustrate the ways in which the metaphors, idioms, and vocabulary of
meridionalism were appropriated to discuss new discourses of difference.
Chapter 1 discusses the ways in which the south was understood as a
regional entity even before the unification of the peninsula. While,
certainly, pre-1861 depictions of the south do not necessarily indicate the
inception of meridionalist discourse, it does lay the foundations for the
ensuing methods of managing the south in the face of Unification. Even
while politicians and intellectuals were debating the process and form of
unification, the south represented an entity that was outside the scope of
enlightened national unity. It represented a space that was at its best, mildly
un-European, and at its most extreme, wholly African. The discussions of
the anti-Europeanness of the Italian south provided the stereotypes, the
vocabulary that would later pervade post-Unification struggles to incorporate an unruly and uncooperative south. The label of “un-European”
renders itself easily transformable into “un-Italian” as the new Italy finds
itself poised between a national unity tainted by internal colonization.
The complex and sensitive issue of meridionalism is at the center of
chapter 2, in which “Orientalism becomes located in one country.”20 That
is, the Other was located within Italian national borders itself, in the south.
This essay looks at Risorgimento writings, which saw the south as an
extension of Africa, the cultural, social, and political divide that separated
the two Italies, and the discourse surrounding the harsh, quasi-imperialistic
methods of uniting the south with the north. Using the texts of politicians,
scholars, and intellectuals, as well as newspaper articles and magazines,
this chapter examines the beginning of the southern question with
Pasquale Villari’s famous Lettere meridionali (Southern Letters) in 1875 and
the definition and development of the question itself. As well, this essay
explores the subsequent pathologicization of the southern question.
8
INTRODUCTION
Descriptions of the south as the “infection” or the “bacteria” of Italy, as well
as the fear of contamination of the north by the south, helped to create an
idea of the foreign, the Other. It is this pathologicization, in which northern
Italy became characterized as the moral, responsible doctor to the ailing,
weak, helpless patient of the south, that helped in many ways to “ease”
meridionalist discourse from a more cultural, social context into the arena
of biology and race of the physiognomical sciences.
The science of physiognomy and phrenology are examined in chapter 3
in relation to the theories of the school of Cesare Lombroso, one of the
foremost scientists of the late nineteenth century. This chapter looks at the
works of physiognomists and the ways in which they racialized the southern
question. It examines the way in which scientists, looking for a biological
explanation for southern failures, divided the peninsula into different
racial categories—the Germanic, Ligurian, Celtic, and Slavic north, the Latin
center, and the Semitic south. Social scientists explained the differences
between northerners and southerners through biological terms. Poverty,
illiteracy, criminality, promiscuity, barbarity—all predictable ends of specific racial characteristics. These racial categories allowed scientists such as
Alfredo Niceforo, a “complicit” southerner integral in the physiognomical
world, to argue that the failure of Italian imperialism was due in large part
to the racial inferiority of the southerners. Unlike the British, who, in
Niceforo’s opinion, were Aryan and northerners and were more predisposed to military conquest and national glory because of this racial make-up,
the Italian race had been confused and tainted by the blood of southerners.
Thus, it was the “lead ball” of the south that had weighed down the
progress of the north and of Italy as a whole.
Chapter 4 studies the different discourses of the Italian imperialist
campaigns and the way in which the languages of Orientalism, meridionalism, and physiognomy came together, intertwined, interconnected, and
redefined one another to create the new vocabulary of colonialism. This
essay analyzes images of Africa and the savage, bumbling, disoriented
Other that imperialists created in order to inspire support for the military
campaign and domestic patriotism. It also examines the way meridionalist
discourse was redirected and redefined in order to “moralize” the imperial
campaigns, to include the southerners within a national, patriotic discourse, and to create an us/them dichotomy more suitable for a military
campaign. This chapter compares the similarities of the descriptions of the
“conquering” of the south during the Risorgimento with the domination
of Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Libya, and the “civilizing” of the barbarian south
with the “taming” of the biologically and racially different Africans. It
explores the manner in which the language of meridionalism was overtaken
by the new vocabulary of imperial conquest. This essay also takes into
INTRODUCTION
9
consideration the ensuing “anti-Africa” or anti-imperialist campaigns,
fueled by comparisons and fears of the “internal colonization” in the south.
Shocked by the startling parallels between the images portrayed by newspapers and magazines of uncivilized Africa and “contemporary barbarian
Italy”21 and by growing concern as the military campaigns met with limited
or little success, different political and social associations organized rallies
to protest the military campaigns.
Chapter 5 examines the propagandistic take of the imperial campaigns
of 1896 and 1911, and the ensuing debates justifying imperialism as a
means to enlarge the confines of Italy so that immigrants could return
“home,” where they would not be treated as semi-slaves. Growing concerns
over Italian immigration and incoming reports from cultural organizations
in the United States, such as the Dante Alighieri Societies, spurred domestic
debate on race, colonialism, and imperialism. Writers, politicians, and
intellectuals engaged in vivacious debates on such topics as the merits
of immigration as a means of colonial expansion, the responsibility of the
Italian state in protecting its citizens abroad, and the “civic” education of
Italian children abroad. Horrific stories of Italians being treated as blacks, as
some southern plantation owners saw Italians as a “ ‘black race’ and sometimes used them as slaves”22 were used by politicians, newspaper reporters,
intellectuals, and other writers to convince the Italian state of the need for
governmental intervention in the emigratory movements. This chapter
examines the manner in which emigration discourse created a new language
wherein the vocabularies of Orientalism, meridionalism, physiognomy, and
imperialism were appropriated, integrated, and reconceptualized.
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1
The Dawning of the
Mezzogiorno:The South in
the Construction of Italy
Introduction
Although treatises on the “backwardness” of the Kingdom of Naples written
by Neapolitan Enlightenment intellectuals exist and corroborate
post-Unification models of the south as “primitive,” pre-1861 depictions
of the south did not constitute a “southern question,” but rather contributed to a larger European discourse of “normal backwardness.”1 Italian
philosophes engaged in the Europe-wide dialogue, attributing economic
and social failings to feudalism. The writings of Enlightenment scholars
from Naples would form part of a collective memory that would inform
the work of future scholars on the south. Later, even after feudalism was
abolished in southern Italy in 1806, the catalog of social and economic ills
remained similar with one unique note—with feudalism, the primary
obstacle to progress, defunct, reform and improvement in the south
became suddenly and inspiringly possible. The backwardness of southern
Italy was not a permanent condition, and the slight lag behind other
European countries could be overcome through rational change.2
By 1848 however, significant changes had taken place in the Kingdom of
Naples. After the revolutionary efforts of 1848 due to which a constitution
was granted and it appeared that Naples would join the ranks of other
enlightened countries, the Bourbon king Ferdinand retracted his promises
in 1849, abolished parliament, and persecuted participants of the insurrection. Ferdinand attempted to erect a “Chinese wall” around the kingdom
and erase the memory of liberal efforts.3 Increasingly, the stereotype of the
south conformed to the reality of the adjectives (backward, despotic, savage,
uncivilized, barbaric) used to describe the state. Exiled revolutionaries
12
RACE AND THE NATION IN LIBERAL ITALY, 1861–1911
contributed to the dissemination of these representations, often writing
very pessimistically of the political and social situation of the people
exploited and governed by an illegitimate, corrupt government. Exiled
writers began to see the backwardness of the south not as a relative measure
of the effectiveness of endeavors for progress, but as the Bourbons’ innate
opposition to the ideas of progress itself. In the 1851 introduction to
Gladstone’s letters, Giuseppe Massari described a “great battle of civilization
against barbarity, wisdom against ignorance, virtue against vice, innocence
against calumny.”4 In fact, wisdom, virtue, and innocence characterized
the people of the south and ignorance, vice, and slander described the
Bourbon oppressors. By 1855 however, this description of the “good”
southerner had faded somewhat as Francesco Trinchera described a
kingdom that had “no signs of a civilized life, no civil institution, no educational establishment, private or public, no roads . . . no commerce, no art, no
industry . . .” and was inhabited by a people “degraded, ignorant and cruel,
with no sense of either God or law.”5
However, it is precisely the development of this discourse from general
to specific, characterizing the southerners as victim and then collaborator
that leads some scholars to believe that the creation of the southern question
was not dependent on the political unification of Italy but was founded in
the long history of the Mezzogiorno.6 Even should the southern question
as a wider political discourse not predate Unification, the vocabulary
in which this dialogue is couched was drawn from pre-Risorgimento
representations of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and those depictions in
turn were borrowed from existing European discourses on gender, ethnicity,
race, nationalism, and imperialism.7 While these individual “categories”
certainly had their own lexicons and their own processes of development
and expression, they also overlapped, interconnected, and referred to one
another. Often, when simple description failed to accurately and comprehensively depict pre-1860 southern Italy, writers used terminology from
other discourses of difference, which allowed for clearer understanding or,
at least, more visceral recognition.8
The South Before Italy: Pre-Unification
Constructions of the Mezzogiorno
Before 1861, southern Italy represented a land of strange and foreign
beauty, a world to be traveled, an adventure to be explored. Travelers’
depictions of southern Italy illustrated its natural splendor, the ancient
past in Greek and Roman ruin, and the exotic sights and smells of Naples
and Sicily.9 Many of the travelers’ accounts of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies
described the south as non-European, “barbarous,” “African,” “Oriental,”
THE DAWNING OF THE MEZZOGIORNO
13
and “savage,”10 in contraposition to the more European northerners. As
one adventurer remarked, “Europe ends at Naples. Calabria and Sicily and
all the rest are Africa.”11 In Storia degli Stati Italiani dalla caduta dell’Impero
Romano fino all’anno 1840 (1842), a work that would later fuel meridionalist and deputy Giustino Fortunato’s naturalistic leanings of the southern
question, Heinrich Leo, a student of Johann Gottfried von Herder, the
world-renowned German philosopher and writer who contended that
history and nature were profoundly analogous, argued that geography had
a hand in the “moral differences” found among the inhabitants of southern
Italy. Leo discussed the nature of extremity in the south, from genius to
ignorance, from energy to indolence, from chivalry to savagery.12 Leo also
described the indiscipline and sense of individualism in the south. He
found the inhabitants of the south weak, barbaric, and mentally obtuse.13
The extreme fragmentation of the southern peoples and regions made it
very difficult for them to be ruled under one single state. Even after the
creation of a large, encompassing Bourbon state, the existing divisions
continued to frustrate and obstruct the formation of a single, unified
entity. Despite the relative primitivity of southerners in comparison with
their northern counterparts, they did not exist as an “other” in opposition
to the northerner, but rather served as part of a southern, non-European
entity against a more enlightened Europe. That is, the southerner, while
described as barbaric and savage, was characterized as part of a larger
southern contingency, as a member of southern peoples of the world.
These southerners were exotic, almost primitive, prone to the manipulation
and fancies of the imagination.14 Travelers’ images of the southern regions
depicted an uncivil people, an other whose gendered primitive culture and
society were antithetical to European “progress” and liberalism.
Still, despite the broader implications of a greater European south as
depicted by foreigners, in Italy, meridionalists juxtaposed images of the
south against descriptions of the north. They described Neapolitans as a
“female people” characterized by their capriciousness and irritability, in
opposition to northern Italians who were “male people” defined by their
rationality and sensitivity—a superior, completely evolved people.15 In
March 1837, Giacomo Leopardi, one of the great Italian poets of the
nineteenth century, after a trip to the south, wrote of his unhappiness at
“having arrived in a land full of difficulties and of dear and continuous
peril, because it is truly barbaric, much more than one could imagine if
one has not been here.”16 Even before real political and geographical
Unification, differences could already be delineated between the north and
the south. As Cesare Balbo, a liberal Catholic historian and politician who
argued for a federation of Italian states headed by the king of Savoy,
explained, Italy contained “from the north to the south, provinces and
14
RACE AND THE NATION IN LIBERAL ITALY, 1861–1911
people almost as diverse one from the other as the most northern people
and most southern people of Europe itself.”17
Despite perpetuating representations of difference, scholars and politicians recognized the dangers that these stereotypes of the south could
cause in the movements for political unification. Albeit useful in making
starker the image of a more advanced, liberal north in contraposition to the
inferior, barbarous south, stereotypes of the southern regions threatened
to create too great a divide between the two regions, a gulf that could
thwart the unification objectives of certain patriots. Even in 1849, Pasquale
Villari, the positivist historian who initiated discourse on the southern
question with his Lettere meridionali in the mid-1870s, warned against
divisiveness among the different regions of Italy and encouraged the
search for its national history. Yet he questioned whether the history of
Italy could be “the history of only one nation composed of a multitude of
particular states” and asked, “what will be the life of these particular states,
what will be the life of the whole nation? The problem turns absolutely on
these two hinges and needs, in examining the first, to re-find the second.”18
Perhaps in an effort to partially exonerate the people of the south, writers
criticized the Bourbon government harshly and held it accountable for the
misery and backwardness of the south. Many felt the Bourbons subjugated
the people of the south, keeping the masses ignorant and superstitious in
order to retain them under control.19 While no one, not even southerners
themselves, would deny the inefficiencies and backwardness of the south,
some writers did tend to emphasize the more positive aspects—the cheerful
ambience, the inherent goodness of the people. Given these qualities, it
seemed only obvious that the problems of the region were caused by a
corrupt monarchy and misgovernment. Thus was born the stereotype of
the southerner, who though good by nature was led astray by corrupt
rulers. In his description of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Sicilian historian Giuseppe La Farina contrasted the fertile soil, the natural beauty, and
the wonderful climate of southern Italy with the misery and suffering of
the people. Exiled from his native land by the Bourbon government,
La Farina complained to a friend in a letter dated September 17, 1855, that
the Bourbons were “the personification of barbarity . . . , a permanent offense
to civility and Christianity . . . with a superstition and an ignorance that
brutalizes the people.”20 Even Cavour, in his writings published in 1848,
conceded that in the complex history of Italy, the Kingdom of Naples had
suffered poor governance and natural calamity more tragically than other
regions.21 The disaster left by the Bourbon misrule appeared even more
distressing as unification drew near.22
Despite the sense that some form of a “national” Italy was needed for
successful unification, old prejudices and stereotypes were difficult to
THE DAWNING OF THE MEZZOGIORNO
15
overcome, especially as soldiers and politicians faced the reality of uniting
two very different regions under an inexperienced and oft-contentious
centralized government.23 The role the south would play in the success of
the nation was evident at an early stage. Successful political unification and
the actual founding of the nation appeared incredibly tenuous, particularly
if it depended on the south. In response to a letter from Cavour dated
August 27, 1860, which expressed Cavour’s trepidation on the involvement
of the Neapolitans, Marquis Villamarini replied the next day, “Is it my
fault, dear Count, if the Neapolitans do not have blood in their veins . . . if
they are, so to say, brutish?”24 The dichotomous representation of Naples
being redeemable and irredeemable at the same time, of being subject to a
process of Bourbon dehumanization, and of being simply inhuman in the
face of Unification would plague later discussions of southern inclusion.
Even should unification come about, however, northerners expressed
apprehension at uniting the “liberal” north with the “uncivilized” south.
Giuseppe Massari even described a virtual moral map of Italy, dividing the
regions of virtue in the north from the regions of vice in the south. In a
letter to Donna Ghita Collegno on August 23, 1860, Massari wrote, “Oh!
That Naples, how disastrous it is to Italy! corrupt land, vile, destitute of that
resolute virtue that marks Piedmont, of that unconquered wisdom that
distinguishes central Italy and especially Tuscany.”25 In a letter dated
December 14, 1860, to Ferdinando Riccardi, a nephew of Luigi Carlo
Farini, prime minister in 1862–1863, Count Carlo Borromeo, secretary
general of the Ministry of the Interior, emphasized the potential consequences of daily contact with a corrupt people, urging officials to find a
way to remedy the problems of Naples. He wrote, “The cowardice, greed,
venality that grow exponentially the more one descends towards the heel of
the peninsula make a desperate effect . . . The entire Italian question is
now in Naples. To succeed there is to make Italy.”26
The evils of the south, including its barbarism, were often made analogous to the perceived primitivity of Africa. In a letter to Cavour dated
October 27, 1860, Luigi Carlo Farini, head administrator of the south
during the first months of Piedmontese control, wrote of the south, “But
my friend, what kind of lands are these, Molise and Terra di Lavoro! What
barbarity! This is not Italy! This is Africa: the Bedouin, in comparison to
these hicks, are the flower of civil virtue.”27 Oft quoted, this comparison
between the south of Italy and Africa suggests the alterity of the southern
regions. It insinuates that the south is even more barbaric than the
Bedouin, a frightening thought for northerners as the south posed an immediate and intimate problem in the Unification.28 These representations were
produced not only by the northerners but also by some Neapolitans themselves, who saw the provinces outside of Naples as savage, uncivilized, and
16
RACE AND THE NATION IN LIBERAL ITALY, 1861–1911
African. Attanasio Mozzillo argued that for the Neapolitans,“a trip Calabria
equal[ed] a trip to Morocco.”29 Comparisons were also made between the
south of Italy and the Middle East. In a letter to Cavour dated October 21,
1860, Massari wrote,
Naples offers the most bizarre and most singular show that can be imagined:
that of an anarchy at the same time picturesque and grotesque: a noise of
another world, a continuous coming and going of people, a cry that would
bewilder . . . and a filth that degrades Constantinople. I have always loved
and appreciated Piedmont, but after these three days in Naples, I adore it.
The opposition is indescribable.30
This prejudice would continue to beleaguer Italian writers, politicians, and
intellectuals as the process of governing a fragmented Italy took a more
practical, pragmatic turn after 1861. Some years later, A. Bianco di St. Jorioz,
a Piedmontese liberal and member of Giovine Italia who organized the
revolts of 1821 in Alessandria, wrote, “Here we are amidst a population
that, although in Italy and born Italian, appear to belong to the primitive
tribes of Africa.”31
Making Italy, Making Italians: Defining
Southerners as Citizens
Perhaps the origins of the southern question lay not in the debates on the
future of the unified nation, but rather on the process by which Unification
was achieved. The process of unifying north and south and the ensuing
work of the government in 1860 and the initial years following Unification
were fought largely on two fronts. The first consisted of a political battle
between the more radical southern revolutionaries and the more moderate
tendencies of the Savoy. The second dealt with the all-important question
of the political assimilation of the southern regions, which exposed the
oligarchical nature of the southern elite. The southern ruling class perceived the democratic insurrection of the Garibaldini in 1860 as a direct
threat to their position in society and strongly resisted any attempt to
widen the political arena in the south. The battle for the honor of having
liberated the south was hard fought between the Piedmontese, who saw
themselves as liberators of an oppressed south, and the Garibaldini, who
claimed some agency for southerners themselves.32
In fact, some argued that “liberation” had never been realized in the
south and that political unity was achieved though northern conquest and
hegemony over the south. Many perceived the south as having been taken
by force. Without a federalist government, the south was not allowed to
THE DAWNING OF THE MEZZOGIORNO
17
make a free and mutually agreed upon choice. Instead, the “conquered”
lands suffered through the gradual collapse of the political, cultural, and
economic systems of the south.33 If for some northerners unification with
the south represented a perilous alliance with a primitive and barbaric
partner, southerners, after initial enthusiasm for Piedmontese intervention,
were disillusioned and resentful of being treated as a conquered people by
politicians who laid claim to the glory of the liberation of the south.
In the immediate post-Unification discourse, images of the superior
north “moralizing” or “civilizing” the south became increasingly common.34
The Gazzetta del Popolo, a daily newspaper founded in Turin in 1848,
maintained that the north
[needed] to moralize Naples . . . We do not want brigands, we do not want
thieves, we do not want judges who sell justice, we do not want employees
that rob the nation, we do not want priests who in the name of Christ spread
fire and pillaging . . . Let them cry at Piedmontisization. It is from here, from
this little Piedmont that comes the spark that has given flame to Italy; it is
from here, from this little Piedmont that have departed the battalions . . .35
The cruelty and ferocity of brigandage were seen not only as an obstacle to
national unity, but as irrefutable proof of the barbarity of the south. In order
to eradicate this destructive criminal force in the south, government soldiers
sometimes went to extremes in battling the social disorder. Pontelandolfo and
Casulduni were destroyed by the army in retribution for the violence
committed by brigands. The Italian army took their frustration out on
the inhabitants of these two towns.36 The savagery of brigandage became
symbolic of the immorality and barbarity of the south.37 The barbarity of the
south, manifesting itself in one form as brigandage, was one of the pillars
supporting assertions of unbridgeable gap between north and south.
The north was described as morally, culturally, and industrially
superior to the south. If Unification were to be successful, it would be the
superiority of the north that would inspire, through example or by force,
reform in the south. In a letter to Cavour dated November 6, 1860,
Diomede Pantaleoni, a politician sent by Cavour to negotiate with the
Pope to solve the Roman question in 1861, boasted that by the strength of
the northerners’ wills, their greatest courage, their superior intelligence
and morals, and armed with their historical experiences and their characters,
they could hope to govern and tame the southerners.38 This sentiment of
northern superiority also allowed for the legitimation of civilized and
moral rule/domination over the south.
Indeed, the south was often referred to as a foreign land, acquired by the
north and to be governed as a sort of colony. Described as ugly, barbarous,
18
RACE AND THE NATION IN LIBERAL ITALY, 1861–1911
and immoral, the south served as the new acquisition the north would
have to civilize in the contentious process of nation building. After a visit
to Naples, General Paolo Solaroli wrote in a diary entry dated December
12, 1860, “We have acquired a most evil land, but it seems impossible that
in a place where nature has done so much for the terrain it did not generate
another People.”39 In this vein, the south often became viewed as a colony,
a conquered land to be brought to civilization and ruled by the northern
victors.
This interpretation of the internal colonization of the south did not go
uncontested. In April, 1861, despite his own prejudices against Naples and
Neapolitans, Costantino Nigra, principal secretary of Carignano and lieutenant general of the southern provinces, warned Cavour against treating
the south as a land to be colonized. He advised against considering the
south as an object of conquest and thus administering the area differently
from other regions in Italy.40 Others warned Piedmont against taking too
many liberties as the colonizer in unified Italy. In 1861, Giuseppe Mazzini
argued that for Italy to become Italy, it needed to be constructed as such,
not as an enlarged Piedmont. He believed that the people should be united
under one law and one life, the law and life of Italy, not of Piedmont. His
vision of Italy was of a collective entity; however, he understood that the
matter by which unification took place would have its repercussions on
this consciousness building.41
To smooth the way for political unification of two disparate states,
writers urged the politicization of the people of the south, for the creation
of a public consciousness and civic identity, of a patriotism and a concept of
the nation that would not exclude the south. The distinct regionalisms of
the country did not have to threaten the larger identity of nation. In 1864,
Francesco De Sanctis, the minister of public education, claimed: “Becoming
Italians we do not have to cease being Neapolitans. Italy can be proud of
having at its breast the richest differences that render proud the Lombard,
the Tuscan, the Neapolitan, the Piedmontese, the Roman, the Sicilian; it is a
nation that has in itself the richness of many nations.”42 As Cavour himself
later wrote at the first meeting of the Italian Parliament in February 1861:
“My task is more laborious and more painful now than in the past. Making
Italy, to meld together the diverse elements of which it is composed, putting
into harmony the north and the south, presents as many difficulties as a war
with Austria and the struggle with Rome.”43 Cavour would not live to see if
the difficulties in uniting the regions would be overcome and in his opinion, the chances were slim. A few days before his death on June 6, 1861, he
lamented, “Italy of the north is made, there are neither Lombards, nor
Piedmontese, nor Tuscans, nor Romagnolis: we are all Italians; but there are
THE DAWNING OF THE MEZZOGIORNO
19
still Neapolitans. Oh! There is so much corruption in that land. It is not
their fault, poor people, they were misgoverned.”44
With Unification, politicians faced the challenge of incorporating and
integrating north and south into one political, economic, and social
national entity. The complexities of governing new Italy included not only
the practicalities of geopolitical unity, but the very difficult problem of
“making” Italians complement the newly formed nation. Not only did the
founders of Italy face the very real problems of an impoverished south,
they also faced objections from those northerners who found unification
with the south extremely distasteful. In a letter dated October 17, 1860, to
Diomede Pantaleoni, Massimo D’Azeglio, a moderate Piedmontese politician, complained, “In all ways the fusion with Neapolitans makes me
afraid; it is like going to bed with a smallpox patient.”45 For D’Azeglio, the
regions annexed to Piedmont and central Italy were so inextricably different that the process of unification would serve only to debilitate the efforts
of the Piedmontese. In his opinion, the republican party advocated the
annexation of the southern regions in order to provoke a crisis in the
Piedmontese monarchy. Other writers expressed their apprehension at
being united with a south that could prove to be unsalvageable. In a letter
to his cousin dated from December 1860, Ippolito Nievo, writer,
Garibaldian volunteer, and participant in the Mille, wrote, “It is perhaps
the fault of the Bourbons or of the devil but one cannot live a day in Sicily
without damning the human race and those who resemble it to hell.”46
The Pathologicization of the South:
“The Bloody Plague” of Unification
Representations of the south became complicated in the association with
illness. Discussions of the south compared the region to a disease that
would plague the newly formed government and prevent it from moving
forward in attaining domestic stability and international glory. Prime
Minister Luigi Carlo Farini warned, “The annexation of Naples becomes
the gangrene of the . . . State . . . We must pay attention that this period of
the annexation of Naples does not mark the beginning of the moral disintegration of Italy!”47 Writers expressed their fear at being contaminated
with the illnesses of the south, foreseeing the moral decay of the north
through its contact with the south. A few years after the conquest of Rome,
Piedmontese politician and prime minister Urbano Rattazzi described
Naples as “the bloody plague that we opened in our hip.”48 The only escape
from this fate was for the north to cure the south of its sicknesses, to
nurse it to health, not only for the benefit of southerners, but as preventive
20
RACE AND THE NATION IN LIBERAL ITALY, 1861–1911
medicine for the north itself, which risked being infected by its proximity
to the contagion.
And as the south suffered from a long-standing illness, it was the more
advanced north that held the cure to its maladies. The south frequently
became referred to as a “plague” or “gangrene” that required treatments
from the doctor, the surgeon, the north. Leopoldo Franchetti, politician
and scholar of the southern question, who along with Sidney Sonnino
completed the fundamental inquest into the conditions in the south in
1876–1877, described it as sickness that needed to be cured.49 In 1863, in
reference to Naples, Alexander Dumas wrote of the “necessity of a surgeon”
for “a society gravely ill.”50 The representations of northerners, who described
themselves as doctors to the southern plague, to southern patients, bedridden and submissive, allowed for the perpetuation of northern moral superiority and organizational primacy in politics, administration, and military
operations. This dualism of the doctor/patient relationship between the
north and the south came into direct conflict with the contradictory image of
the newly constructed “one and indivisible” nation.51 The unified and “single”
political body of the nation prompted images of the burdened northern doctor beleaguered by the illnesses of the southern patient as politicians and
intellectuals began to understand that the success of the nation depended on
the health of its southern half. As Cavour himself admitted, “If Italy is saved
or lost, it is saved or lost with Naples or in Naples.”52
The recognition that the recently achieved unification hinged on the
situation in the south roused the fear that the maladies and evils plaguing
it would contaminate and infect the unprotected north. This trepidation
caused many politicians to openly address the problems of the south and
to question the possible solutions to the social, economic, and political
problems of the plague. At the opening of the Camera of Deputies in 1861,
one deputy presented the problem: “When a wound bleeds and is about to
turn into gangrene, it is necessary to enliven it with the pungent air of publicity, it is necessary to cure it, if one wishes to let it heal, with the red-hot
iron of free discussion.”53 Gradually, the Piedmontese came to recognize
the different elements of the plague that afflicted southern Italy.54 While
some southerners appropriated the medical metaphor of the south, they
did not use the comparison to express implied disgust and revulsion. They
used the metaphor not to show disdain, but rather to express their preoccupation with the horrible conditions of the region. Many southerners in
fact found the diagnoses of the critical condition of the south to be too
dire. Sicilian Emerico Amari wrote, “We do not need to represent these
two people [Neapolitans and Sicilians] as nothing other than a gangrene;
no, we are Italians and we have conserved Italian virtue; we made the
revolution and this is enough to demonstrate our morality.”55
THE DAWNING OF THE MEZZOGIORNO
21
Still, even with open discussion, some politicians remained skeptical
that the north would be able to cure so sick a patient as the south. Prime
Minister Bettino Ricasoli stated somewhat pessimistically on November
20, 1861, “The plagues of the Neapolitan provinces cannot be cured by any
doctor with any specific means.”56 Perhaps even worse was the fact that the
Bourbons were now not the only ones being blamed for southern problems.
Indeed, the southerners themselves were scrutinized for their complicity in
the continued backwardness of the region. In correspondence from Naples
in the first days of 1861, La Gazzetta di Torino printed a commentary on
the innate passivity of Neapolitans that allowed for the domination of the
Bourbons for so many years, “It was a kind of government that . . . relied
wonderfully on the disposition of these vague and fidgety people . . .
languishing in its own restlessness, carried by its Oriental nature to not
care . . . , to adore above all repose, to find compensation for its troubles in
the pleasures of domestic calm.”57
The South Incognito: Africa in Italy
The division between the north and south of Italy was often described in
exotic or racial terms. In 1861, even the names of southern cities seemed
foreign and bizarre. For Giuseppe Cesare Abba, writer and Garibaldino,
Calatafimi was a “a strange name that, with Marsala and Salemi, made one
feel [as if] in another world, Africa, Saracens.”58 Giuseppe Bandi, a writer
and patriot who founded two Mazzinian journals, was particularly
intrigued by the dialects and dress of Sicilians. He described the Sicilian
dialect as a “most African language,”“little less than Turkish.” He compared
the Sicilian traditions of dress to those of the Bedouins, “with the skullcaps
on their heads and with muskets across their saddles shouting ‘viva Cicilia!
viva la Taglia!’ ”59
The southerners were compared to Africans, the south to Africa—and
the newly made Italians were found wanting. Il Piemonte, a satirical newspaper, related the following correspondence: “[Costatino] Nigra from
Naples wrote to Cavour: ‘I am Nigra, and so you have sent me among the
Negroes. Better, a thousand times better the Negroes of South America.’ ”60
In a letter to his wife, Adelaide, in 1863, General Nino Bixio, a commander
who fought with Garibaldi, described Puglia: “This, in short, is a land that
would need to be destroyed or at least depopulated and sent to Africa to
make them civilized!”61
Representations of the differences between the north and south as an
impassable gulf between civilization and barbarity drew from the established
colonial discourse of conqueror and conquered and rendered the south a
22
RACE AND THE NATION IN LIBERAL ITALY, 1861–1911
submissive partner in the new union. The relationship between north and
south was reminiscent of the relationship between European colonizers and
African populations. Count Ottaviano Vimercati, a Milanese diplomat who
had spent years in Africa and who participated in the Algerian campaign,
wrote, “The Arabs, who I fought 15 years ago, were a model of civilization
and progress in comparison to these populations who are only 40 miles away
from the capital. You could not imagine the barbarity and the true brutishness
of the country people here . . .”62 The impossibilities of union with the south
stemmed often from the fact that southerners were frequently depicted as
more African than European. Unlike northerners who were civilized,
European, and industrialized, the south remained in its more primitive,
backward, African state. Whereas the northerners were “true” Italians, ready
to sacrifice and move forward to fulfill their national destiny, southerners
were still too barbaric to understand their Italianness, insisting instead on
maintaining their regional identities, their “individual” prerogatives.
Conclusion
The confusion over the existence of the authentic Italian, the nation as an
entity, and the problems of unifying many disparate identities confounded
intellectuals and politicians alike. Questions of categorization only
touched the surface of the complicated issues of identity politics. Already
the identity of Italy as a nation, beyond a geographic entity, was difficult to
ascertain; southern Italy then was an even more imprecise entity.63 Only
after Unification did an image of the south as internally homogeneous and
qualitatively other become consolidated, definite, and concrete.
However, should the southern question and the history of southern
Italy correspond, every historical event then risks to be reduced to, as
described by historian Salvatore Lupo, “an eternal querelle on deficiencies
and blame . . .”64 The works of Pasquale Villari, Giustino Fortunato, Sidney
Sonnino, Francesco Saverio Nitti, Gaetano Salvemini, and Antonio
Gramsci are not merely reflections of a presumed, imagined reality of the
time but instead represent the intellectual and political thoughts of the
principal actors in the meridionalist movement. Between the traditional
analysis of the southern question as a homogeneous and consistent discourse and the reconfiguration of meridionalism as a means of defending
the south itself, it is fairly impossible to give an unequivocal and unitary
representation of meridionalist discourse.
If the political question of the south could not exist in contradiction
with the rest of the Italian nation, then, at the very least, there existed a
grave social disease. The south was characterized by an indescribable
THE DAWNING OF THE MEZZOGIORNO
23
misery, by the refusal of southerners to recognize the unified state, the
inability of the ruling classes to stabilize the economic systems. These
problems led meridionalists to engage in constructing a southern question
discourse. Intensely conscious of the particularities of the situation in the
south and wanting to find a remedy for the grievances that afflicted the
Mezzogiorno, the ruling classes moved to become a social force that would
reinforce the foundation of the nation and be a part of the process of the
bourgeoisie fashioning itself into a liberal class.65
Both conservative and liberal meridionalism shared the idea of a
common, homogeneous southern question, a national question connected
to the way in which unification was achieved and the subsequent economic
and social development of the newly formed Italy. They also believed that
the problems identified by meridionalists could not be individuated as the
defining factor of backwardness, nor could they be taken out of the national
context as a purely “southern” question.
The perpetual importance given to certain “typical” aspects of southern
inferiority was used to counteract the myths of the wealth and opulence of
the south. The arid and mountainous lands along the Apennines were seen
in direct opposition to the splendid climate and terrain of the south. The
works of meridionalists confirmed the correlation between the rapid
industrialization process and development in the north with the much
slower progress of the south. The contradictory interdependence and
inequality between the two Italies became a fundamental constant in the
history of unified Italy and of its particular mode of development.
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2
Making the South “Italian”:
Writing the
Post-Risorgimento
Southern Question
Introduction
In Italy, discourses that described “otherness” did not remain confined
simply to the realm of the external or extra-national. With the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy on March 17, 1861, external differences
became, to some, unexpectedly internal and occupied their own arena
within the realm of Italian national politics and culture. The Kingdom of
the Two Sicilies, formerly an external component to an as yet un-unified Italy,
became the focus of a nationalist debate concerned with methods of integrating the southern and northern regions under a centralized government.1
The southern question described a duality between northern and southern
Italy and what was perceived as the social, economic, moral, cultural, and
biological/racial inferiority of the south. The ideas of difference surrounding
this discourse would touch upon sensitive issues of nationalism, governance,
equality, and identity.2 The south served as an integral “other” in opposition to the development of an Italian national culture.3 Integrally linked
with politics, the southern question would go through many transformations as intellectuals, politicians, and other writers attempted to resolve
southern inconsistencies by understanding the nature and origins of the
problem.
Many contemporary scholars consider the southern question a postUnification discourse constructed from the many political ideologies and
agendas central to the Risorgimento movement. This perspective of the
southern question as primarily an economic dilemma describes three
explanations for southern economic “backwardness.” One of the main lines
26
RACE AND THE NATION IN LIBERAL ITALY, 1861–1911
of thought in the historiographical debate over meridionalist discourse
contends that the expansion of the market after 1860 exposed the preexisting rudimentary nature of southern economic structures.4 Another camp
maintains the Gramscian notion that the “historical bloc” of southern
agrarian conservatives and northern industrialists, who combined their
efforts after Unification, instigated the economic exploitation of the south.5
Still a different trend sees an imperialist element in the treatment of the
south, with two divergent theories. In the economically based account,
northerners purposely sabotaged southern industries and created a colonial
market for northern goods as well as an economical, submissive labor
force. A more political version depicts a legitimate southern dynasty as
conquered and plundered by an imperialist, militaristic north.6
The notion that the south as a homogeneous entity, fundamentally and
diametrically opposed to the north, developed only after Unification has
some legitimacy.7 The perceived dualism between northern and southern
Italy neither held the same resonance nor the same threat until the 1860s
and early 1870s as with Unification.8 Some scholars argue that only after its
conception with the defeat of the Historic Right in the mid-1870s was this
meridionalist polarity reflected back onto the earlier period. The
emergence of the southern question in the 1870s was not prompted by a
recognition of southern misery and backwardness then, but rather was a
concerted effort by conservative reformers to denounce southern leaders
as corrupt and thus unfit to govern. Giarrizzo argues that the Historic
Right, smarting from a defeat in the 1874 elections in the south that
would later lead to the coup of the Historic Left in 1876, reacted to its
political setbacks by demonizing the south, which it held responsible for its
disappointments.9 Such conservative leaders as Leopoldo Franchetti,
Sidney Sonnino, and Pasquale Villari participated in the formation of this
discourse, which sought to politically delegitimate southern élites by
calling into question their moral fitness.
Pasquale Villari and the Genesis of
the Southern Question in 1875
The genesis of the southern question is directly related to the 1875 publication of the Lettere meridionali of Pasquale Villari in L’Opinione, an
important journal published in Rome. A Neapolitan exile in Florence,
Villari outlined the framework upon which future discourse on the southern
question would be constructed.10 With the help of Villari, the Mezzogiorno
came to occupy an integral and central role in national politics. Discourses
on the south as a national question revealed the contradictions and limits
MAKING THE SOUTH “ITALIAN”
27
of the process of national unification.11 Often cast as the first meridionalist,
Villari had already introduced some of the themes of this future debate in
his article “La scuola e la questione sociale in Italia” in 1872. In his essay,
Villari described the backwardness of the south, urging his readers to forgo
the more affluent streets and neighborhoods and “penetrate the most
remote quarters, where the alleys and the racket are so confused and intertwined, and the houses so tall and close to each other, that they form a
labyrinth in which not even the air, let alone anything else, can circulate
freely.”12 He encouraged writers to visit the popular neighborhoods of
Naples in order to “describe them minutely, depict the life and moral
conditions of those people, and denounce them to the civilized world as an
Italian crime . . .”13 He believed that northern Italy knew little about the
south and what they knew was based on misinformation that judged the
situation in the south poorly. Although northerners had great esteem for
certain exceptional individuals from the south, they tended to emphasize
the corruption left behind by the Bourbons and did not recognize the
“private virtue and honest characters” who the Bourbons had forced to
retreat from public life and who the Italian government should seek to
reclaim.14
To improve the southern situation, Villari wanted to communicate a
national mission to his readership and attribute a sense of responsibility to
the government in Rome. In the first letter, he examined the role and very
existence of the camorra, portraying it as foreseeable considering the
miserable conditions of Naples. He focused the second letter on the mafia,
arguing that it was not a secret organization but rather a natural consequence of the social problems in Sicily. His third letter examined the
condition of the southern economy and the inevitable division between a
rather limited class of landowners and a larger group of maltreated
peasants who, in their wretched circumstance, were thus forced to seek
refuge and relief in brigandage. Villari’s fourth letter argued for government
intervention that would encourage the expansion of a class of smallholding
peasants. He believed that these preemptive reforms were essential in order
to secure both the economic and moral future of the nation.
Although Villari attempted to demonstrate that poverty and crime
existed in the north of Italy also, his examples only served to emphasize the
even more dire conditions of the south. The so-called general ill was only
recognizable and analyzed in the particular situation of the south. Villari
saw history as an evolutionary development that underwent various levels
of civilization. Although he contended that the south was not barbaric, the
evolutionary model of history as well as the binary opposition between
barbarity and civility informed his understanding of the southern question
and his explanation of its relation to the culture of the nation. Villari
28
RACE AND THE NATION IN LIBERAL ITALY, 1861–1911
needed to construct the south as an Other to the civilized north as well as
moldable, redeemable material to create a moral nation.15 To this end, he
found comparisons to American slavery particularly useful in making his
point.16 He pointed out that “Negro slavery” had in fact obstructed the
developmental efforts of the American South and had been more detrimental to white slave owners than to other groups. He warned that it
would be “impossible to achieve a genuine improvement in the moral and
civil conduct of people as long as it tolerates this type of disgrace in its very
bosom.”17 Instead, he argued for the need of “some kind and noble soul to
go there, to make a description in minute detail, to depict the way those
people live and their moral state, and denounce it to the civilized world as
an Italian crime.”18 The image of slavery was invoked repeatedly in order to
highlight the miserable conditions of southern peasants. Although most of
these references were frighteningly out of context, they served to describe
the conditions of the peasant in the south under Bourbon rule and to
underscore the fact that the situation had not improved and may in fact
have worsened.19 He noted that sometimes there were “slaves that transformed themselves instantaneously into a horde of cannibals.”20 Villari
cautioned,
America demonstrated with its example that the slavery of the Negroes in
many cases above all harmed the master of the slave, because he became
corrupted by the unjust dominion which he exercised. Wouldn’t an unlimited dominion be [more] corrupting when exercised not on Negroes but on
men of the same race?21
He warned that if this treatment of southerners continued, the peasants
would one day rise, ferociously, to vindicate themselves from a long-repressed
hate, with all their brutal passions.
As Moe argues, “On the one hand, [Villari] formulated an increasingly
pointed critique of the manner in which Italy’s elites had governed the
country since Unification; on the other hand, he focused on the problem
that at some level summed up the most urgent issues facing the nation: the
social conditions of southern Italy.”22 In parliament in 1876, Villari spoke:
We, my dear colleagues, brought about a revolution, which was largely
the work of an intelligent, educated, and disinterested bourgeoisie . . . The
people were in such conditions as not to be able to participate in the
revolution, and were in a sense therefore dragged along by us. But precisely
because we stood alone in this effort, because we alone were intent on
completing the creation of a free Italy, even though we wished to do what
was best for the nation as a whole, we found ourselves, without knowing it
MAKING THE SOUTH “ITALIAN”
29
or wanting it, isolated in a closed circle, and we almost came to think that
our little world was the whole world, forgetting that outside our narrow
circle there is a vastly numerous class, to which Italy has never given a
thought, and which it must finally take into consideration.23
Villari also examined the ideas of liberty and individualism in the south,
the former that the Mezzogiorno lacked and the latter that it had in
overabundance. Both these characteristics were seen as major flaws
and obstructions to progress.24 Villari believed that many of these problems were due to the fact that Italy had attained unification through
circumstance, with the intervention of outside forces, and without the
involvement of the whole of society. Instead, the people were pushed
toward a political revolution before having made a social transformation,
before unification spontaneously surged as a necessary product of national
activity.25
Villari reconceptualized the relationship between the north and the
south replacing the geographical categories of north and south with the
concept of a unitary hierarchical society. He created an analogy in which
the north was to the south what the more educated and more affluent
classes were to the more ignorant and miserable orders. He likened the
relationship between the north and south to that between the upper and
lower classes in one society. By framing the relationship in social rather
than geographic terms, he was able to enumerate and legitimate the
responsibilities and obligations of the upper classes to the lower classes.
He urged the government to take serious and decisive action, not only for
the health of the nation domestically, but also for the sake of its reputation
internationally.26 Villari warned that Italians needed to heed the criticisms
of the English and the Germans, who ridiculed “Latin people” for knowing
the “form and not the substance of liberty.”27 As long as these people
refused to understand that a free people necessitated the sacrifices of the
rich and the powerful for the advancement of the poor and the weak, there
would be no freedom for Italy. Villari argued that as the “miserable and
corrupt plebe corrupts all society . . . it is in their interest, in that of their
own morality and of their own sons, to combat this evil with all the energy
possible.”28
Villari also argued that southern elites themselves had an obligation to
the southern peasantry and the southern politic as a whole. He was caught,
however, in his own conundrum. In his attempt to make the southern
question a national quandary, he had also created an alienated south that
suffered from ailments particular and unique only to that region and
different from the rest of Italy. He admonished the southern elite, describing
northerners who looked with disdain on the southern conditions and lay
30
RACE AND THE NATION IN LIBERAL ITALY, 1861–1911
the responsibility for the impoverished conditions “down there” directly
on the shoulders of the “cultured people” of the south, who “did not do its
duties, not reacting and not improving this state of affairs.”29 Northerners, he
argued, were content to leave the south in its “semi-barbarous” state, relieved
that “[i]n central and northern Italy, we will be, as we are, civilized.”30
The perceived semi-barbarous state of the south manifested itself in
several different forms according to Villari. Among these problems were the
ever-present threat of pestilence and disease. The cholera epidemic of 1884
brought to the forefront the miserable conditions of the poorer neighborhoods of Naples where “the massacre takes root in proportions that are
reminiscent of the Middle Ages, or those of Oriental cities.”31 Villari also noted
the closed spaces of Naples, where the poorer neighborhoods were overpopulated, creating unhygienic situations that served as hotbeds for bacteria and
viruses. He believed that the lack of water, space, air, and light brought illness
that would either decimate the population or, at the very least, damage its
general health, thus weakening the race.32 Yet Villari questioned the emphasis by northerners on the sanitary conditions of the south. Certainly,
the hygienic situation exacerbated the wretchedness of the south; however,
he argued that the question of Naples was “more economic and moral than
hygienic.”33 It was not enough to improve the hygienic conditions if the
moral and economic structures were left untouched. He warned,
If you found a baby abandoned in the street and wanted to educate him, it
would be absurd to begin with the alphabet. First of all, you need to wash
him, clean him, dress him, and teach him the habit of washing and keeping
himself clean, without which you will attain nothing.34
Among the social problems enumerated by Villari was his concern over
criminality in the south. He believed that the Neapolitan camorra, the
Sicilian mafia, and brigandage in general were natural consequences of
specific social circumstances. These criminal bands were part of an “illness
that extended little by little and took different forms by which it penetrated
different strata of society.”35 As Villari explained, under the Bourbon
regime, plebeians were completely abandoned and perpetually exploited.
The authorities protected the gentlemen of the south, and both civic
institutions and the ecclesiastical establishment fueled the misery through
the giving of alms, which Villari believed to be detrimental to the selfsufficiency of the poor. Thus, the camorra was considered a means of
achieving order in society. He argued for a more detailed study of the
camorra, which would begin with the understanding that the development
of the criminal organization was not an aberration, but rather a most
normal and possible state of affairs.36 The mafia was also profoundly
MAKING THE SOUTH “ITALIAN”
31
connected to the economic and political situation of Sicily. Villari observed
that there were three distinct classes—the proprietors of the latifundia in
Palermo, the peasants, and amongst these peasants a class of tax collectors,
guardians, and negotiators of grain. He argued that “the first are victims of
the mafia if unintended, the second are recruited as soldiers, the third as
captains.”37
Because of the deep-rootedness of these phenomena, efforts to rid the
south of these organizations would prove problematic. Describing an
Englishman who contended that extreme methods against the mafia
would cause more harm than good, Villari warned, “The remedy is to be
found in time, in public works, to which Sicily has rights, and finally in
the schools.”38 He argued not only for repressive measures, but also preventative ones.
As well, the causes of brigandage were directly related to the social condition and economic state of the peasantry, who were forced to eat “bread
that dogs would not eat.”39 He believed that brigandage had become the
savage and brutal protest of misery against ancient and secular injustices40
and that it was the necessary consequence of the southern condition if “the
law did not protect the millions of white slaves.”41 He claimed that the
government, in their efforts to destroy brigandage, had considered too
little the consequences of their actions. While the radical remedies against
brigandage made the “blood run in rivers,” little thought was given to
whether the urgency of the repressive measures in fact impeded the
implementation of preventative measures. He argued that
In politics, we have been good surgeons and horrible doctors. Many amputations we have performed with iron, many cancerous tumors extirpated
with fire, we have thought of radon to purify blood. Who can put in doubt
that the new government has opened a great number of schools, constructed
many streets, and done public works? But the social conditions of the peasant
have not been the study of any work, nor any measure that worked directly
to better conditions.42
In light of these social problems, Villari also invoked the image of the ill,
diseased south caught in the grips of a moral, social, political, and economic
plague; Italy was politically immoral and if Italians did not resolve the
southern question, the country would suffer. He described northern Italy
as being “infested by passion both ferocious and tiny, that corrupts . . .
justice and sentiment.”43 He continued that southern Italy was “sick with
another illness, administrative corruption . . . lacking . . . the conviction
that liberty imposes duties, from which honest citizens cannot excuse
themselves.”44
32
RACE AND THE NATION IN LIBERAL ITALY, 1861–1911
Although the southern question discourse often appeared most unflattering to southerners and southern society, this could not be attributed
solely to the prejudice of northerners. Complicit in this process of stereotype
making were southerners themselves. Meridionalists such as Villari, perhaps, did not intend to contribute to the myth building that constructed a
barbarian, other-ed south; however, in their attempt to bring to light the
problems of the south, they both alienated and differentiated it from the
seemingly more progressive and economically more affluent north. Villari
even warned the northerners, “After the unification and the liberation of
Italy, you no longer have an escape route; either you manage to civilize us,
or we will manage to render you barbarians.”45 This dichotomy served to
further distance the south from the north and from the rest of Europe.
Rationalizations of Unity: Meridionalists and
the Development of the Southern Question
The southern question, arguably one of the primary domestic issues
during the first fifty years of unification, confronted the economic and
perceived social and cultural backwardness of the Mezzogiorno. Indeed,
the work of other meridionalists continued to widen the gap between the
south of Italy and the more European north. Leopoldo Franchetti, politician
and coauthor of the most famous of the official inquests on Sicily, was
sympathetic to the situation in the south and described the people and circumstances of this region as dire.46 Franchetti claimed that the southern
peasants reminded him of the “savages” of America and seemed to show
little desire for improvement.47 He described them as honest, ignorant, and
superstitious. They lacked any sense of their own rights and showed an
almost primitive feudal respect for the signore “not from esteem, not from
reason, but instinctively, as though for a moral and material superior from
which one cannot escape.”48 Franchetti also described the south in gendered terms. He argued that northerners would have to force their modern
practices and values on the medieval “little sister” Sicily; otherwise, it could
not stand shoulder to shoulder with other countries in European civilization.49 While the north had received their “little sisters” of the south without thought as they thrust themselves “trustingly into [northern] arms,”
they had also exploited the southerners.50 “[E]maciated, starving, covered
with sores,” the north would have to “cure them lovingly, nourish them,
find with every method, also with fire where it is necessary, to give them
back their health.”51 Instead, Franchetti argued,
without even giving a glance at their wounds, we put them to work, the hard
and tiring work of the completion of Italy; we have asked of them men and
MAKING THE SOUTH “ITALIAN”
33
money, we have given to them in exchange a second-rate liberty, foreign
manufacturing, and we have said to them: grow and multiply. And then,
after 15 years, we marvel because their sores have become gangrenous and
threaten to infect Italy.52
The south was a veiled menace to the big brother of the north, who not
only had to support the younger sister of the south, but also had to care for
her, cure her. Franchetti adopted the use of the medical metaphor in
describing the relationship with the south. He described the north as
having the authority generally associated with doctors, while Sicily was
portrayed as a sick patient incapable of making his own decisions.53
Like Villari, Franchetti made a patriotic appeal to the shared national
destiny of all Italians. He contended that the problems of the Mezzogiorno
were shared also by the north.54 Franchetti’s concern with the conditions
in the south reflected his view that the south was integral and essential to
the economy of the country as a whole and to the north in particular.55
Antonio de Viti de Marco, a professor of economics at the University of
Rome and a deputy in Parliament, concurred that the south was integral to
the northern economy, arguing that the protectionist measures of 1887
had reduced the Mezzogiorno into a sort of “colonial market.” He added
that because of these measures, the south lost its competitiveness in the sale
of agricultural products on the international market as well as the right to
purchase foreign industrial products at a lower price than that offered by
northern manufactures.56
Francesco Saverio Nitti, prime minister and scholar of economic structures, also assumed that the south had not been able to benefit from the
false promises of prosperity that accompanied unification. Representing
the paternalistic ideal of conservative meridionalists, Nitti saw the southern
question as an integral part to a single national problem of economic
development. He believed that the Italian state had stifled the burgeoning
development of the south guaranteed by the large monetary reserve owed
to the Bourbon administration.57 If the fiscal measures favorable to the
north were lifted, then the south could also benefit from the potential of
the new Italian nation.58
He believed that the myth of southern prosperity misled the government
to administer the south poorly. Italy faced two different illusions—the
illusion of the superiority of the people of the north and that of the natural
wealth of the south. The first then exploited the resources of the second.59
Because of these misperceptions, the more industrialized north exploited
the south for all of its natural resources, using it as a market for its products.
Hence, the south suffered from increasingly miserable conditions. “Poverty
in fact flooded within the walls of [the south]. An entire emaciated people,
34
RACE AND THE NATION IN LIBERAL ITALY, 1861–1911
a most unhappy mass of men, have an uncertain today and an even more
uncertain and an even sadder tomorrow.”60 Nitti warned against the poor
treatment of the south by the more prosperous north. He saw the north’s
success as directly related to the exploitation of southern resources. For
forty years, the state had continued to drain the wealth of the south to the
north. He believed that the north exploited the resources of the south in
order to foster the growth of its industry and manufacturing more easily.
When this was accomplished, the more prosperous north changed the
customs laws to its benefit and the south continued under its domination.
The delicate union of Italy also suffered under the weight of stereotypes, prejudices, and misconceptions between the north and the south.
Giustino Fortunato, a deputy in Parliament and scholar of the southern
question, described his own encounter with intolerance, even within the
south itself, as a young child. Born in Basilicata, Fortunato recalled,
“I remember well, amidst the dawn of the memories of infancy, the first
thought upon which I reflected, following the severe words that I heard
one day proffered by my father, face to face, holding me on his knees: ‘you
must hate the Sicilians because they hate us.’ ”61 This prejudice contributed
to the perceived division between the north and the south.62 Despite this
split, he believed that with Unification, knowledge of the true south might
assuage the horrible preconceptions held by northerners. He noted with
much pride that there were two Italies in one, but that Italy, which housed
nine million Neapolitans and three million Sicilians, was still an enigma, a
mystery for the newly formed nation. For too long, the peninsula had been
separated by foreign domination. Had the north truly considered carefully
its partnership with a south that had been “confined down there, without
commerce, without industry, without relationships of any sort, with 230 years
of Spanish domination on its shoulders?”63 Was the north listening to its
conscience in working toward improving the lot of its southern sister? Or
had it questioned too often the existence and identity of the Mezzogiorno?
He answered, “We are what race, climate, place, and history (the history of
a land naturally very poor that men obstinately believe to be naturally very
rich) have wanted us to be: in misfortune, the most tragically hit, the weakest
at the moment of the rescue.”64 He urged caution and tolerance because
“the endeavor of Italy is all in the Mezzogiorno; and it is good that I say
this . . . the Mezzogiorno, know this well, will be the future or the disaster
of Italy!”65
Fortunato argued that the unification of the two Italies was tenuous
because “the unity of the great Italian country, the primary political event
of the 19th century, ‘seems a miracle and remains a fairytale . . .’ Rather than
the fruit of national energy, it was an admirable improvisation, supported
only by the force of an idea . . .”66 In order to overcome this fragility, a call
MAKING THE SOUTH “ITALIAN”
35
for citizens to perform their national duty was sent out to inspire reform.
Niccola Marselli, historian and senator, reminded Italians that besides
being concerned with the organization of the government and the form
the nation should take, they would also have to confront the social and
cultural differences that could obstruct national unity. He used sharp
language in order to place responsibility on all Italians—northerners to
help civilize their southern brothers and sisters, and southerners to exit
barbarity and embrace progress. He believed that Italy had been unified in
order to “create an Italian People, homogeneous for civilization, however
varied by nature.” Marselli argued that too much time and effort had been
spent over the form of governance rather than over the actual substance of
the newly formed nation. He admonished, “Other than the virgin land to
cultivate, the inhospitable roads to fix, there exists in Italy, especially in the
Mezzogiorno . . . entire social strata to redeem and to civilize.”67 He urged
all Italians, north, center, and south, to “unite to combat the highest battle
of Italian civilization: that has for its objective the destruction of the
barbarity of one part of our people and the ever increasing decrease in the
number of the proprietors that barbarity maintains . . .”68 Marselli invoked
images of battle and warfare in order to stress the importance of recognizing the problems of the south and remedying the situation before it could
weaken the rest of the nation. He noted with irony the ways in which
northern Italian prejudice about southern Italy mirrored the same narrow-mindedness northern European countries showed the more southern, Mediterranean nations. He pointed, “Italy is all a southern country,
because with the exception of some inhabitants of the Alps, the Italians
have more or less the same vices and virtues of the southern people . . .”69
Whatever regional differences may have existed in Italy, Marselli argued
that they did not “constitute two Italies, as some say: they are two essential
and necessary forces of the organic life of the same people.”70 Neither the
north nor the south could be destroyed and the citizens of the nation
should not desire the dissolution of the unique characteristics of both
north and south.71
Nitti agreed with Marselli’s vision of unity and plurality. In fact, he
argued that despite perceived differences, Italians shared a lack of a sense
of collectivity, which was extremely detrimental to the success of the
nation. Citing Italy’s great legends of heroic endeavor, Nitti felt that this
dependence on symbolic champions represented the inability of Italians to
come together in collaborative action for the good of the nation. He
observed, “In modern countries, those that have the greatest numbers of
heroes are those in which the collective conscience is lowest.”72 He also
noted that excessive pride and arrogance plagued the new nation as it delayed
political work and lengthened bureaucratic procedures. He remarked with
36
RACE AND THE NATION IN LIBERAL ITALY, 1861–1911
much irony, “If one asked 100 Anglo-Saxons if they felt able to do better
than the governors of their country, 99 would respond no, and if you asked
100 Frenchmen, 99 would say yes. In Italy, one can say that all 100 would
say yes.”73 This conceit also rendered the government unable to admit its
errors in the administration of the southern regions.
Like others before him, Nitti appealed to a sense of national duty in
order to instigate national change. Naples was the soul of the south of Italy.
For that reason, the problems of Naples necessarily must interest all of
Italy.74 However, unlike some others, he understood that regional differences had to affect governmental decisions. Nitti argued that “unity did
not mean uniformity.”75 His objective was to present a new positive, modern
culture to the Italian bourgeoisie in order to render it able to succeed in the
social reforms necessary to reinforce and support the politic endeavors of
the proletariat. His primary goal was to create a national consciousness. He
believed that the country was not only the same territory, but a moral
unity constituted of traditions, interests, ideas.76
Yet for the nation to be achieved, the south would have to overcome its
southern condition in order to reach some kind of parity with the north.
Fortunato saw the struggles of the south as an acerbic war for existence in
which proprietors and proletariats, the bourgeoisie and the peasants, gentlemen and commoner fought together and against one another.77 He
maintained that despite the problems in the south, the north would have
to contribute positively to some sort of remedy, reminding northerners of
Giuseppe Mazzini’s warning that “Italy will be that which the Mezzogiorno
will be . . .”78
Curing the Southern Ill: The “Paralysis” of the Nation
The South and Social Disease: Crime and Its Cures
Some meridionalists argued that environment and ecological disaster had
a direct effect on southern character. The psychology of the southern
populations was necessarily influenced by the climate, by the natural disasters so common in the Mezzogiorno. These occurrences helped form a
mentality characterized by “a form of apathy, an indifference to the bad, an
incapacity to dare.”79 Nitti explained, “What was the work of man if a small
violence of nature can destroy it in a stroke.”80 He also described various
aspects of southern culture that were popularly seen as signs of the weakness
of the Mezzogiorno. Religion was a particular weakness of the south because
he argued that it encouraged punishment rather than love, vengeance
rather than forgiveness. Sexual violence also threatened the security of
MAKING THE SOUTH “ITALIAN”
37
the south, not only for the violation of women, but also for the brutality of
the men seeking vengeance on behalf of their sisters, daughters, and wives.
An almost animalistic violence plagued southerners who showed their
wrath when dishonored by an unfaithful wife, a disrespectful paisan.81
These perceived flaws could also explain the embracing of brigandage
and other organized crime groups. Nitti believed that because the masses
were superstitious and accustomed to centuries of the strong overpowering
the weak, they “considered the brigand as a vindicator of wrongs that society
had inflicted.”82 Still, the cruel misery had not completely destroyed the
more “intimate energies of the race, the essential soul of lineage” and in
fact “the brigand and the emigrant with their revolt and their exodus were
proof of an admirable expansive capacity.”83
Other meridionalists as well addressed the issue of organized crime in the
south. Southern question discourse examined the issues of brigandage,
against which the Italian state employed brutal, almost warlike measures, as
well as those of the mafia and the camorra. While these ills were seen as being
particular to the south, they were also “all symptoms of a grave social illness
that troubled Italy and in a special way made itself felt in the Mezzogiorno.”84
Pasquale Turiello, a patriot and political writer, compared the contexts in
which the organizations were set. Whereas Sicily despised the state, rejecting
it completely, creating the mafia as a “counter-state,” in Naples, the people
were indifferent to the state—they attempted to manipulate and use the state
to their advantage.85 Sociologist Scipio Sighele described the camorra as
“psychologically a female and often an hysterical female.”86 Some, such as
Giuseppe Massari, a southern politician and the parliamentary speaker on
the official inquest on brigandage, used the medical metaphor to understand
the problems of brigandage in the south. Many, Massari contended, argued that
brigandage was a “symptom of an evil profound and ancient.”87 He believed
that this medical comparison was accurate, that “in the same way that sickness in the human organism is derived from immediate causes and from
predisposition, the social sickness, of which brigandage is a phenomenon,
has its origins also in the same double set of causes.”88
Methods of battling these associations were varied; however, many
expressed their concern that the cure was often worse than the social ill.
Giustino Fortunato observed,“I asked the elders of my town if one still had
to fear, for one motive or another, the resurgence of brigandage. ‘No,’ they
all replied to me with security; ‘no, because the brutes have been the soldiers of Italy.’ ”89 As Villari had also noted, Fortunato saw that the radical
remedy for the brigandage ill was perhaps more damaging than reparative
for the southerners.
Yet at the time when organized crime was wreaking havoc on the south,
some meridionalists warned against the north taking the same advantages
38
RACE AND THE NATION IN LIBERAL ITALY, 1861–1911
and adopting the same exploitative roles as the illegal southern criminal
associations. They cautioned against the draining of the few assets of the
south and misunderstanding the needs of the region. Fortunato argued
that the discussions about enriching the Mezzogiorno were laughable,
asserting, “It would be enough not to bleed [the south] more with a
burden of taxes that it cannot support, with an entire load of tributes.”90
First, he reasoned, Italy must “reverse the engine at full steam, and then
bring about, little by little, the modification . . . of the arrangement of
taxes like customs! Every other thing is useless talk, it is ignis fatuus, it is
dust in the eyes . . .”91
Parasite and Host: The Continuing Southern Plague
Meridionalists also continued to depict the south as either an ill patient, a
perilous disease threatening the health of the entire nation, or as a parasite
sucking the lifeblood of the more civilized parts of the north. Like other
meridionalists, Nitti likened the problems that plagued the south to an illness
that needed to be cured and warned that “no energy can be pretended by
an exhausted organism, if first there will not be an efficacious cure restoring
its vigor.”92 The miserable conditions of the south weakened the physical
well-being of an entire population. Indeed, the symptoms of the intolerable
situation were to be found throughout the Italian cities. In Naples, where
the city was “reduced by acute illnesses” that “grew every day in worrying
measures, the number of all the sicknesses are a sure index of the physical
decline of a population.”93
Turiello described “the parasites, the constitutional infirmities of the
human body [that] grow [and] reduce in inverse sense the vigor of the
native organism, or rather here the organism, not of the individuals but of
the State.”94 Others such as Enzo Tagliacozzo likened the social problems to
a disease that weakened and infected the body of Italy and in particular the
limb of the south. He explained, “The major social illnesses that ensnared
the weak organism of the newly born Italy were diffuse in the
Mezzogiorno. There is no lack of delinquent associations in the rest of the
peninsula, but they do not have the scope nor the organization of brigandage, the camorra, and the mafia.”95 In the same vein, Scipio Sighele also
used the medical metaphor to describe the efforts of the government to
remedy southern problems. He observed, “It would be evidently an ingenuity if, after having made this diagnosis, we pretend to have discovered
the cure to heal a congenital Italian illness.”96 Many other writers followed
in this pathologicized manner. R. De Zerbi, a participant in the expedition
of the Mille and founder of the Neapolitan newspaper Il Piccolo, warned,
MAKING THE SOUTH “ITALIAN”
39
“One must think of curing the grave evil of the country, the paralysis, that
takes away from Italy half the people; we need to cure the inequality of
national prosperity.”97 In 1875, politicians in the Chamber of Deputies
questioned whether the situation in Sicily truly merited the drastic measures
and laws proposed by some senators, including separate laws for the
Mezzogiorno that would apply to the southern regions only. Some senators
warned that before taking such drastic action, perhaps the Italian state
needed to better examine the southern situation, because “he is certainly
more skilled and enlightened that doctor who, if he can, preserve both limbs
of the sick person and heal him, instead of the [doctor] who heals [the
patient], more or less, but returns him to his family with one limb less.”98
Napoleone Colajanni, who aggressively criticized the work of leading
criminal anthropologists, took offense to the medical metaphors favored
by many of the meridionalists. He condemned the use of the metaphor
that enabled meridionalists to call for the amputation of the south from
the north. Though the patient had been identified and the “symptoms of the
sickness have been noted,” he warned, “they will not proceed victoriously
against it if they do not know the causes . . .”99 He was critical of the characterization of the north as the doctors and surgeons who would either
amputate the gangrened limb that was the south or would cure it of its ills
so that it too could join its northern brothers in European civilization.
Colajanni cautioned that it was not simply the south that was diseased but
the entire country itself, and that the continued divisiveness that separated
the superior north from the inferior south would only further weaken
Italy. He used the same medical comparisons to a different end. He warned
that the situation in Italy would not improve if Italians did not recognize
that the whole country was ill, “at a point of anemia or scrofula, in another
of epileptic convulsions or of infective fever, but always ill. We will not have
true unity that is a producer of sane energy if we do not respect the native
and historic conditions of the single regions.”100
The Empire at Home: Internal Colonization
and the Conquered South
Many meridionalists questioned the depiction of northerners as the glorious
liberators of the south and depicted northerners as conquerors rather than
liberators. Colajanni claimed that northerners viewed southerners, their
“little brothers,” with extreme distrust and disgust and “treated them as
barbarians while showing that they themselves were true barbarians.”101
Others questioned the involvement of northerners in the development
of the south as they saw them as vultures who fed off the south in order to
40
RACE AND THE NATION IN LIBERAL ITALY, 1861–1911
fatten themselves up. Like Carlo Cattaneo, a Risorgimento patriot and
federalist politician, who questioned the motives of Piedmont in the
unification (“I hold firmly that Piedmont has shown adequately the desire
to do by themselves and for themselves . . . And when I think . . . that,
without Piedmont, Italy still maintains 20 million people: I say, I say it with
pain but with firm faith: Piedmont is not necessary!”),102 some meridionalists
believed that northern annexation of the south was an exercise in oppression. With Piedmontese annexation was launched the political, economic,
and cultural oppression of one nation upon another. Although they shared
a common parliament, Neapolitans, Sicilians, and Sardinians were different
from Piedmontese, Lombards, and Ligurians. Not only were the north and
the south economically, politically, socially, and culturally diverse, and thus
by nationality different, the unification itself in reality was seen by some as
oppression and division.103
In their role as conquerors, northerners exploited the structures of the
south, thus igniting in the proud souls of the southerners,“a terrible reaction
and a mound of hate against the so-called Piedmontisization . . .”104 Arcangelo
Ghisleri, a geographer and politician from the north, would later concur,
arguing that in examining the northern prejudices against the south, the
stereotypes on its moral character, and the perceived widespread attitude
of individualism, there was a clear attitude of superiority on the part of
northerners so that “when they spoke of the south—[it was of] dominators
and dominated, between oppressors and victims.”105 The south was treated
as a colonial asset rather than as an equal partner in the unified Italian
nation. As Salvatore Lupo observed, “The functionaries and military pawns
on the field did not have any modesty in assimilating the Mezzogiorno as a
species of rebellious Affrica [sic] because [it was] barbarous and savage,
governable only by force.”106
Much of the blame for the inadequacies and failures of the south was
placed on the greed and selfishness of the north. In the north’s quest for
progress and inclusion within the European sphere, the Settentrione used
the south in order to further its endeavors. Colajanni queried, “The
conclusion? Clear and painful. The brothers of the North contributed to
the economic evils of the Mezzogiorno and Sicily [and] consider[ed] those
regions a colony populated by barbarians, a colony where only a good
market for their industrial products existed.”107 The north looked at the
south “haughtily, treating its inhabitants brutally and scornfully . . . with
insult and with calumny, calling them dirty and barbarous . . .”108 Bruno
Chimirri, a parliamentary deputy in 1876 and minister of finance in 1900,
accepted this interpretation, asserting that because the south was segregated from the rest of Italy, it experienced all the discomforts of the
national transformation without receiving any of the benefits of the new
MAKING THE SOUTH “ITALIAN”
41
state. Despite the extensive participation of the Mezzogiorno in liberating
Italy from the tyranny of foreign rule, they were not in a position,
geographical or political, to make demands on the resources of the newly
formed government.109
Nitti described the south, which had nothing to protect, as a sort of
colony of the north after 1887, a market for the goods produced by the
industry funded by the south for the benefit of the north.110 Whereas the
south had contributed more than its share to government expenditures
after Unification, it had received less than its due from the ruling parties.111
He believed that although the unitary state had produced many benefits,
these advantages were not evenly distributed between the north and the
south. In addition, the development of the north was due not only to its
own efforts, but in great part to the sacrifices of the Mezzogiorno.112 The
south itself was complicit in this exploitative process. Instead of wholeheartedly embracing the modern technological progresses and experiences
of the north, the south stubbornly held on to its traditions, resisting
change at every turn. Although the north certainly did not make industrializing the south a priority, neither did southerners seriously consider the
national efforts to push the Mezzogiorno into the industrial age.113
Perhaps, Nitti conjectured, it was the south’s historical experience with
despotism that prevented its enthusiasm for change, transformation, and
progress. He observed that “in the Mezzogiorno [there is] the habit of
giving up. It is a spirit a little macabre . . . it is not dissimilar to the advice
in some Piedmontese cookbooks: the rabbit loves being skinned alive.”114
Sadly, he also admitted that the distance between north and south was
greater after Unification than before. “While [the north] moved toward the
great countries of central Europe, for its production and for its forms of
public life, [the south] remained always far, and for its production,
remained . . . closer to northern Africa.”115
The southern question was further complicated by the educational and
moral deficiencies of the south. These troubles made it increasingly difficult
for southerners individually and for the region as a whole to pull itself out
of the African abyss toward European progress. Nitti believed that southerners needed to find a spirit of opposition to the abuse and invasions of
the government, and the will to develop a public morality that would help
it to escape from its misery.116 In order to remedy the southern question,
the government needed to institute special laws, guarantee a rigid and
honest system of finance, reduce and offer fiscal exemptions, stop useless
public works, review the organization of trains and customary law, ease
credit without abuse, help production without “increasing the parasitism,”
and transform Naples into an industrial city.117 Indeed, Nitti believed that
Neapolitan workers needed only opportunity to ensure industrial success
42
RACE AND THE NATION IN LIBERAL ITALY, 1861–1911
in the city. He argued that Neapolitan workers were good, meek, and
naturally ready for the intense effort to improve the southern situation.
Although these Neapolitan laborers did not, in actuality, perform at the
level of Lombard and Piedmontese workers, it was not because they could
not do better, but because they had never had the occasion to do so.118
Gaetano Salvemini, a historian and socialist politician, argued for the
politicization of the southern masses as the true base for southern renewal.
The miserable conditions of the south, which represented a weakness for
the nation, were also the tools by which the northern bourgeoisie and the
southern latifondisti could guarantee their prosperity.119 When he was
fourteen years old, Salvemini traveled by train for three weeks with two
northerners, listening to their intolerant discussions of dirty and barbarous southerners. He responded to their diatribe by introducing a
polemic concerning money extorted from the south for the benefit of the
north, but was quickly silenced by the admonishing pinch of his mother.120
How could the north be so secure in their superiority when they themselves had been victim to the same sort of racial and ethnic prejudices, to
the same experience of imperialism? Salvemini reminded northerners that
Today southern Italy is to northern Italy as the Lombard-Veneto were to
other countries of the Austrian empire before 1859. Austria absorbed taxes
from Italy and poured it beyond the Alps; considering the Lombard-Veneto
as a natural market for Bohemian industry; with an inflexible customs
system that impeded the industrial development of the Italian dominions.
And the Lombards were thus held back weary and deprived of initiative, and
was by this time admitted by all that the Lombard people were “nothing.”121
He postulated, in accordance with Marxist principles, that the battle
between the classes would be the decisive factor in reaching a solution to
the southern question. He believed that an alliance between the workers of
the north and the peasants of the south would be the integral center of a
democratic renewal of the entire Italian state.
Regardless of one’s political affiliation, two points were extremely clear
to Italian intellectuals and politicians—the south would play a crucial role
in the forming and the future of the country; and the process of reckoning
that both the north and the south would undergo would add dimension to
their respective identities and that of the unified nation. Gino Arias, a
historian of law and professor of political economy, warned that not to do
anything to remedy the wrongs in the south was already reprehensible, to
aggravate the injuries, even because of ignorance, was truly a travesty in
the last war of national unity. He argued that the new state had the duty,
for the good of the country, to find a solution to the southern question.122
MAKING THE SOUTH “ITALIAN”
43
Conclusion
Although the idea of the south as a homogeneous entity, with an identity
and a mythology of its own, arguably did not come into some regularized
form until fifteen years after Unification with the 1875 publication of
Pasquale Villari’s Lettere meridionali, representations of the south as a site
distant and distinct from northern Italy and Europe featured in preRisorgimento and Risorgimento discourse. Pre-Risorgimento writings often
characterized the southern regions as primitive, backward, and barbaric.
Whereas previous depictions lay much of the blame of southern backwardness on the despotic rule of the Bourbons as well as on the history of an
oppressed, politically dominated Mezzogiorno, later representations would
emphasize the racial character of southerners. Images of the south as the
land of dolce far niente were explained through environmental and climatic
stimuli. Like Africa and other subaltern lands, southern Italy felt the stimuli
of geography, of the unique Mezzogiorno pull of sea and volcano, intensity
and heat, that would shape its racial character and personality.
The figure of the south as an external Other became suddenly internal
and domestic with Unification in 1861. Earlier representations of a
barbaric, savage south more akin to Africa than to the rest of Europe
influenced post-Unification depictions of a backward, diseased south that
hindered the progress and glory of the newly constructed nation. The
stereotypes of the south were based loosely on what were viewed as
uniquely or particularly southern characteristics—criminality in the form
of the mafia, the camorra, and brigandage, economic chaos, moral deficiency, individualistic tendencies, religious superstition, apathy, and laziness.
These popular images forced the southerners to battle not only the real
domestic political issues at hand but also the prejudices of northerners.
Sociologist and historian Ettore Ciccotti described the attitude of the
north toward the south as “a type of Italian anti-Semitism.”123
Representations of the south as backward and primitive did not go
uncontested. The irony of a southern country criticizing its own south did
not go unnoticed. The difference with the Mezzogiorno accentuated by
northern Italians diverged only in degree from that offered by northern
European countries in contrast with their southern, Mediterranean neighbors. In essence, the criticisms were very similar.124 Southerners such as
Napoleone Colajanni called into question the explanation provided by
meridionalists who in attempting to expose southern misery to provoke
reform ended up invoking the same prejudicial idioms employed by those
northerners who opposed southern annexation from the beginning.
Southerners, however, were also complicit in the dissemination of the
developing language of meridionalism. Francesco Crispi, in his capacity as
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RACE AND THE NATION IN LIBERAL ITALY, 1861–1911
prime minister, called upon the stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno to
describe his own character for his own gain. His manipulation of southern
character traits to own his purpose serves to show the elasticity and
malleability of meridionalist discourse.125 He used his own “meridionality” to make his arguments on the southern situation more authentic. His
use of popular imagery of the volcanic features of southern identity,
impassioned rhetoric, outspokenness without reserve, helped him to
maintain influence and justify his actions by presenting himself as a
dynamic, zealous, emotional leader, moved from his heart to guide the
nation to glory. Crispi conformed to the Sicilian male model—serious,
tranquil, tenacious—and prided himself on his sense of duty, honesty, and
frankness. And as the stereotype demanded, he was at the same passionate
and grave, impetuous and persistent, compassionate and contemptuous.126
Extremes characterized Sicily, and so did they describe the myth of Crispi
that he himself propagated. He used this discourse to his advantage, proving that the importance of the nation and national identity superceded his
regional identity as a Sicilian, that in fact his Sicilianness rendered him
exceptionally, inarguably Italian.127 He understood, however, that an
imagined link between Sicily and Africa existed, and he did not deny those
connections. When Crispi received a Moroccan delegation in 1890, he
himself pointed out the common cultural links between his native Sicily
and the African country. Taking the delegation on a tour, he likened the
elephant tusks of Africa to his own horn of coral, which he considered the
secret to his omnipotence. He saw both as talismans against enemies.128 He
made clear his sense of association with Africa and African customs. If
Crispi chose to describe himself in the perceived “primitive” terms of his
guests, he also allowed his critics to use the same vocabulary to describe his
rule. Did his Sicilianness render him an Oriental despot or the head of an
African tribe?129 Thus, at the same time Crispi could employ meridionalist
language positively, he also exposed his weaknesses and offered his
opponents opportunity to exploit these stereotypes to legitimate their arguments against the south and southerners. The malleability of meridionalist
discourse reflected the constant process of development and contestation
that intellectuals, writers, and politicians undertook to understand themselves and their relationship to the south.130
While earlier representations found history, nature, and culture to be
accountable for southern character, later, post-Unification, post-1875
renderings found southerners themselves physiologically responsible for
the state of affairs in the region. The stereotypes of the south as barbaric
and primitive increasingly seemed to speak more to reality than to myth.
Descriptions of the south as feminine and gendered, primitive and African,
diseased and ill became more and more attributed to uniquely southern
MAKING THE SOUTH “ITALIAN”
45
characteristics. An emphasis on individuality and a lack of a collective
sense, unfettered sexuality and an intense passion translated into traditions of individual vengeance, and organized crime were ascribed to the
innate particularities of southern identity. Responsibility and culpability
were placed on southerners themselves. The lack of motivation to change
and to better the southern situation was not due to external factors of historical oppression or geography, but rather was a result of the internal
features of southern morality and spirit. With the pseudoscience of physiognomy, this was later extended to the very biological and racial make-up
of southerners themselves.
The pathologicization of the southern question in which the
Mezzogiorno was depicted as an invalid dependent upon northern doctors
and European cures helped in the development of the physiological
rationalization of southern identity by introducing the south as a “foreign”
body. Depictions of the south as a parasite, a gangrened limb, a disease
allowed critics to perceive it as something outside of Italy, as an alien object
to the healthy, moral north. These images of the south made available the
lexicon of difference and Othering crucial to the physiognomical discourse
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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3
Science and the Codification
of Race: Physiognomy and
the Politics of Southern
Identity
Introduction
The pathologicization of the Italian southern question, which compared
the misery of the south to a plague threatening the healthy, prosperous
north, contributed to the developing discourse of physiognomy in Italy.
Depictions of the south as an illness, a parasite infecting the north, codified
the image of the Mezzogiorno as a foreign entity, alien to the more “whole,”
more progressive Italian north. The descriptions of the parasitic,“other-ed”
south helped ease the transition into portraying southerners as biologically different, as constituting a different race than the northerners.
Northerners, characterized as doctors who held the responsibility of either
curing the cancerous south or amputating the gangrenous southern limb,
aided by a few complicit southern researchers—Sicilian Alfredo Niceforo
was one of the most notable accomplices—sought to understand and
explain questions of difference and diversity through emerging research in
biology, science, physiology, and phrenology.1 The use of mathematical
measurement and the scientific method to legitimate the unflattering theories of a racially inferior south justified the already existing prejudices
toward the Mezzogiorno.
With the publication of L’uomo delinquente. In rapporto all’antropologia,
giurisprudenza e alle discipline carcerarie (Criminal Man. In Relationship to
Anthropology, Jurisprudence and Prison Discipline) in 1876,2 Cesare
Lombroso achieved recognition among international intellectual circles as
the founder of the Italian school of positivist criminology.3 Trained as a
psychiatrist and a professor of criminal anthropology at the University of
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RACE AND THE NATION IN LIBERAL ITALY, 1861–1911
Turin since 1905, Lombroso contended that race served as an essential
element to the etiology of deviancy in the south. His groundbreaking
works attracted a number of students and disciples who helped him found
the new school of criminal anthropology that challenged traditional
penology that had formulated a hierarchy of punishments based on the
severity of the crime. Instead of focusing on the crime, Lombroso and his
followers transformed the field by examining the nature of the criminal
him/herself. The school argued that the punishment should not be made
to fit the crime, but rather to fit the criminal. Less important then was the
actual crime committed: even a person who had committed a minor offense
could be disciplined as a felon if his/her moral degeneracy threatened
the welfare of larger society.
To determine the level of one’s corruption, Lombroso and his followers
developed a system by which the dangerousness (pericolosità) of an individual
was evaluated through his/her evolutionary development. Modeling itself
after the theories of Social Darwinism, the Lombroso school attempted to read
and define physical malformations or atavisms as indicators of degeneracy.
Physical malformations signaled moral and psychological limitations; the
number and severity of these physical deformities determined the degree
to which an individual was compromised.
This biological method of understanding and defining difference
easily extended beyond criminality to race and gender. Reflecting the
discourses of imperialism and domesticity, so too did Social Darwinism
and the Lombroso school analyze ideas of barbarism, savagery, primitivity,
emotionality, sensitivity, and weakness. The inherently biological nature of
Lombroso’s methods lent itself to the extension of his work to the discussion of race. He contended that on the evolutionary scale, the people of
Asia, Africa, and the Americas were less developed than their more civilized,
white European counterparts.4 The discourses of racial difference and
criminality intertwined as positivists attempted to unravel the hierarchy of
crime by understanding innate primitivity and civility.
However popular the theories of the positivist school would become,
their work did not go uncontested. Some sociological criminologists, such
as Filippo Turati and Napoleone Colajanni, criticized Cesare Lombroso
and his followers for their biologically deterministic beliefs.5 Arguing that
human development was influenced by a number of external environmental
factors such as education, poverty, and home life, sociological criminologists
attacked the idea of the “born criminals” (delinquenti nati) constructed by
positivists. They disagreed with Lombroso’s claim that biological race
affected behavior and pointed to the “social diseases” that had come to
affect even purer and more homogenous races. Using physical features as
indicators of criminal deviancy assumed some sort of biological regularity
SCIENCE AND THE CODIFICATION OF RACE
49
or “normalcy,” a difficult argument for Italy. Indeed, Italian researchers of
race and biological difference faced the added complication of investigating
race in a country that had been peopled by numerous migratory groups
from North Africa, Greece, the Mediterranean Basin, and Eastern Europe.
Certainly, the idea that one race encompassed all of Italy was easily disproved
with a review of the history of Italian settlement; categorizing the many
populations inhabiting the country would be a much more complex task.
Positivist anthropologists faced challenges from many sides. First, to
delineate the many races of Italy would be to undermine the work of
nationalists who hoped to unify the country through some notion of
commonality. Second, to accept the multiple races of the peninsula would
require the development of positivist theories on Italian hybridity in
opposition to Aryan or German purity. Third, to study biological and racial
inferiority and superiority would prove uncomfortable to some scientists
who themselves were members of an “inferior” race (Lombroso himself was
Jewish and extremely sensitive to the revival of anti-Semitism in northern
and eastern Europe). Finally, many of these scientists were also socialists
who adhered to the idea of social reform and would have to negotiate the
tension between claims of biological inferiority, and hence inevitable
primitivity, and a genuine desire to improve the conditions of the poor in
both the north and the south.
The narrowing of this discussion on Italian positivist anthropology and
physiognomy and, within this context, the categorization and defining of the
racial groups of Italy, delineated the biological differences between northern
and southern Italy and intersected with the detailed analyses of the south by
meridionalists. The physiognomical and positivist anthropological theories
on the Mezzogiorno and its people contributed to the process by which
southern weaknesses and flaws, seen earlier as a result of its history of political and social idiosyncrasies, came to be explained through race and biology.
Criminal anthropologists forwarded the premise that the problems of the
Mezzogiorno and its people enumerated by the southern question—laziness,
individuality, criminality, uncontrolled sexuality, widespread illiteracy, barbarity, savagery, and primitivity—were manifestations of biology and race.
Italian Physiognomy and Criminal Anthropology
While physiognomical texts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries broke new ground in categorizing and ranking human beings
using pseudoscientific method, these new works were founded in a much
longer tradition of studying human attributes as a means of determining
human character. Physiognomists such as Paolo Mantegazza, the director
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RACE AND THE NATION IN LIBERAL ITALY, 1861–1911
of the National Museum of Anthropology in Florence and the president of
the Italian Society of Anthropology, believed that the science first appeared
“in the Bible, in the Fathers, in the philosophers, and in the poets.”6 From
the very beginning, the examination of faces for expressions of joy and
sadness, hurt and anger led not only to the sciences of physiognomy but,
Mantegazza conjectures, to the searching of the heavens and stars for a connection between the constellations and features, of “judicial astrology—a
veritable white magic applied to the study of the human face.”7
Although the origins of studying human expression and features dated
much earlier, the parascience experienced a resurgence during the Middle
Ages with the works of Averroè, the Spanish–Arab Islamic philosopher also
known as Ibn Rushd, during the twelfth century and Alberto Magno,
German philosopher and theologian, later made a saint, in the thirteenth
century.8 During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries,
Giovanni Battista Della Porta argued effectively against the astrological
physiognomical trend that combined the passion for the mysterious with
the study of facial features. Also popular during this period was chiromancy, the art of palm reading. Della Porta contended that human features
were related to one’s character rather than to the movement of the stars. In
the eighteenth century, Johann Kaspar Lavater, a Swiss theologian and
writer, attempted to reconcile science and theology, enlightenment and
esoteric Christianity in a new natural science of the soul and the body.9
The introduction of science into the field was further accentuated by the
work of anatomist Camper who studied the human face in different races.
Physiologist Charles Bell who examined the anatomy and philosophy of
expression brought the study of human countenance into the nineteenth
century. Charles Darwin, however, pushed physiognomy to true innovation as he opened the field to comparisons by looking for the first lines of
expression in animals. Whereas previous anatomists and physiologists had
concerned themselves only with expression in relation to art and aesthetics, Darwin examined the general laws that affected expression in the entire
animal kingdom.
In the late nineteenth century, Italian positivist anthropologists and
sociologists based their work on race and criminality on the legacy of studies on human features and expression. Furthermore, they advanced the science of phrenology, combining issues of nation, identity, and affiliation
into their research.10 Lombroso described this new science as something
“completely new . . . risen suddenly . . . from the fertile seed of the modern school, upon the ruins of the old and the new prejudices,” as a “science
of anthropology, that studies man with the means and with the methods of
the physical sciences, that replaces the dreams of theologians, the fancies
of metaphysicians with a few arid facts.”11 This new science examined one
SCIENCE AND THE CODIFICATION OF RACE
51
of the great unsolved mysteries, the “origin and plurality of the human
races; if, that is, within the human races [there] exist profound inequalities
that manifested themselves from their origins and lasted unchanged under
the variations of weather and climate, leaving in the history and destiny
of the people their eternal stamp . . .”12 Lombroso marveled at the possibilities of this new field of study, which would allow “whites,” who “tower[ed]
proudly at the summit of civilization,” to know whether they would “one
day bow down before the prognathous snout of the Negro and the yellow
and ashen face of the Mongol; if, finally, we owe our primacy to our organism
or to chance.”13 Most importantly, the prognosis of racial origin would be
based on the greatest authority, science.14 This new science encouraged the
categorization of races as a means of understanding difference and justifying political action. With the political discourses of nationalism and imperialism coming to the forefront of public debate, phrenology, physiognomy,
and criminal anthropology came to play an important role in the development of policy and ideology.
The study of expression in determining moral capacity, intelligence,
and psychological character provided room for speculation by pseudoscientists who claimed their research was based on hard fact and methodical
experimentation. Despite arguments that the work in the field was based
on evidence and thus scientifically legitimate, the room for conjecture
allowed for the publication of some rather ridiculous assertions. One example of such license is the categorizations of race and expressions offered by
G. Luigi Cerchiari, writer and physiognomist. He described:
Ferocious Expression: Tobas, Pampas, Maori, Witi Islands
Sweet Expression: Chiriguani and Guarani in general
Apathetic Expression: Patagonians, Quichua, Aimarà, Malaysians, Chinese,
Japanese, Laplanders
Buffoonish or Monkeylike Expression: Negroes in general and Negritos
Stupid Expression: Hottentots, Bushmen, Australians
Intelligent Expression: Europeans15
Taken to an extreme, physiognomy could be used as a dangerous tool
for legitimating scientific racism—even in its most scientific form, however,
researchers found it difficult to escape from the social prejudices that
informed their work. Anthropologist Giuseppe Sergi used scientific measurement as a means of understanding and delineating race, but avoided
using skin color as the primary method of rationalizing difference. While
he grounded his observations on racial groups on his experiments, he did
move beyond the realm of scientific method to make some conjectures on
the psychological differences between Aryans and Italics. Based on a few
trips to northern Europe, he described Aryans as more collectively inclined
52
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and more organized than the disordered, individualistic Italics. During the
eras of ancient Rome and the Renaissance, the individualism of the Italics
created exemplary military leaders and brilliant artists and allowed for
Italian cultural and political dominance. In the modern age, however, the
framework of politics and society found more value in social unity and
collectivity, which allowed for the building of solid institutions, such as
industry and education, and the formation of cohesive identities that
allowed for a strong nation and successful imperial campaigns.16 Sergi
argued that
[w]hile within the Aryan race the individual easily mixes with the collective
without any sacrifice, and considers himself . . . an element of the social unit
from which he does not aspire to rise . . . [,] within the Mediterranean race,
on the contrary, every individual wants to emerge from the social mass, even
when it is necessary to remain as a molecule of an undivided unit.17
The psychological characteristics of these two different races explained
then their political inclinations, the former tended toward order, the latter
toward anarchy.18 This rationalization led Sergi to write, “[t]herefore
socially they (the Aryans) are worth much more than the Mediterraneans,
notwithstanding that individually they are inferior.”19
Sergi was not the only anthropologist to develop a race model that
posed an oppositional superior, collective Aryan race against an individualistic, chaotic Mediterranean people. In attempting to define difference,
social scientists left the realm of evidence to speculate in the arena of the
imaginary. Luigi Pigorini, the archaeologist and paleontologist who
founded the Prehistoric and Ethnographic Museum in Rome, believed that
the first inhabitants of the peninsula came from Africa. In his opinion,
these first residents of Italy were savages bereft of significant cultural
elements. He argued that the more progressive tools of the Neolithic
civilization—smoothed stone and ceramic crockery—had been “imported
complete, therefore from a people who came from outside,” by men arriving
“from the banks of the Baltic,” who brought “rays of new light . . . to the
Mediterranean.”20
An Italy Divided: The Two Races of the Peninsula
The delicate equilibrium of these identities was threatened not only by
competing discourses of nationalism, religion, and class but in Italy was
also exacerbated by theories of racial difference. The southern question
had already built upon the historical ideas of difference between the north
and the south of Italy. The ensuing anthropological and physiognomical
SCIENCE AND THE CODIFICATION OF RACE
53
discourses rendered those differences biological in nature. The racial
explanations of the pseudoscientists replaced specific cultural, political,
and social environments as the cause behind the great disparity between
northern and southern Italy. Complementing existing arguments on climate
and its influence of human development, discourses on difference contributed a new element to the mix—that of race. This new interpretation
gained great popularity. Even Giustino Fortunato, the Neapolitan meridionalist and deputy, espoused the racial explanations offered by physiognomy:
Nobody remembered the singular harshness of the topographical structure,
that makes southern Italy an insular kingdom and out of hand, a kingdom of
discontinuity, with the intricate labyrinth of its landslide-ridden mountains,
with its very irregular streams in the change of rivers, with the rather
frequent deserts not irrigated and not irrigable, upon which reigns malaria,
nobody gave due importance to the fact, always more established, that the
Italian nation was formed with two races originally dissimilar, the Aryan
and the Mediterranean, one prevalent in the north, the other in the south of
the parallel of Rome, blonde and of tall stature the first, dark and of oval
visage the second,—subordinate and unequal by birth, by life and death, of
a different attitude of spirit and intellect.21
Northerners and southerners were separated not only by a cultural abyss,
but also by a racial divide. So dissimilar were the two groups in Italy that
northern Italians were more akin to northern Europeans than to their southern Italian relatives. A. De Bella queried, “Or are you firmly convinced, as
I am, despite the atrophy and the adaptations produced in us until today
by the Bourbon government and by the Savoy government, that our
nephews, inhabitants of northern Italy could be more Aryan than authentic
Aryans?”22
Anthropologists divided Italy into three zones with different combinations of two different races—the south, perceived as being populated with an
almost uniform and primitive Mediterranean race; central Italy, with a mixed
Mediterranean and EuroAsian population (however, the Mediterranean
genes still dominated over the EuroAsian or Asian genetics); and the north,
with its seat in the Po Valley, which was peopled largely by EuroAsian
elements, Celts and Venetians, Illyrians and proto Slavs.23 As Italian physiognomists explained, two races, EuroAsian and EuroAfrican, peopled
Italy. The Celt and Slav component of the EuroAsians advanced into Italy,
penetrating as far as the Tiber Valley.24 Because of these movements,
northern Italy was populated by a people of mixed Aryan and Etruscan/
Roman (Italic) descent. Southern Italians, instead, were more homogeneously Italic. Giuseppe Sergi explained that in the region south of the
Tiber Valley, Italy hosted “primitive inhabitants,” the Mediterraneans.
54
RACE AND THE NATION IN LIBERAL ITALY, 1861–1911
North of the Tiber Valley, “the Aryan elements become gradually greater
up to the extreme north of the Italian Alps. The Po Valley can be considered
predominantly Aryan.”25
Sergi argued that Italians and Italy, the people and the state, accepted
and adopted the ideas of Latinism and the theories of racial inferiority. He
observed,
And Latinism . . . is like a social disease for we Italians more than for other
nations, that is like a cryptogram that invades all activities and all tendencies,
because it has penetrated in the sentiments of the majority of people and of
those who arrive at guiding destinies; for this reason, one sees it in the
education system, in the politics, in the legislation and in other active
manifestations of the collective life. But because it is a disease, Latinism, cannot
but give morbid manifestations, and therefore in politics, in the legislation,
and in education does not produce but caricatures of the Latin manner,
deformation, and the dispersal of energy.26
Italians, although belonging to the same racial group as such Mediterranean/
Latin countries as France and Spain, faced an even greater hardship. The
genetic flaws inherent in the biological make-up of the Mediterranean
race were further exacerbated by the cultural weaknesses of the Italian people.
Unable to effectively prevent and curb these imperfections, the Italian state
reinforced the stereotypes in the people and in the culture.
According to anthropologists such as Enrico Ferri, a defense attorney
and law professor, who, with Lombroso and Raffaele Garofalo, formed the
positivist school of penal law, race played an integral role in the uneven
development of the different regions in Italy.27 For Ferri, it played the most
important role in determining patterns of crime within areas that shared
similar social and physical environments, particularly in the more violent
crimes such as homicide.28 While he did examine the different racial types
that inhabited Europe, he also fell prey to broad generalizations, referring
to the “white race” and the “colored races.”29 Although Ferri was the first to
coin the term “born criminal” (delinquenti nati), he also recognized the
importance of such social factors as poverty and illiteracy. His inclusion of
these social elements in examining criminality allowed other physiognomists
and anthropologists to consider race with the environment as a mitigating
feature in understanding difference.
The study of race and ethnicity then was enhanced by previous research
conducted by meridionalists on the southern question. The problems
enumerated by writers on the Mezzogiorno were reexamined, rewritten,
and reconceptualized to incorporate the new racial theories.30 Positivists
recognized the importance of previous discussions on social environs and
their effect on culture and progress and integrated the southern question
SCIENCE AND THE CODIFICATION OF RACE
55
into their own discourses on difference. Some physiognomists argued that
the causes behind the idiosyncrasies of the southern races and the miserable
conditions of the south originated in the
social breakdown that resulted from the battle of . . . the adventurers who
wanted dominion, in the political history of those who dominated . . . , in
bad government past and present, in the abandonment . . . [of the] dominators
intent only on impoverishing [the south], and finally . . . in the movement and
the shifting of the center of civilization . . . from the Mediterranean . . . [to]
central and northern Europe . . .31
The intersection between the discourses of meridionalism and physiognomy would inform future discussions on difference; however, race would
remain the most serious consideration in the examination of the
decadence of the Mediterranean ethnic group. According to positivists, the
difference in civilization and quality of life is derived from race. As
Francesco Perrone argued, “it is the biological phenomenon, namely
ethnic and anthropological, that is the principal factor to consider in the
explanation . . . of the phenomenon of our inferiority.”32
Anthropologists and physiognomists continued not only to categorize
the peoples of Italy into two distinct racial groups, they also began to
distinguish characteristics, social, cultural, political, collective, individual,
that they believed belonged to particular races and ethnicities. The two
races of Italy also conformed to the preconceived notions of collectivity
and individuality particular to Aryans and Mediterraneans. These
dichotomous perspectives on the self had an impact on social action also.
Collectivity allowed for a more stable society, a more ordered cultural
system. Individualism prevented the progress of society as a whole and
created a more chaotic, competitive atmosphere. Giovanni de Gennaro
admonished, “Look at those northerners: they have journals for peace, for
feminism . . ., for popular culture, to defend liberty, an infinite number of
schools, and charity flourishes, and instruction expands and they participate
in all the civil and human battles . . . Instead, what do we have? An honest
mass, but apathetic.”33
The racial differences between the north and the south also manifested
themselves in ways that were visible, apparent, and indicative of the “civil”
divide between the two regions. Physiognomists argued that race determined individual and collective characteristics, that identity was formed
on the basis of biology and heredity.34 Because of the sense of collectivity
in the north, social features, such as cities, communities, homes, were more
ordered, more stable. What accounted for the relatively better conditions
in northern Italy? Two reasons, Sergi explained, determined the northern
56
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tendency toward civic responsibility. First, ethnically and biologically,
northerners were inclined toward communal work, and therefore the
association between labor and capital was not particularly complicated.
Second, the location of northern Italy, its proximity to the regions of
central and northern Europe where work had been organized efficiently
for some time, influenced the social and industrial systems of northern
Italy. He contended that “[n]orthern Italy, as a matter of fact, has a true
working class that . . . wants to live better than the classes of southern Italy,
and feels the dignity of the work and of the class to which they belong.”35
This organization in the north also allowed for an industrial activity
and an industrial production that tended toward the cooperative. Sergi saw
the success of industrialism in northern Italy as a natural manifestation of
the biological predisposition toward collective action. Whereas the north
moved progressively forward, bolstered by their communal consciousness
that translated into industrial activity, social living, material comforts of
life, and private and public hygiene, “the south, with rare exceptions in
some principal cities, live some centuries behind, passing up all that serves
living civilly and . . . even the decency and hygiene of the houses and of the
cities.”36 The lack of “active impulses” that “could put them on the road to
work” was lacking in the south.37 Southerners lacked the desire to live
comfortably and healthily, and, in Sergi’s opinion, “they seemed a primitive population upon whom the influence of civilization has had little
efficiency.”38
The difference in perspective on collectivity and individuality proved to
be a vicious cycle for southerners. Their lack of collective consciousness
prevented them from achieving the industrial success of their northern
counterparts. Lino Ferriani observed, “Two civilizations therefore in one
Italy . . . The same spontaneity of southern ingenuity, caressed by the
warm climate, put to sleep the desire of the culture, and causes the slow
unraveling of progress.”39
Preying on the existing prejudices of meridionalism, positivist theories
on the two different races of Italy were based on the principle that the
Mezzogiorno was populated by an inferior race as compared to the people
of the north. As Francesco Perrone explained,
And in the research and presentation of statistical data, comparisons and
consequences that went on with elaborations, arrived at stabilizing that the
short stature, the pigmeism, the narrowness of the chest, the albinism, the slowing
pulsation, the delay of menstrual function and other similar notes of differentiation, demonstrates and speaks to a characteristic of physical inferiority that,
then, underwent yet another continuous degeneration for hygiene and the
depressed economy not advanced in the south of the peninsula.40
SCIENCE AND THE CODIFICATION OF RACE
57
If northerners and southerners were of two different racial groups, then
could not southern misery be the result of biological weakness rather than
of misgovernment or exploitation? Anthropologists and physiognomists
offered politicians a means of defense against the sharp criticisms that
charged the government with treating the south unequally and of using
the resources of the Mezzogiorno for northern gain. Misery in the south
was caused not by poor or prejudicial legislation, but rather by the genetic
resistance of southerners to change. Perrone explained that southern
Italians were of a “[r]ace that is African in origin, like all the populations of
the Mediterranean, but has remained more African than other fractions,
refractory, that is inert, in front of the new road to civilization, even if it has
the faculty for assimilation that could raise it to the level of the others.”41
The new race theories also offered writers who were wary of the
tenuous unification of northern and southern Italy an opportunity to
support their allegations that the union of the two regions was forced and
unnatural. The differences of racial make-up of each group and the levels
of civility determined by the biological features of the people of each
region could prove to be too great an abyss to fill. In fact, the unification of
the north and south under a centralized national state and a single national
flag was not, perhaps, beneficial to either region. Attempts to bridge the
gap would fail miserably because the distance was simply too far and the
disparity simply too profound.
Despite the pessimism of certain physiognomists, some anthropologists
offered a solution to the discourses of difference that rendered the disparity
too great. If indeed science proved the general inferiority of the Italics/
Mediterraneans to the superior Aryans, and, for the more specific, the inferiority of the EuroAfrican southern Italians to the EuroAsian northern
Italians, then perhaps the answer to the Italian dilemma lay not in racial
purity, but in racial diversity. If, unlike the purer Aryan people of the
north, Italians faced a population divided by race42 and connected by
miscegenation, perhaps this mixing could prove to be an advantage rather
than a disadvantage. Sergi suggested that
[w]hile the mixing of the races would be useful also from a biological point
of view, in our case it would be efficacious from a social point of view.
A major unification would occur in Italy, when the two different races that
populate it, of which one has its primary nucleus in the Po Valley, and the
other in the more southern part of the Tiber and below, could be so fused
that every difference could be considered nonexistent.43
The history of the Italian people, which posed such a potential hindrance to
future national exploits, also accounted for the multiplicity of Italian
58
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identity.44 Addressing the very unique nature of Italians who were often
caught between the two different races, the various ethnic identities, the
diverse regional dialects, the problem of reconciling all these identities into
a cohesive sense of Italianness, some anthropologists, such as Mario Pilo, a
writer from Pallanza on Lake Maggiore, argued effectively that it was the
very hybridity of Italians that made them distinctively Italian. He
explained his own background:
Son of an islander father and a sub-alpine mother, product of the crossing of
a brachycephalic, blonde family of Catalan origins and of a dolicocephalic,
dark family of the Ligurian race, Greco-Latin in name, southern by
temperament, northern by education, strange mix of body and of soul of all
the most varied characteristics of the two Italian races, I passed all of my life,
from infancy to today, divided between Piedmont and Calabria, between
Emilia and Puglia, between Campania and Lombardy, between Sardinia and
the Veneto: and of every horizon has been made my visions, and of every
speech my thoughts, and of every soil my memories; and everywhere I have
left remnants of my heart . . .45
The definition of Italianness then depended on the very diversity of the
people as dictated by historical legacy. Thus, despite efforts by nationalists
who argued for commonality through historical legacy and destiny, and
rationalizations by anthropologists who saw unity in the mixing of races and
cultures, underlying all arguments was the recognition of ethnic difference.
Southerners as a Racial Group: Environment to Biology
In delineating the differences between northern and southern Italy, the
defining characteristics of each region were also enumerated. Even if the
one region depended on the other to understand and construct its identity,
both the north and the south developed their own unique personalities
and characteristics. With these imagined qualities came also perceived
prejudices and stereotypes and very real aggression and discrimination.
While the north certainly cultivated a certain identity in opposition to and
in conjunction with the south, it was the Mezzogiorno that acquired new
facets to its character that rendered it individual and distinct from the rest
of Europe for its unrelenting backwardness and primitivity.
Positivist anthropological discourse that used race as a category of
identification and as a means of understanding levels of civilization,
progress, and potential, created a new vocabulary with which to express
categories of difference already delineated in meridionalist discourse. Race
theory did not so much construct an innovative language in which to
SCIENCE AND THE CODIFICATION OF RACE
59
discuss southern Italy as it used scientific method and an original lexicon
to structure the problems posed by the southern question. Francesco La
Penna explained the new framing of the Mezzogiorno by physiognomists
and criminal anthropologists: “There were those who wrote, explaining
the reasons of the facts, that the Mezzogiorno was a naturally poor region;
and others, more brutally, who maintained that the Mezzogiorno was of an
inferior race; and therefore its inhabitants indolent, obtuse and worse . . .”46
Rather than explaining the miserable conditions of the south as a manifestation of the social, cultural, and political environment, criminal anthropologists re-couched the terms of the southern questions in the language
of race and biology.47
The physiological make-up of a human being, a people, a region determined not only potential criminal tendencies, but also the success of
economic endeavor, the evolution of social and cultural systems, the efficiency of political frameworks. The circumstances surrounding the southern
situation were explained through the vocabulary of race, and the latent
progress of southern mentality was understood through the grammar of
biology. La Penna wrote,
From the southerners was expected, with miracles, the product of the work
of much time and of much concert of forces and variables; and, because this
could not and has not been possible, and the missing effect involved and
involves the responsibility of their same more severe judges: here is everybody
attacking them without discretion, confounding in . . . one unit good and
bad, martyrs and tyrants, all humiliating with the strangest judgments, . . .
describing them as an inferior race!!48
In order for this new discourse of racial determination to function then,
disparity and difference within the south itself could not exist. In order for
race theory to make the wider, grander conjectures on nation and nationalism, on racial groups, and continents, divergence from established patterns
for predicted genotypes had to be smoothed over and made negligible.
Sweeping statements on ethnicity and regionalism made possible the vast
generalizations on race and identity. Francesco Paternostro wrote that
these theories created a racialized Mezzogiorno “extending it to all of the
south of Italy, to Sicily, and even to Sardinia: almost as if there were one
origin of the southern people and of the islands, only one history, that is
the dominations or the constitutions, one or similar the infiltrations of
foreign peoples, one finally the events!”49 Physiognomists grouped people
together and rendered them a community, made them a people, constructed
them an identity.50 The homogenization of southerners, their cultural
commonalities justified by their racial affinities, offered physiognomists
60
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and criminal anthropologists the possibility of explaining the backwardness
of the south as an inevitable biological outcome. Thus, with research done
by these pseudoscientists examining criminal tendency, technical explanations for primitivity, and the linking of southerners to the “colored” races
of Africa, the “Orient,” and Asia, politicians, writers, social and cultural
critics were able to blame phenotype rather than governmental policy or historical legacy for the inability of the south to reach the levels of civility
achieved in the north.
Criminality in the Blood: Theories of
the Southern “Born Criminal”
The new theories constructed by the positivist school engaged with meridionalist discourse by reexamining the well-known issues of southern misery
and reconceptualizing those problems in biological terms, cloaking them
in pseudoscientific method, and representing them as manifestations of
the inevitability of race. Appropriating the concepts introduced by southern
question discourse, criminal anthropologists and physiognomists borrowed
from the well-established meridionalist vocabulary and adopted the
metaphors popularized by the dissemination of stereotypes and prejudice.
Scipio Sighele, who until 1912 was a member of the nationalist party,
described the options available to the surgeons of the positivist school in
curing the criminal disease:
The positivist school does not have great affection for the repressive
methods to which it attributed only a secondary importance in the therapy
of crime, but it applies to sociology the criteria of medicine and knows that
when hygiene can do nothing anymore because the disease has progressed
and has already formed gangrene, the only method of salvation is surgery.51
The pathologicization of the conditions in the south was easily adaptable
to the new terminology presented by the science of biological difference.
However, the cure, possible surgery, proffered by meridionalists as a means of
remedying the southern “cancer” was less easily affected in racial discourse. In
finding biology the source of southern misery, anthropologists could not
argue for a remedy. Instead, using race suggested an immovable, fixed
reality. Using science implied incontrovertible fact. Despite the dangers, or
perhaps because of the serious consequences of race theory, the positivist
school continued to argue for a certain racial determinism. Southerners
were more prone to committing violent crime because of their racial
tendencies toward ferocity.
SCIENCE AND THE CODIFICATION OF RACE
61
What were the dangers of unification then? Would the southerners be
responsible for the corruption of the north? In fact, the south was, as
described by Scipio Sighele, a land of born criminals. In his 1890 study of
Artena, a small village in the province of Rome, entitled Un paese di delinquenti nati (A Land of Born Criminals), Sighele was convinced of the
inevitability of race in determining the criminal potential of an individual
and of a society. Pessimistic in his evaluation of the situation in Artena,
Sighele saw criminality passed from one generation to the next as a kind of
legacy. He argued that criminality was hereditary, and that “for unhappy climates, or for other disgraceful conditions of environment, the inhabitants
bring with them generation to generation a sickness, so in Artena one part
of the inhabitants transmits generation to generation the tendency toward
crime . . .”52
Studying the proportions of delinquency in Artena, using what methods
were available to him through physiognomical and anthropological
theory, the measuring of skulls, the examination of facial features, data
gathering in the small community of rates and types of violence, Sighele
believed that the small town was the definitive place of the title of his work.
A true country of born criminals, Artena appears almost like a savage oasis in
the middle of a civil population, and the extraordinary numbers of crimes,
would seem implausible and would remain inexplicable, if it did not
correspond to the laws of heredity, and if one did not think that perhaps,—
like every poison although producing its effect on all the parts of an organism, affects however especially one organ on which it exerts what is known
as elective action,—so also the microbe of crime,—poison of the organism,
unfolds in some places more intensely its deleterious influence . . .53
If the people of the south tended toward violent crime, it was because
aggressivity and the need for vengeance ran in their blood.
The mafia, camorra, and brigandage then were predictable manifestations
of a passionate race. Unable to control themselves and their innate, natural
urges, southerners organized criminal activity and behavior because it was
the only way for them to understand the ordering of society. The racial
determinism of this thought not only left southerners bereft of any hope
for change, it also alleviated the government of any responsibility for the
failure in eradicating violent crime in the south. In Pungolo, a daily
Milanese newspaper published from 1859 to 1891, Francesco Torraca, a
literature professor at the University of Naples and general director of the
Ministry of Public Instruction until 1901, speaking of the camorra wrote,
“If the police commissioner arrests the criminals and brigands, it will
always be well done, but we flatly deny that this is a cure for the sickness.
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After a little while, it will begin again. Vice is in the blood as they say, that
is, in the character . . .”54
Race as a predictor of criminality also became an indicator of southern
primitivity. Just as one could not deny their biological make-up, it would
be difficult, virtually impossible to transform a civilization resistant to
change and progress. Lombroso argued,
There exists unfortunately an inferior civilization in many regions of southern
Italy: as proof I will give the camorra and the mafia, that will have their
equivalents in the north, but not so intense and numerous as in the south.
Also the fact that the criminality of blood lasts in the south is proof . . . [of an
inferior civilization].55
Brigandage, the mafia, and the camorra did not manifest themselves forcefully in civil countries; instead, organized crime was the normal state of
primitive tribes and flourished in societies with an inferior civilization
based on violence.56 The types of crime committed, whether murder, rape,
assault, crimes associated with the more primitive peoples, or crimes such
as fraud, financial maneuvering, bribery, linked to more industrialized,
civilized societies, represented indicators of social progress and evolution.57
Lombroso was convinced that “the first roots of southern brigandage, of
the mafia, and of the camorra, were nothing . . . but the atavistic transmission
of the customs of nomadic peoples and of the savage tribes of prehistoric
times, favored by the idleness in which the people of Naples and Palermo,
their legitimate heirs, lived.”58 Organizations such as the camorra were truly
barbaric clans, “something that [leapt] to the eyes when . . . confront[ed]
[with] savage societies . . .”59
To understand the nature of the criminal organizations, that is, to
understand the features of the race that allowed and cultivated a code of violence and a convention of honor connected to delinquency, anthropologists
examined the need for these associations in the south, searched for the
reasons behind their existence.60 What did it mean for a society, a culture
to be defined by its predisposition toward crime? Why would a society,
rather than working toward eradicating a social menace, view it as a rebel
force, as an honorable system to assert independence and autonomy?
Sicilian anthropologist Alfredo Niceforo explained that the mafia was not
an association of criminals, but rather demonstrated the “individual and
collective spirit of rebellion against the principle of authority, a tendency
to put the solution of every thing on the point of a knife or on their
arrogance . . .”61 He argued that if one were to examine the “psychological
fabric of the Sicilian mafia, you will find that it is composed of three
elements which have survived times now long gone: the feudal spirit, the
SCIENCE AND THE CODIFICATION OF RACE
63
Arab spirit of independence and pride, and the medieval spirit of
chivalry.”62
But if race was a predictor of criminality and criminality an indicator of
backwardness, then backwardness needed to be understood also in its
interconnection with biology and physiology. If the south was attached to
traditional principles and rituals from a forgotten age, the backwardness,
the fear of change, and the resistance to progress were only smaller features
of the greater primitivity of the race. The inability to better themselves, to
improve upon the racial foundations, to mutate and attain the levels of civilization achieved by other races indicated not apathy on the part of southerners, but rather the inability to overcome the obstacles that their racial
make-up presented.
Alfredo Niceforo and the Primitivity of the Southern Race
Not only were southerners of a different race than northerners, they had
the grave misfortune to be an inferior people who were infinitely more idle,
more violent, more sensual, less disciplined, and more individualistic63—
all characteristics attributable to the nature of a backward society. Alfredo
Niceforo explained that “the other Italy, that of the south, presents to us a
moral and social structure that recalls primitive times, and also perhaps
almost barbaric, a social structure of an inferior civilization, by now taken
over by the fatal cycle of modern social evolution.”64
Alfredo Niceforo, born in Castiglione di Sicilia on January 23, 1876,
followed in the footsteps of Lombroso and Ferri, and became one of the
most influential and controversial writers of race discourse.65 He served as
president of the Italian Society of Anthropology, of the Italian Society of
Criminology, and, from 1910 on, as a member of the faculty at the
University of Rome, teaching criminology at the School of Criminal Law.
In 1895, he was sent by the Roman Society of Anthropology and the Italian
Geographical Society to Sardinia to collect anthropological data.66 A pupil
of Enrico Ferri, Niceforo found that the rates of violent crimes in Sardinia
rivaled and often surpassed those of Sicily. In his book on criminality in
Sardinia, which compiled a plethora of prejudices and misconceptions
into a treatise on the Sardinian race, he explained that “[t]here exists . . . an
ethnic temperament that is formed of common psychological characteristics
and individual components of a human variety combined.”67 He continued,
Alongside such ethnic temperament, exists a national temperament . . . And
there exists finally a regional temperament that for thousands of Sardinians,
thousands of Tuscans, and thousands of Piedmontese, taken by case, also
different amongst themselves, possess above all common psychological
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characteristics that allow for the construction of an ideal type of Sardinian,
of Tuscan, of Piedmontese.68
In delineating the different temperaments that together competed and
constructed the consciousness the nationalists so desired, Niceforo
touched upon the very difficulty of this fragile intertwining of identities.69
Like other criminal anthropologists, Niceforo saw race as the primary
factor in patterns of crime throughout a geographical area. Like other
criminal anthropologists, he did not give a clear definition of race. Unlike
other criminal anthropologists, however, he did not place as much credence
in social and cultural environs as instigators of difference—Niceforo placed
more emphasis on physical atavisms. He wrote, “Italy of the south
represents—in comparison to Italy of the north—a true . . . social atavism. It
is left with ideas, with sentiments, with the civilization of centuries past.”70
In his most controversial work, L’Italia Barbara Contemporanea,
Niceforo delineated what he believed to be the factors that allowed for a
contemporary, barbarous Italy. Not surprisingly, the reasons behind the
perceived primitivity of Italy lay in what he argued were the very real
inferiorities of the south. For Niceforo, social and cultural characteristics
and physiology and race were intertwined in an inextricable way. The poor
hygiene, the lack of organization in the cities, the failure of the productive
systems led to a miserable economy. And as Niceforo explained,
[t]he miserable economy produces then a miserable physiology. The average
stature of a homogeneous group of individuals is therefore an index of the
physiological misery of that group: there exists still many other physical
indices of misery: in the cranium, the muscular force of the chest, in face,
even in the beating of the pulse and the coloration of the eyes and the
hair . . . Does the lack of riches of the southern Italians have any relation
with their stature?71
This inferior economic situation did not foster a hygienic environment, an
organized social structure, or an efficient political and legislative system; it
also prevented southerners from eating regularly and following a healthy
diet. Niceforo observed that in the north, people not only eat differently
from people in the south, but they also ate better quality foods and
consumed a much more balanced, caloric diet.72
The abyss between the north and south manifested itself also in the rate
of illiteracy. Niceforo noted that illiteracy diminished much more rapidly
in the north than it did in the south, again, in part, due to the concept of
communal welfare and social action so prevalent in the north.73 He noted
that not only did the numbers of registered students differ in the north and
SCIENCE AND THE CODIFICATION OF RACE
65
the south, but there was also a great disparity between those who registered
and those who frequented the schools.74 Again, the northern appreciation
of collectivity helped to improve not only the school system but also the
perceived value of education.
Niceforo argued that one of the central differences between northerners
and southerners lay in their varying perspectives of the self, or the “I.” In Italy
then, “the physical difference between Aryans and dark Mediterraneans, is,
essentially, in the major and minor excitability of the I: one,—the dark
Mediterraneans,—have the restless and extremely excitable I, the other,—the
Aryans,—have the very balanced and cold I.”75 Whereas the restlessness and
excitability of the Mediterranean “self” generated “inattention, the weakness of
the will, excess of banal emotion, impulsiveness, excess of the imagination, the
absence of a practical sense of life, a quick and rapid intelligence,”76 the Aryan,
with the more docile and less excitable I had a “sentiment of social organization much more developed that the dark Mediterraneans, who, having an I
more excitable and very mobile, has a more developed sense of individualism
and rebels at every spontaneous social and collective organization.”77
In describing the kind of savagery and barbarity of southern people,
Niceforo reinforced many of the stereotypes and myths already established
by the prejudices of meridionalist discourse. Arrested development, crime,
violence, indolence were signs of primitivity, of a civilization unable to
progress to the necessary levels of the modern age.78 While crime was certainly not absent in the north, the nature of the crimes committed
reflected the varying levels of civilization achieved by different regions.
Niceforo noted that the forms of criminality that resulted from the brutality and savagery of primitive civilizations had become, “in the modern
societies, refined and civil, ferocity has ceded its camp to fraud, violence to
craftiness. The delinquent of the primitive society battles with the muscles;
that of the modern, civil society, battles instead with the brain.”79
Niceforo described life in southern Italy as “still primitive,” where “one
lives as if the centuries of civilization passed very far from this land, forgetting it and not touching it with their vivifying breath.”80 The south,
abandoned by the hand of progress for too many years, was cursed to continually replicate and reproduce the tragic primitive systems of its past.
In the same way with which the individualist psychology of the inferior—
for example of the delinquent or epiletoide—repeats the psychology of the
other inferior people, of the savages, of the animals, so the psychology of
inferior societies, less civil, less evolved, repeats the social psychology of the
primitive tribes, of the crude populations, still untouched by the magic finger of civilization, Naples finds itself exactly in this situation, save the partial
and sporadic differences owed to the contact [with] a superior civilization.81
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The north and the south then were divided into people of culture and
people of nature, respectively—one able to navigate the perils of the modern
world and manipulate technological and social innovations to their
benefit, the other doomed to follow their instincts, unable to cope with the
ideas of progress.82 The natural evolution of the species espoused by
Darwin and appropriated by social scientists to understand cultural and
social survival passed over southern Italy.
Perhaps the only hope for the Mezzogiorno was its unification with
northern Italy, a more civilized, industrialized society that would now bear
the burden of taming the southern people. In fact, one of the solutions
proffered by anthropologists and sociologists was the intermingling of the
two races in order to form a stronger race. Unfortunately, this strategy of
genetic planning could have dire consequences.
To bundle together two societies—one civil, the other less civil—like we did
with the strict centralization [of the state] that suffocates us, and throw over
it an equalizer mantle of only one law, of one desire, of one constitution,
while on the one hand encumbers the free development of the more elevated
and civilized areas, that abandoned to an autonomous regime could touch
quickly an elevated state of well-being and of civilization, greatly damages
the less advanced provinces . . .83
Arguments such as this one by Niceforo offered Italian republicans who
still believed overwhelmingly in a confederacy the scientific credence
needed to support their political agendas. The unity of northern and
southern Italy hindered progress in the more civilized area and worsened
the situation in the disadvantaged region.
When the savage society met with and ultimately was conjoined with
the more progressive societies under the rubric of nationalism, both the
primitive and the civilized societies suffered.84 The settlement of small
communities of “Mediterranean” peoples to the north explained the existence of havens of criminality riddled with typically “southern” bloody
crimes. As Niceforo depicted Naples after Unification,
Naples, socially coarse, primitive, . . . found itself unexpectedly in contact with
a superior society, that was too distant [with which] to be assimilated. The
assimilation did not happen, and there was a superimposition instead of a
fusion: for this [reason], you find in the Neapolitan ambient two strident
elements . . . an inferior element, unevolved, primitive, on the one hand, and
on the other, an element of modern civilization not well assimilated, and therefore damaged by the attempts of a marriage with an inferior civilization.85
If the south could not improve even with the help of the north, then it was its
biological character that did not allow it to progress forward. The cultural
SCIENCE AND THE CODIFICATION OF RACE
67
characteristics of southern Italy that defined it as the Mezzogiorno, that
gave it its unique personality and nature were repackaged as racial qualities.
The primitive nature of the southern people also carried a gendered
component in its description. As in the southern question that characterized southerners as a more feminine people, dependent on foreign rule,
sensitive to religious ritual, controlled by superstition,86 and governed by
their passions and emotions, the race theories of criminal anthropologists
rendered the southern race itself feminine, sexual. Niceforo himself
described the collective psychology of southern society as “infantile,”
known for its “feminine lightness.”87 He went so far as to depict southerners as “woman-people” and northerners as “men-people.”88 In line with
the gender discourse on the weakness and inferiority of women that
biologicized and “hystericized” the female body, nature, psychology, and
tendencies toward domesticity, criminal anthropologists borrowed from
the existing gendered vocabulary in order to describe and differentiate
between the racial groups. Thus, the racial discourse of physiognomists
held even more resonance as it echoed the popular discourse of gender
and sexuality. The feminization of southerners mirrored the Europe-wide
fears of degeneration.89 Not only did the irrational femininity of the
southern race prevent it from progressing into the civilized world, but also
the unbridled sexuality (linked both to race and to gender) of southerners impeded the efforts of the Mezzogiorno to improve their lot.90 The
physiognomical theories incorporated the languages of gender and
sexuality in order to rationalize and understand differences in race. By
using the existing vocabularies of meridionalism, anthropologists not
only helped to define more clearly their conceptualization of race, they
also made their ideas more readily acceptable, more palatable to a society
already accustomed to seeing gender difference.
It appears quite logical then that the biological discourse of the positivist
school should have also appropriated the very visible categories of color.
Not only were southerners of a different, inferior race than the northerners,
their race was more akin to the peoples of the more primitive sectors of the
world. Their perceived primitivity rendered people of the Mezzogiorno
closer to the savage, barbaric natives of the lands untouched by civilization
and progress. In some cases, the savagery of southern Italians made them
less European. Niceforo believed that if you were to compare the “savage
brutalities committed by the Neapolitan plebes at the beginning of the
century . . . with the method with which they carried themselves . . . you
would have enlightening proof of the truly barbarous inferiority of those
people.”91 He quoted Alexander Dumas, who put it most succinctly
when he described his impression of Naples: “We are not in Naples, we are
not in Europe, we are in the presence of cannibals, in some bay of New
Caledonia and we have in front of our eyes true man-eaters.”92 In examining
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southerners in the Mezzogiorno, race implied not only difference from the
northerners, but commonality with the non-Europeans. In the development
of positivist discourse, southerners were rendered feminine, sexual, savage,
barbaric, and colored.
The construct of race offered social scientists a grouping of people that
incorporated all the problems of meridionalist discourse, intertwining all
the stereotypes and prejudices of the southern question into a single, more
compact consciousness. Indeed, the factors that rendered southerners
an inferior people, their femininity, primitivity, criminality, indolence,
mysticism, culminated in a paradigm of race and color. Race did not simply
constitute a group of people diverse from other units; rather, it incorporated ideas of culture and color. Inferiority implied a distinct melanin
content. With this understanding of difference then, Niceforo found the
barbarism of southerners, the descriptions of the nature of their characters
and the features of their social consciousness and unconsciousness, to be
disturbingly non-European.93
In order to rationalize the inability of the south to improve its conditions, to relieve the north of all culpability in its failure to transform the
Mezzogiorno with social, political, and economic reforms, the positivist
school compared southerners with non-European groups. The area south
of the Tiber Valley housed a people that, despite or perhaps because of centuries of Spanish and Bourbon rule, were closer in resemblance, in blood,
in culture, in ritual to the African and Middle Eastern world.94 Niceforo
observed that in Sicily,
you hear in the ear words in dialect and names that are purely Arabic . . .
Elsewhere you are taken by the severity, perfectly Oriental, with which the
men keep their women; at every step you hear voices and songs of love so
passionate and so rich with colorful images that you do not find but in the
songs of the Orient.95
Indeed, Niceforo found many commonalities between the people of the south
and the people of the Middle East and Africa. Perhaps most significantly, he
believed that the people of Naples lived with fear and under threat of terror
that “generated [a] servility of the masses.”96 In the south, “the same
phenomenon occurred . . . that happened in the slave populations that
lived in the zone of Africa . . . called the slave zone: the terror that the
Negro king strikes—powerful God, always thirsty for blood—is such that
the people are slaves worse than a herd of sheep . . .”97 The similarities in
culture, in ritual, in action were explained neither by the analogous levels
of primitivity nor by the comparable environmental conditions, but rather
by their shared blood, the shared heredity.
SCIENCE AND THE CODIFICATION OF RACE
69
Recalling the ninth century and the invasion of Sicily by the Arab forces,
criminal anthropologists viewed this legacy, reminiscent of the one drop
rule that rendered people “of color” if they had but one drop of nonwhite
blood, as an eternal reminder of southerners’ intimacy with the colored
races. Niceforo remarked that in Sicily, “you find a spirit of independence
almost savage, left by the infiltration of Arab blood. You cannot prevent a
Sicilian, who sometimes is a true Arab, identical from the time of conquest
to today, from using the knife or [resorting to] violence if someone insults
him. All his African blood rebels.”98 The biological make-up and the
cultural character of the Sicilian people reflected its diverse historical
experience with foreign domination and influence. “So you find in the
Sicilian character the Saracen restlessness and pride, the vanity of the
Greeks, the Spanish arrogance, certain Oriental loftiness, certain savagely
Arab impulses.”99
With this single drop of blood came the genetic trappings anthropologists
saw as inevitable and inherent to individual racial groups. A vicious cycle
that seemed to have no end, the biological identity southerners were given
by the positivist school seemed to guarantee social failures regardless of
the efforts made to reform a corrupt system. Sergi had observed that the
south did
not sense the impulse of work, it gets used to laziness, remain[s] always
unable at whatever work, lives as a slave who pays some vile or personal
service, and comes closer, so, in the body as in the spirit, to the primitive
tribes, and to the blood relatives of Africa, Berbers, or Abyssinians.100
A sense of destiny, of unchangeable fate trapped the southerners in a state
of static primitivity. Race, not effort, biology, not struggle, determined the
conditions of the south. Niceforo explained,
So that race, born in Africa . . . that in the war battle found the supreme
individual and social glory, that race that, tied in the form of a clan, fought
in a chronic state, maintaining continuous aggression as a normal condition
of . . . life, brought, through emigration, all its psychological characteristics
and transmitted them to its descendents like a peculiar legacy.101
So from one generation to the next, the degeneracy of the race was passed
on in southern Italy. The Mezzogiorno, unable to overcome its biological
destiny, was bound by its history of foreign oppression that could be read
in the features, in the genetics of its children. This feature of the racial discourse not only offered politicians a scientific explanation for the failures of
governmental programs dedicated to the improvement of the Mezzogiorno,
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it also provided leaders with a rational, technical excuse for not continuing
efforts for reform.
Contesting Theories on Race and the Two Italies
The theories on race, ethnicity, and biology that developed in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries neither went unquestioned nor
were accepted equally by all intellectuals in all sectors. If race were truly the
primary consideration in discussions of difference, then difference itself
would have to be defined and justified through association with particular
ethnic groups. The publication of Antonio Renda’s La Questione
Meridionale compilation of responses to the publication of Niceforo’s
L’Italia Barbara Contemporanea in 1900 showed both the expansiveness
and the unevenness of the dissemination and acceptance of these new
ideas. The questionnaire introduced the problem:
In the unique breast of Italian politics are therefore two societies very diverse
in the level of civilization, for the social life, the moral color; and while one of
these two Italies—that of the north—presents itself to us with a physiognomy
of a more diffuse civilization, more fresh and modern, the other Italy—that
of the South—presents itself to us with a moral and social structure that
recalls primitive and unevolved times, a social structure of an inferior society.
There is in summation in southern Italy an arrested development that
makes it similar to a spent railcar on a dead railway, in the middle of the
tremendous movement of a hundred locomotives.102
It continued,
If you admit this difference of level of civilization and development between
the two parts of Italy, do you believe that the causes of the minor diffusion
of southern Italian society are to be found in its isolation because of which
it (especially Sardinia and Sicily) was left behind, from the misgovernment
of the Spanish and the Bourbons that placed it under submission, from the
yoke of a weighty feudalism under which it was dominated? And not far
from the causes was there also the research into the marked differences
between the character of northern Italians and that of the southerners?103
Responding to a questionnaire that delved into the Italian physiognomical
debate and called for an intellectual rethinking and re-rendering of race
theory, twenty-seven of the most important anthropologists, sociologists,
writers, and politicians explored the academic, penal, social, political, and
economic ramifications of this discourse. However widespread these new
ideas, writers still lamented the difficulties they had in propagating such
SCIENCE AND THE CODIFICATION OF RACE
71
potentially distasteful ideas.104 Ettore Ciccotti, a sociologist and historian
who was a member of the Socialist party, explained that “when one tries to
deduce social inferiority from the characters of this race or that presumed
race, one encounters immediately the argument that a higher level [of
civilization] had been attained by the same race in other historical periods,
a consideration that excludes an intrinsic and permanent inferiority.”105
Scipio Sighele concurred, adding,
That there are, for example, two Italies, north and south,—different in race,
history, customs and habits,—is one of those axioms that nobody attempts to
negate when one speaks in private; but this axiom becomes a hypothesis, in
fact a paradox, in fact even a lie, and an unpatriotic lie, when,—instead of
whispering it in conversation,—it is published in a book or in a newspaper.106
For some, such as Gaetano Salvemini, the race theories so in vogue were
often difficult to swallow. Even more problematic were the use and manipulation of categories of race to explain social inequalities. Salvemini
admonished,
I deny absolutely that the character of the southerners, different from that of
the northerners, has some role in the diversity of development in the two
lands. Race is formed in history and is the effect and not the cause of that,
and in history it is transformed; explaining the history of a country with the
word race is lazy and simplistic.107
The concept of race itself was questioned as to its veracity as a signifier and
its very existence.
Despite the gulf between the two regions, the arguments that claimed
that unity was false, unnatural, and detrimental to regional health, and the
scientific proof of biological difference offered by physiognomists and
anthropologists, the north and the south were inextricably linked in one
unique fashion: the racial superiority of the north depended on the inferiority of the south. The self was defined in its relation to the other. The
north only looked progressive because the south looked so backward. In
comparison to the more northern countries in Europe, northern Italy was
not as progressive as it was represented. In fact, according to economist
Achille Loria, the whole of Italy not simply the south, was barbarous.
[N]orthern Italy, despite the fact that it is far superior in civilization to
southern Italy, is . . . still very far from the level of civilization attained by the
other nations on the other side of the Alps: because it presents even now
those tumultuous and asymmetrical lineaments, characteristic of a backward
civilization, that other more progressive countries of Europe have overcome
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for quite some time . . . [I]nstead of a barbarian southern Italy that would
be opposed to a civilized northern Italy—according to the thoughts of
Niceforo—there is disgracefully a “barbarous contemporary Italy,” as
proven by the title of his work.108
Compared to the more northern regions of Europe, northern Italy was still
southern, and thus comparatively more Mediterranean. If the theories of
physiognomists were accurate, then barbarity was only a relative term.
Giovanni de Gennaro observed,
Climate and race—if they exist—have always been, more or less, what they
are now; nevertheless, they have allowed rapid development of
civilization . . . We note, in the meanwhile, and not without regret, that the
north of Italy can be proclaimed highly civilized only thanks to the barbarity
of the Mezzogiorno.109
Among the most well-known dissenters against the positivist anthropological discourse were sociological criminologists Filippo Turati and
Napoleone Colajanni. In “Il delitto e la questione sociale,” published
in 1882, Turati criticized Sergi’s racial theories.110 Turati’s thoughts were in
line with his political work as one of the founders of the Socialist Party in
1892. He felt that social conditions, such as the lack of education, poverty,
unemployment, and the breakdown of the traditional family unit, were to
be held accountable for criminality. While Turati recognized the misery
that permeated the south, he argued that “poverty means the lack of education
in the broadest meaning of the word. It means not knowing the rules of
social interaction, ineptness in conforming to the individual interests; bad
examples, honesty betrayed, weak nerves, excitability of sordid passions,
inability to reflect, permanent deficiency in satisfying vital needs.”111 Turati
believed that the only solution to remedying the problems of social
environments that led to pervasive criminality was the elimination of a
capitalist society and the creation of a new social order where wealth and
education where more equally distributed. He did not directly address the
issue of race, but mentioned it as one of the factors that could be overcome
with a good environment.
Napoleone Colajanni, Sicilian republican and sociologist, was one of
the most vocal opponents to Lombroso’s school of criminal anthropology.
He was one of the first to criticize and reject the positivist theory of race as
the primary cause of southern backwardness.112 Motivated by his desire to
protect the south and southerners from stereotypes and racial prejudices,
Colajanni condemned the rather ambiguous categories of race formulated
by the positivist school. He challenged the Lombrosian connection
SCIENCE AND THE CODIFICATION OF RACE
73
between physical characteristics and psychological features by pointing
out that many nations were populated by different races and yet the
citizens of those countries appeared to behave, think, feel in a similar
fashion. He wrote,
The general tendency for the races to become less diverse in terms of blood
and interests and to increase communal inclinations proceeds incessantly
and finds in the organism of the nation the melting pot for the fusion of
psychological elements, even while the anthropological elements remain
unchanged or change slowly and minutely.113
Collective identity was formed not by race then, but by environment and
social construct.114 He argued that if the proposed theoretical connections
between race and civilization indeed held true, then the south “would be
condemned in perpetuity to its inferiority.”115 He continued,“[F]ortunately
for our regions, this hypothesis doesn’t have any scientific value: it does not
represent anything but an anthropological fairytale . . .”116 Still, Colajanni
did not deny that a multiplicity of races populated the Italian peninsula. He
proposed instead that “the diversity of races through physical characteristics
has been well-known for some time . . . But diversity does not, in fact,
mean at all inferiority of the race.”117
Referring directly to the dependence of northern superiority on the
perceived inferiority of the south, Colajanni mocked the supposed ascendancy of the Alpine race of northern Italy.118 Considered culturally, politically,
economically, and racially superior on the peninsula, northern Italy was
derided as populated by unkempt, uneducated, uncouth mountain people
by the southern French.119 He compared the modern proponents of race
theory to the champions of slavery during Aristotle’s time—both groups
believed that a person’s classification as slave or free was written in their
biological and physiological composition. It was ironic, he pointed out,
that during that ancient period, slaves were often northern European, the
group considered superior in the late nineteenth century.120
According to Colajanni, the high homicide rate did not necessarily
signify a greater ferocity in southern Italians. He argued that assault rates
were actually higher in Germany and in Scotland, areas that were supposedly
more civilized and more progressive. Even crimes such as infanticide were
more common in northern Europe than in Italy. Therefore, he insisted,
violence was not inevitably linked to one race, but was common in different
forms to all races. Colajanni called attention to the decline in the numbers
of homicides in Sicily and Sardinia, down to almost one-half of what it had
been twenty years before. This expeditious improvement did not conform
to the imperatives set up by theories of racial determination.121 He compared
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different types of criminality, from the camorra, murder, kidnappings, and
extortion in the south to the theft, fraud, stock exchange and financial
maneuvering, and rigging of the market in the north. He noted with irony
that often the linking of certain races with particular crimes proved inaccurate and inconclusive. Too often those very crimes were rampant in areas
not populated by the race deemed more prone to these misdemeanors.122
Even the mafia and the camorra were not uniquely southern Italian as
bands of whites who lynched blacks similarly dishonored the United
States.123 Colajanni highlighted the inconsistencies and weaknesses of the
categories of race set up by the positivist school. Lombroso had attributed
a great importance to race in the determination of the criminal phenomenon. Colajanni argued that Lombroso believed the main center of crime
was in Conca D’Oro due to the fact that the area had served as the “first
and most tenacious residences of the ‘rapacious Berber and Semitic
tribes.’ ” Yet, Colajanni pointed out, “[w]e know already that there are
fewer crimes in Algeria than in Sicily; and in Algeria, you can find the pure,
unmixed Berbers.” He also derided Lombroso’s personal struggle with race
theory due to his own racial line—Lombroso was Jewish. Lombroso, fearful
of the resurgence of anti-Semitism, allowed some exceptions for the Jewish
people. Colajanni mocked, “The same Lombroso rushes on, contradicting
himself, contending that . . . the Jews everywhere contribute only minimally to delinquency. But the Jews do not represent the semitic race par
excellence?”124
Colajanni believed that anthropologists manipulated race to conform
to whatever definition was convenient, and that the contradictions of the
theory were conveniently overlooked so as not to challenge the basic premises of hierarchy. He argued that the morality of public life in the south was
not inferior to that of the north and that using race as the primary category
for predicting criminality was prejudicial and simply wrong.125 He
insisted, “One thing is clear to me: that neither climate nor race is enough,
as is repeated often, to explain the delinquency in Sicily.”126 He continued,
“Is there the need to deduce a consequence of the previous premises? If
there is, there is only one possibility: crime is the product of social conditions.”127
He underscored the reality of social exploitation that motivated the scientific façade of anthropological racism.128
Colajanni’s dissenting opinion inspired others to question the authenticity and legitimacy of the anthropological theory of race in Italy. The
integrity of data gathering, the utility of the numbers produced, and the
rationale behind the proposed hypotheses were questioned by sociologists
who felt that the positivist school simplified meanings of difference in part
to forward prejudicial preconceptions and political divisions in southern
Italy.129 Notwithstanding the evidence provided by positivist anthropologists,
SCIENCE AND THE CODIFICATION OF RACE
75
phrenologists, and physiognomists, climate, social systems, and political
environs were still considered by many to be more influential and more
integral to understanding the nature of difference. Northerner Arcangelo
Ghisleri questioned the evidence offered by scientists that racial categories
not only existed but were a reasonable measure of a people’s prospective
civility. He wrote,
But it is not here . . . that I can give scientific proof of the insufficiency of
those theories that either make questions of climate and race or talk of
craniums, of color, of stature, and of anthropological and biological features,
of infatuation, of impatience, of discipline, of religiosity and superstition, of
illiteracy, etc.,—or rather talk of the forms of individual and collective
delinquency and of the relative statistical rates,—all imply (even though
they do not dare to declare it) an irremovable distrust in the spontaneous
forces of the populations of which they speak; so that all imply or lead one
to consider the inferiority of the south as a perpetual and incurable fact.130
Were race theory and criminal anthropology pursued purely for scientific
advancement or, as Ghisleri alluded, did the quest to understand biological
difference presuppose the inferiority of the south as the basis of the social
experiment? Could scientific objectivity be respected when cultural and
racial prejudice informed the individual and collective identities of the
researchers and of the research itself? Bernardo Alimena, a Calabria-born
professor of penal law at the University of Naples, declared,
It is a veritable fallacy, it seems to me, this theory according to which the
Mezzogiorno and the islands are inhabited by an inferior race, called the
“Mediterraneans,” which carry in them, fatally, simply, all the reasons of their
very decay . . . not for any other reason, but for their African origins.131
Conclusion
The new theories of criminal anthropologists and physiognomists did not so
much introduce an innovative new approach to understanding categories of
difference so much as they racialized the already existing groupings popularized by the southern question and gender discourse. Engaging with other
languages of difference and appropriating the perceived problems of the
Mezzogiorno, race theory addressed social constructs of difference in order
to rationalize and make scientific the varying levels of progress in the Italian
nation. It offered a new perspective, a scientific method of examining the
problem that seemed to better justify the prejudicial and racist stereotypes
and myths surrounding southern Italy.
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The Social Darwinism that inspired the positivist school to examine
southern Italy as a subject in its research on race also informed the solutions proposed to remedy the problems uncovered by this new approach to
understanding difference. Efforts to change the south through governmental reform—through military action to eradicate organized crime,
economic programs to alleviate financial distress, nationalist work to
replace traditional social divisions with common cultural consciousness—
had failed because the people themselves were biologically unable to
accommodate change. Still, the south was not utterly hopeless. Erminio
Troilo, a professor of philosophy born in Chieti in Abruzzo, suggested that
the people of southern Italy should not be “considered as a cursed race,
savage, forever unable to look at the sun of civilization, damned to remain
crystallized and immobile in the din of life and of the civilization that
passes . . .”132 Instead, he urged Italians to appreciate southerners as an
“ethnic type different from that of the other regions of Italy, with its special
energies, able to develop therefore, in the right conditions, a special form of
civilization corresponding to its own characters, to its own tendencies.”133
The answer then to transforming the Mezzogiorno lay in altering the
nature of the people themselves. According to Giuseppe Sergi, the inferiority of the southern race could be cured only with the influx of Italians from
the more active provinces, who would “mix and melt with the southern
people.” The government should favor this mixing of the races that “would
be biologically and also socially useful.”134 Sergi believed that it was necessary to mix new and foreign elements derived from other populations.
This intermingling would produce a new people that would finally release
the latent energy of the southern people. Gradually, these new hybrid people would transform their social systems and in that revolution would follow the natural evolution of the people into a more progressive collective.
Sergi believed that mixing with northern Italians could have beneficial
effects on the south.
Now, if instead of foreigners who emigrate and exploit the indigenous Italian
forces . . . Italians of other more active provinces, already initiated in the
labor of every kind and mixed with the southern populations . . . merged as
one people with them, importing habits of activity and beginning work, the
renewal of the inert southern people would be assured.135
This intermixing of blood and people would be the responsibility of the
other provinces of Italy, which, being inextricably tied to the south after
Unification, would either drown with the “lead weight” or learn to swim
with the extra appendage.
SCIENCE AND THE CODIFICATION OF RACE
77
The race theories constructed by the positivist school not only imagined
a specific racial identity for the southerners, they also helped to create a
biological character for the northerners. If the people of southern Italy
were individualistic, primitive, inferior, savage, feminine, and sexualized, the
people of northern Italy were organized, collective, social, progressive,
masculine, and restrained. If the people of southern Italy were more akin
to Africans or Arabs, the people of northern Italy were more closely related
to northern Europeans.
Race theory could also be manipulated for less divisive means. Engaging
with nationalist and imperialist discourse on the Italian endeavors to create empire and international reputation, the positivist school found a way
of using its scientific method to justify and legitimate the imperial work of
the nation. Did the race theories of criminal anthropologists make the
chances for colonial success even more tenuous? If the south was inferior
and the north tainted by its association with the Mezzogiorno, were the
Italian people too weak to achieve the status of the great Western powers?
What role did the race of the imperial powers play in their potential as conquerors? Some criminal anthropologists and physiognomists had contended that the Italic race was the more vulnerable and inferior of the two
races that populated Europe. How then could social scientists find a way to
bolster the nationalistic efforts, and how true or how forced would these
new conjectures be? Or despite these attempts to bolster imperial venture,
would Italians follow the fate of other Mediterranean countries as predicted by Sighele who argued that
while . . . Italy had the shame of Aduwa, Spain was beaten by the United
States, and France battled the epileptic crisis of the Dreyfus Affair, most (and
I accuse myself, among them) constructed . . . the simplistic theory of old
and young races, the ones destined for the sunset and the other for glory,—
and naturally ours was not only old but decrepit,—and the tocsin was rung
for the . . . funeral of the Latin race, while the fanfare was sounded for the
victorious and invading German race. The light, it was said, comes from
the north. We, southern people, were condemned to return fatally to the
shadow.136
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4
Civilizing the Southerner,
Taming the African:
Imperial Endeavor and
Discourses of Race
Introduction
If Italian writers had succeeded in thoroughly complicating the categories
of race and ethnicity in their discussions on the southern question and in
the new theories of criminal anthropologists, the introduction of imperialist discourse further extended the debates on nation, nationalism, and
national identity. With the nation unified and formed, the state organized
and defined, and the people catalogued and confused, politicians turned to
adding yet another element to the mix of the nationalist movement. A successful imperial campaign and the establishment of an Italian empire in
Africa would proffer the young nation the international prestige that it so
desperately desired.1 Also, the added benefits of arousing a sense of patriotism within a divided people would help to strengthen the country
domestically while simultaneously shoring up its position as a European
power with influence and power on several continents.
Nationalists hoped to instill feelings of patriotism and loyalty by
embarking on a campaign of colonial expansion. Italian interest for Africa
began in the early 1880s with the purchase of the Bay of Assab on the Red
Sea from an Italian navigational company. After the formation of the colony
of Eritrea, parts of Somalia were annexed, piece by piece, to Italy
(1885–1890). Further attempts to penetrate inland encountered strong
resistance, and in 1887, Ethiopian forces killed five hundred Italian soldiers
at Dogali, instigating a wave of nationalistic resentment and adding fuel to
the anti-Africa (anti-imperialist) movement. In March 1896, the definitive
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and humiliating defeat at Adua marked the end of the first Italian imperial
campaign. To placate the nationalists who felt threatened by the strength of
the new parties, Giolitti embarked on the second imperialistic campaign in
Libya (1911–1912). The Nationalist Association called for the acquisition of
colonies to elevate national prestige. Unfortunately, many nationalists and
socialists alike scorned Giolitti’s efforts. The nationalists felt that, despite
the victory, the Italian army’s military tactics were cowardly—instead of
fighting a glorious, patriotic war, Italy fought timidly and apprehensively.
As attractive a solution as imperialism seemed to be toward resolving
many of the problems of the developing nation, the quest for empire was
met with great resistance not only by those whose territories were
encroached upon, but by Italians of both the left and the right who objected
intellectually and ideologically. How could Italy rationalize the conquest of
another land when the nation had only liberated itself from the oppression
of Austrian and Bourbon foreign rule less than thirty years before? How
could Italy justify the colonization of a distant people when the nation suffered the accusations of southerners who felt that the south served only as
a colony to the money-hungry, power-driven Piedmontese? How could
Italy understand the imperial politics of race when the nation still fell prey
to the uncertainty of ethnicity and hierarchy within its own borders? How
could Italy unite its national state with an imperial colony when the nation
itself still stood separated by economics, regionalism, dialects, meridionalism,
biology, culture, and politics in its domestic situation?
Politicians in favor of the African campaign faced the challenge of the
unpleasant domestic situation in the south and the obvious parallels of
northern domination and the attempts at African conquest. Discussions
on imperialism became more prominent as protests of the annexation of
the south took form in local rebellions. The campaign against the Sicilian
Fasci (1890–1894) mirrored the military preparations for the invasion of
Eritrea in 1890.2 Did the proximity of these dates truly demonstrate “an
imperialist program of Piedmontese origins that worked its way down the
peninsula before setting sail for the African continent?”3 Already, before
unification, Piedmont had discussed the possibilities of founding colonies
in Africa with Britain; however, until the Piedmontese captured the south,
the north had been unable to put its plan into action. With the “conquest”
of the south, the north conscripted southerners into the new national
armed forces, perhaps one of the first examples of the exploitation of
southern labor.4 For some, such as Eduardo Cimbali, imperialism, along
with nationalism and pacifism, represented one of the many modern and
eternal enemies of the south. Like imperialism, which embodied the need
for “universal domination with its barbarous and medieval war of conquest
and extermination,”5 the nationalism that called for the forced annexation
CIVILIZING THE SOUTHERNER, TAMING THE AFRICAN
81
of peoples and the establishment of colonies in the name of language,
religion, or race was equally primitive and savage.6
For Giustino Fortunato, the imperial endeavors in Africa seemed a
wasteful, detrimental enterprise. He counseled that in “suffocating on that
bank of sand under that sky of metal,” Italians were actually bidding
farewell to those “most envied characteristic qualities of our race . . . , to
the noble traditions . . . of the good ancient times!”7 Instead, with the military
campaign, Italy called upon itself “the calamity of a war of lead, much
blood scattered in Dogali . . .”8 Particularly after 1896, the government
would be foolish and selfish to compel its citizens to continue “the disaster
of Adua,” which was “the most painful page of our Eritrean Iliad . . . in
which was proven that we Italians cannot in bad faith accuse the African
Continent and Abyssinia of being a semi-barbarous state.”9 To persist in
creating an Italian empire would only be to perpetuate the grave errors of
the Kingdom of Italy in its presumptuousness and arrogance.
Proponents of Italian imperial endeavor faced not only the military and
political difficulties in colonial domination, they were also challenged by
the adamant protests of the anti-African campaign that was supported by
the unlikely grouping of industrialists, Socialists, Catholics, conservatives,
and the liberal left.10 While their arguments against the African campaign
may have varied in nature, they expressed their misgivings on the Italian
endeavor with the same language of meridionalism.
Enrico Corradini, founder of the newspaper L’idea nazionale and one of
the principal leaders of the nationalist movement that would later fuse
with the Fascist Party, went so far as to argue that the anti-African campaigns, the “Italian hatred of the Italian nation,” were responsible for the
defeat at Adua.11 In reaction, some supporters, such as Ernesto Vercesi,
tempered their pro-imperialism arguments by conceding that Italy first
needed to solve its domestic problems before taking on an international
campaign. Vercesi understood that “imperialism [was] a plant not yet born
in the garden of Italy” and that might in fact sprout quite late; however, he
argued that while the current economic situation of Italy did not yet
permit “the embarking on this new path of imperial expansion, at least
these gray and sterile ideas of those without country should not come to
debilitate our national fiber, still tenuous enough.”12 Despite the resistance
to imperialism, many politicians believed the military undertaking to be
absolutely essential to the growth and health of the nation. Corradini
argued that “[w]ars are necessary like revolutions. All the world is imperialist outside and inside . . .”13 He believed that imperialism was a “state of
exuberance, of vitality, of force, of work and production, of industry, of
commerce, of money” and that “nationalism and imperialism were the two
true forms of life in this gigantic modern world, besides being vast, powerful,
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and fast.”14 As Gualtiero Castellini explained, “nationalism . . . is still a
variation of a spiritual attitude before domestic politics; imperialism is the
expression of the desire for power of the nation that immediately shows
itself in foreign politics.”15 Giovanni Bovio, a lawyer and politician who
was a follower of Lombroso’s school of criminal anthropology, concurred,
“In fact, civilization does not signify to syllogize, but to civilize; and civilizing is expansion; and to expand is to colonize.”16 Imperialism appeared
to be the logical and essential consequence of nationalism. As Riego Girola
expressed his view on imperialism, “the nation is the means, conquest the
ends.”17 The nation could not exist nor prosper without keeping one eye
focused on imperial endeavor. Success in constructing empire seemingly
guaranteed the continuity and supremacy of the nation.
Indeed, Italian imperialists saw themselves as the heirs presumptive of
the Roman empire. They were not creating a new empire as much as they
were recreating one, reclaiming Italy’s former glories, resurrecting the
legacy of time past. Imperial endeavor was not only a duty of the people to
their historical birthright, but an obligation of the state to secure the
well-being of the nation. Although imperialists did not explicitly offer an
explanation as to the imminent need to protect Italian interests, they continued to emphasize that were Italy to allow others to occupy key positions in
Africa and the Middle East, it would be “suffocated” in the Mediterranean.18
The military campaign would bring a new patriotism, a renewed pride in
the country, much needed in a period wrought by domestic unrest and
international instability. Advocates of the first campaign maintained that
Italy needed to prove its military and imperial might in the international
arena. After the disastrous defeat in Eritrea, supporters of continued
Italian efforts in the Middle East and Africa argued that Italy needed more
than ever to avenge its shattered reputation amongst the European imperial nations and to reestablish the lost faith of its people. Italy required a
victory in order to regain face and restore the confidence of its people.19
The initial discussions of the imperial campaigns engaged with the
difficult and complicated Italian discourses of meridionalism and race to
express both glorious support and vehement opposition. In the early
debates on imperial endeavor and the planning for the first campaigns,
politicians and writers attempted to build a kind of national solidarity, a
consciousness, a common identity by which all Italians, southerners and
northerners alike, could be bonded together in a concerted effort to maintain and sustain national pride. In so doing, they constructed a discourse
based on imagined or perceived historical legacy and race that claimed a
legitimacy to empire, that contended an imperial destiny, and justified a
brutal military enterprise. Still, in attempting to resolve the southern question
and constructing a uniform, homogenous identity for Italians, advocates
CIVILIZING THE SOUTHERNER, TAMING THE AFRICAN
83
of imperialism could not ignore the meridionalist discourse that had so
long separated the Italians into two distinct groups. Thus, these initial
discussions on imperialism engaged the southern question and the social
problems that had so long plagued the young Italian nation. Even as
supporters of an Italian empire rationalized the hierarchy of ethnicity and
race in the Mezzogiorno, they needed to navigate the intricate discourse on
biology and skin color implicit and complicit in the quest for empire and
the conquest of foreign lands and peoples. The languages and vocabularies
employed in early imperialist thought and action were informed by the
familiar language of meridionalism and were manipulated, transformed,
constructed to conform with the endeavor at hand.
Creating Commonality: Imperial Discourse and
the Italian Consciousness
National Needs: Empire and
the Rhetoric of National Survival
One of the main priorities of proponents of Italian imperialism was the
creation and inculcation of a sense of cohesion among Italians who had
long been divided by perceived cultural, ethnic, regional, and oftentimes
racial differences. Italian politicians understood that a strong national
effort, bolstered by an irrefutable argument for imperial destiny and
supported by the conviction of a united people, was indispensable for a
successful military campaign. In a country that had too long been torn by
its indecision in constructing a national identity and by its complex discussions of individuality and collectivity, advocates began piecing together
a schema by which Italians, despite their long political separation, were
bound together by historical legacy and a national need for European
power and international glory.
Whereas the world treated British and German citizens with great
respect and esteem because they had behind them, supporting them, the
flags of their mighty countries, the influence of their respective empires,
Italians lacked the “symbol of power against which one knows that it is
dangerous to commit those acts of injustice and abuse . . .”20 Italy needed
to construct its own empire in order to provide its citizens with the same
security, to instill the same guarantee of deference as accorded to the people
of the established empires. Italian imperialism was born in the full conscience of natural pride of Italians, of being “politically, morally, militarily,
civilly more than the world believed them to be, and from the legitimate
desire to end, once and for all, their hateful role as the eternal Cinderella
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that other people have assigned to them.”21 For imperialists, the war in
Africa helped to bolster the confidence and morale of the Italian people.
Victory allowed the citizens of the nation to abandon their former role as
“famished eunuchs, constrained and condemned . . . [as] the harem of
French politics” and become instead “a mature people with its own politics,
conscious of its rights and duties.”22 Empire would offer Italians “a place in
the sun, their place, small for now, more vast tomorrow, but theirs, [because]
of their efforts, their resources, their abilities, and their labors.”23
After Unification, the Italian government became increasingly convinced of a national psychological need to occupy, at all costs, a place next
to the advanced nations of Europe, to take the rightful position due to their
civility and ingenuity. Roberto Michels, a professor of political economy
and statistics at the University of Basel and the University of Turin, argued
that “[h]aving become again a slave, Italy intends to break its chains. The
nation having grown into adulthood, Italians felt the need to battle before
the foreign powers as before themselves for their consideration, for their
good political name.”24 To prove its worth in the face of the other European
powers, Italy insisted on being active in the partition “of that part of the
world that remains in the hands of the weak peoples.”25 Colonial expansion
then, according to Sidney Sonnino, prime minister in 1906 and 1909–1910,
was “a necessity of life and development”26 for Italy. An expansive sphere of
influence would help Italy to ascend “on the sea, in commerce, in colonies
of all types, but above all in those that are politically ours and upon which
the national flag waves.”27 He saw imperialism as a general phenomenon
of the times and Italy needed to be part of the “common historical current
that pushed civil people toward colonization.”28 Scipio Sighele argued that
imperialism permeated many facets of society. He described many forms
of imperialism, including individual, familial (also known as nepotism,
which he admitted had significant historical influence), national, racial
(such as the pan-Slavic movement), continental (“which does not have a
name but is exercised in Europe because to become civilized means to
become Europeanize”), and finally, human (that tames the forces of nature).29
Imperialism was not only a necessary endeavor for the state and its people,
it was the natural state of human behavior.
Even Nitti viewed the perceived need for colonies as an element that
was profoundly and intrinsically linked to an idea of destiny. He believed
that with the “ancient means of colonization and the medieval and barbaric
forms of invasions . . . hundreds of thousands of barbarians” from the furthest reaches of Europe poured into Italy and brought with them “the
desire for discovery, and in the most modern and civil form of emigration, the
spirit of expansion and adventure.”30 Expansion and imperialism was rooted
in the “soul of man.”31 The Italian race had such a passion for expansion
CIVILIZING THE SOUTHERNER, TAMING THE AFRICAN
85
that its population could not be contained within its “hereditary and political
confines.”32 The Italian state had an obligation to obtain colonies in order
to allow for the natural growth tendencies of the nation.
North and South: Ameliorating Meridionalism for Empire
For advocates of the military campaign, imperialism also offered the
government an opportunity to remedy the general domestic problems
that had been plaguing the young nation. By focusing on imperialism as
the main objective in political discourse, other challenging arenas, such as
education, economic prospects, emigration, collectivity, could be worked
out. A strong nation that prepared its citizens for international glory would
find domestic tranquility.33 Pasquale Turiello believed that the remedy for
Italian weakness was a pedagogical authority based on discipline, a
“virilization of the Italian people that brought a new pride in Italian politics
and a strong colonialism.”34 He believed that the “most ready and natural
remedy to the dangers [of society] . . . [was] now in the possibility of a
wide expansion of the Italian race on the most salubrious plateaus of
Africa.”35 Colonialism and imperialism represented “the highest ethical
culmination of the history of a people in the modern age.”36 A strong
empire would resolve the social problems and seemed a logical conclusion
to the southern question. Imperialism offered politicians a reversal of the
damaging southern question discourse that divided the nation between a
homogenous north and a homogenous south. It inspired some politicians
who had been intent on delineating cultural and biological difference to
look toward cultural and biological commonality. For some, imperialism
was so powerful a domestic force that it transformed the liabilities of
southern and Latin inferiority into strengths.
Politicians who hoped for a return to imperial might turned to what
they considered to be the greatest of all empires, to what they believed
could be argued as their birthright—the Roman Empire. In order to instill
a collective desire for national glory in foreign conquest, advocates of
imperialism resurrected the legends of the ancient empire and reminded
Italians of their relationship, the “familial” ties with the much admired,
much revered Roman civilization. If Italians were linked by blood, heritage,
and legacy to the ancient Romans, then surely the progeny of the Empire
could find in their genetic make-up the ability to successfully construct a
new empire, based on the traditions of Rome and sustained by the progress
of the modern age. Whatever perceived differences may have existed between
the north and the south, they were minor, unproven in the face of the
historical glory of the Roman Empire. For some advocates of modern imperialism, Rome represented a unifying symbol to which all groups—racial,
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ethnic, and regional—in Italy could claim allegiance. Perhaps the memory
and legacy of Rome could ameliorate the impassable gulf between the
north and the south described by southern question discourse. Theories
linking ancient Roman legacy with modern imperial success became
extremely popular as Italian imperialists sought to legitimate the optimism
for conquest.
Some proponents of imperial endeavor found a genetic commonality
between another powerful and influential nation—Germany—and Italy.
Roberto Michels cited the well-known pan-Germanist Ernst Hasse as having
said that
of all the Latin countries, Italy is the only one that has known how to conserve, from medieval times to our days, a conspicuous sum of “German
vitality,” so that it manifests a force of ethnic expansion and forms therefore,
it alone, an exception to the rule that says that all the Latin peoples are
undergoing a crisis of decline.37
Clodaco Taroni reprimanded, “The idea of the inferiority of our race, that
is sustained also by eminent Italian writers . . . demonstrates [how one
can] ignore geography and deny history.”38
Some physiognomists, such as Giuseppe Sergi, claimed that the genetic
traces inherited by the English from the Roman invasions were at least in
part responsible for contemporary British colonial success. This type of
reasoning allowed imperialists to argue for imminent Italian victory.
Surely if the British, related only distantly to the Romans, could find imperial glory, then the Italians, direct heirs of Roman blood, would become an
even stronger, more influential colonial power. Italians then, related to one
of the largest colonial powers of the day, Britain, and to one of the most
powerful nations in Europe, Germany, would find imperial success a natural inheritance.
Napoleone Colajanni argued against the myth that the ancient Romans
and the contemporary English were members of the same race. Colajanni
conceded that they resembled one another because of the similarities in
their “methods of colonization, political tact, practical sense, firmness of
purpose, religious tolerance, greatness of the work, boldness in undertakings,
and egoism . . . united harmonically to the principal of social solidarity.”39
However, he intended to dispel the arguments of physiognomists by contending that “the English and the Romans, against the hypothesis of Sergi,
[being] of two different races . . . demonstrate[d] perfectly that the diversity of the race [did] not constitute an obstacle to reach the highest civilization, which until now has been achieved.”40 While this new argument
may have been in direct opposition to the racial theory espoused by the
CIVILIZING THE SOUTHERNER, TAMING THE AFRICAN
87
physiognomists, it offered imperialists another angle by which to justify the
military campaign. Advocates of empire were able to counter arguments of
the decadence and degeneration of the Latin race using Colajanni’s contention that the varieties in races did not necessarily hinder the success of
nations.
Perhaps instead of obstructing imperial victory, Latin blood and culture
were actually of benefit to the military and political enterprise.41 Southern
question discourse, which had seen the Mediterranean as a contagion
amidst the southern people, was now being championed as the legitimation for future imperial success. G.B. Penne suggested that perhaps the
Italians of “the gentle Latin blood” could serve as a model for a new race,
adapting “energy and perseverance with versatility and . . . brilliance, disposing of individualism for fraternity, reconciling egoism and . . . altruism
and liberality, molding restricted concepts of imperialism, personification,
and monopoly on the larger ideas of humanism, cosmopolitism and
union.”42 Meridionalism actually rendered Italians more perfect imperialists as they had so long suffered the complications of biological difference
in one nation that they had no more the inclination for racial hatred and
intolerance. The very weakness of the Italian nation, the “lead ball” of
Sicily now proved to be its very strength, as the Latinness of the Italian
people offered a new, more tolerant, kinder, gentler imperialism. Clodaco
Taroni explained that the Latin ideal, in opposition to that of the AngloSaxons, is one of great tolerance. Latin people were so generous in spirit
that in fact they “cannot conceive of a true superiority above other
races . . . [and] because of this, placed in contact with other races, the Latin
[person] cannot conceive, like Anglo-Saxons, hatred for the man of color,
and [instead treats him] as a brother . . .”43
Renato Paoli concurred, portraying the Italian imperial system to
appear tolerant, gentle, and kind in order to present the campaign as a
benevolent tool in providing the citizens of the country with another
source of wealth and influence and the indigenous peoples of the colonies
with a means to civilization and progress. He described three systems of
imperialism—the American, the British, and the Latin. The American
system, as admired by Ferdinando Martini, a liberal deputy who served as
the governor of Eritrea, seemed the most obvious choice as a method of
Italian imperialism.44 Like the Native Americans who peopled North
America, Africans represented an inexcusable hindrance to Italian glory.
He saw “the indigenous” as an obstacle to the national mission, and therefore
the nation shouldered the responsibility of removing the hindrance, helping
them to “disappear” as the Americans did to “the Red Skins elsewhere.”45 It
was now the time for Italians, the “sentimental colonizers,” to find the
courage to begin the imperial work, to inspire “the future generations
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[who] will depopulate Africa of its ancient inhabitants, right up to the second
to the last one . . . Destroying the Negroes, [we will find] the way to finally
eliminate all traces [of that race].”46
The English system entailed segregated cohabitation in which “the two
races, the white and the black, live side by side, rigorously separated, like
the ancient castes.”47 The two groups were divided into the race of white
“sovereigns” or “dominators” and that of “the [black] subjects, the dominated, the helots.”48 The relationship between the two peoples was restricted
to the economic sphere; however, the conquered people, although prohibited from taking public office, were respected in their traditions, laws, and
religion.
The Latin tradition of imperialism involved a more peaceful collaboration
between the races—as Paoli termed it, “racial assimilation.” The two races,
“in a reasonable division of offices and work, complete each other, using
their intrinsic virtues of intelligence or work.”49 The admirable end of this
type of colonization allowed the “lower” race to rise gradually toward the
dominant race with which it would eventually merge.50 Indeed, Latin
imperialism, practiced by the Italians and the South Americans, was to be
admired for its message of tolerance and its methods of advancement.
Italian imperialists used the situation in South America as a means of justifying their own efforts in Africa. If Italians used the same techniques as
South America, where race relations were perceived to be fairly decent, in
organizing their colonies, they could certainly avoid the brutality and
racial hatred present in the American and British systems of imperialism.
Clodaco Taroni argued that the blacks in Brazil were completely integrated
with the rest of the population and thus represented a progressive
approach of the first order. In the United States, however, with “all their
false civilization, blacks live beside them in separate districts.”51 He noted
that hatred of blacks permeated the very souls of whites in the United
States. Whites “would not even consent to sit at the same table or travel in
the same compartment with a black person!”52 The situation on the West
Coast was just as shameful. With the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the
American government showed their disdain for Asian immigrants,
mirrored only by the prejudice and hatred of Americans for the thousands
of Japanese and Chinese in the country.53 The South Americans appeared
much more civilized, more tolerant, more advanced in their relations with
people of color. For all their pretenses of superiority, Anglo-Saxons could
not effectively deny the reprehensible treatment of “all who are not of their
[white] race.”54 Taroni believed that, along with the Chinese and the Japanese,
Latin people, with their more open-minded, more compassionate system
of colonial rule, could stabilize an equilibrium between the races and
equality amongst them.55
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89
Italian imperialism did not have to conform to that model offered by
the Anglo-Saxons. In fact, the word imperialism itself was “an ugly word
that does not adapt well with the Latin peoples that were and are eminently
republican in the most libertarian sense of the world. Imperialism signifies
domination, and domination can only have been dreamed up by barbarous peoples.”56 Instead, Italian imperialism was not so much a matter of
conquest as it was an effort towards unity. “Not imperialism, but union,
not empire, but liberty: and this liberty must not only be political liberty,
but rather individual economic liberty.”57
Still others looked beyond the smaller categories within the European
race hierarchies and turned instead to the more visible realities of skin
color. Little else could make the perceived biological differences between
the northern and southern Italian counterparts disappear so quickly as the
even more visible racial differences between the European and the African.
Perhaps, the more correct and precise categorization that could rationalize
and guarantee empire was the demarcation between the white and
“colored” races. For the Italian state struggling with a still divided population, the construction of an all-inclusive national and larger racial identity
to which all Italian people could belong was of especial significance. The
imperial campaign gave politicians the opportunity not only to expand
their territorial horizons, it offered them a rallying point behind which
they could encourage Italians to put aside the prejudices of the southern
question and unite behind an Italian imperial endeavor. Imperialists
described the distance between northerners and southerners enumerated
by meridionalism and physiognomy as much closer than the cavernous
abyss between Italians and Africans. To this end, supporters of the military
campaign fashioned a sense of commonality and community by maximizing
the larger differences between black and white in order to minimize the
regional differences between the north and the south.
Constructing Difference: Finding Domestic
Resolution in Imperial Distance
In order to construct these perceived oppositional categories of black and
white, supporters of imperialism formed a dichotomy between civilized
and barbaric, cultured and primitive, cultivated and savage. Ironically,
these same differences had previously been enumerated as indicators of
northern and southern difference. With the imperial campaign serving as
a new unifying force, the familiar vocabulary of meridionalism was appropriated to describe difference between two new groups—the Italians and
the Africans. In a popular song written in 1888, Giuseppe Alfieri described
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an Italian soldier, self-important with the significance of his mission in
Africa, who bragged to his lover that he was going to make the world
respect Italy.58 At the end of the song, he comforts her that he will “attempt
victorious to return” and with him bring “to Italy new honor.”59 His
mistress, in more concrete and malicious terms, feared for the life of her
soldier. She laments, “If the Moors eat you / Like a tortello?,” for the
Africans, one knows, “are more beasts / than our dogs.”60 She was also concerned about his fidelity, playing directly into the stereotypes of the
promiscuous African woman. The juxtaposition of the courageous, patriotic Italian soldier with the animalistic, hypersexualized, cannibalistic
Africans emphasized the us/them dichotomy that imperialists hoped
would inspire support for the colonial campaign.
The formation of these bipolar groupings was neither ingenious nor
innovative. Indeed, these images of opposition had long existed in an Italy
beleaguered by the southern question. This vocabulary was transferred
from describing southernness to describing Africanness. Italy, as a great
civilization, as a part of the larger European tradition of progress and
sophistication, became a member of one of these “better races,” which had
the duty to ameliorate domestic and regional differences in order to better
improve those peoples of the world unable to help themselves. Fortunato,
however much he abhorred the imperial enterprise, agreed that this image
of Italian and European camaraderie, the common imperial goal, “one of
the greatest events of universal history” was powerfully symbolic and thus
valuable to advocates of imperialism.61 This larger, more powerful Europe
saw the conquest of the “African Eldorado, with the magic reflection of its
enormous lakes and its torrential rivers,” with “its exalted veins of gold
[that] could shock the economic movement of the old world” as a means
to their own glory and as a symbol of their supremacy.62 Italy, as part of the
wider, whiter Europe, believed it had a right to conquer the unclaimed
savage lands and to rule the untamed primitive peoples. Indeed, Italy conformed to the requirements of the benevolent colonizer: “the barbarians
belong to the first conqueror who wanted to 1) humanize them, 2) civilize
them, 3) above all, to make them Catholics.”63
Sighele understood that in the international struggle, the imperialist
rhetoric that argued for a dichotomy between the civilized and uncivilized
was resonant with meaning in a nation divided by meridionalism. Indeed,
he conceded that many of these nations were not inferior to Italy, that they
were worth “as much as ours, that [they were] worth, in certain respects,
more than ours, and therefore we cannot give rise to a mad pride of
superiority, almost as civil people on barbarous people, but we must only
give rise to a just spirit of emulation and competition.”64 The goal of imperialism was a legitimate defense of Italian nationalism that would otherwise
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be “diminished and suffocated.”65 Sighele insisted that imperialism was a
“necessary consequence” of nationalism because one was “derived logically
and legitimately from the other.”66 He believed that imperialism was
“neither a pathological manifestation nor the dangerous extreme” of a
doctrine pursued by the most ardent of followers.67 Instead, he argued that
nationalism was “the natural development of the collectivity of the nation”
and an “ ‘instinct of power,’ ” a “desire of expansion that animates the individual psychology of each one of us.”68 Sighele believed in an intimate link
between “individual instinct and that collective imperialist will,” and though
he could not adequately describe it, an evolutionary development by which
one inevitably determined the other.69
However natural a consequence imperialism seemed to be of the larger
nationalist movement, this did not necessarily connote progress or civility.
The proposed benefits of imperialism, according to those who opposed the
military campaign in Africa, would not solve the domestic problems at
hand. Indeed, by painting imperialism in a charitable, benevolent light,
imperialists were merely postponing the inevitable discovery of the true
brutalities of conquest. With the battle at Dogali in 1887, imperialist rhetoric could no longer ignore the military aspects of the campaign. Although
the 1885 propaganda surrounding the colonial enterprise had spoken
unreservedly of “the free expansion of markets and of industries,” calling
upon the ideals of the Risorgimento that were still present in the collective
memory of Italians, it was not until the Italian occupation that descriptions of the quest for empire assumed “a qualifying connotation an
oppressive and militaristic conqueror character . . .”70
The Corriere della Sera echoed the rhetoric of the anti-African campaign, urging Italians to reflect on the true nature of the imperial endeavor.
It questioned the behavior of Europe in general and the rhetoric that justified conquest as a mission of civilization. Instead, it asked if it were not “a
hypocritical competition to proclaim [the race for empire] as such.”71 It
argued that underlying the drive for colonies was the “fear of being overwhelmed, instinct of conservation, desire for the conquest of territory
already owned, national passions and rancor to satisfy, battles of material
interests, jealousy, ignorant masses to contain by every means.”72 Imperialism
harmed not only the poor peoples of the conquered lands, but the masses
in the dominating country as well. Italy would be better served to concentrate
on domestic problems and solve its own national woes before searching for
empire. The Italian state needed to
redeem the masses from ignorance, prejudice, from the predominance of
regionalism, from the overwhelming influence of petty politicians; to
spread the notions of individual morality, of collective solidarity, of political
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morality; to accomplish works of social justice, long promised, waited for in
vain; to transform the tax system, to reduce them to a tolerable rate; to combat poverty, to redeem the sterilized lands from malaria; to favor agriculture;
to reconstitute the national treasury.73
The Corriere warned that before thinking of “bringing civilization to
Africa, above all, these questions must be or should be resolved.”74 Above
all, the question to be resolved was that of the south.
Conquest for a Conquered People: Imperialist
Rhetoric and the Southern Question
Speaking the South: Meridionalist Language in
Arguing Empire
Imperialists justified national attention on the international scene by arguing
that the Italian state could not focus solely on one arena of politics. If the
government were to concentrate only on the domestic problems and join
the race for Africa too late, the other European nations, in the rush for
colonies, would leave nothing but scraps for the young country. Working
on two fronts, the domestic and the international, would guarantee the
health of the nation and could, perhaps, have the added benefit of remedying both situations. Advocates of imperialism argued that war would
fuse together the north and the south better than any plan for a national
political economy. The colonies would offer solutions to many of the
problems enumerated by the southern question—they would provide a collective identity through the formation of an us/them, conqueror/conquered,
white/black dichotomy, they would present a new territory upon which the
surplus populations of the Mezzogiorno could settle, they would offer
work and agricultural opportunities to a region ravaged by rampant misery.
Arguably then, the benefits far outweighed the disadvantages of empire. By
subordinating domestic politics to foreign affairs, Italy as a nation and the
Mezzogiorno as a region, almost as a side effect, would profit.75
Advocates of colonial expansion linked together the colonial and the
southern questions. For Enrico Corradini, the southern question was as
much about external politics as it was about the internal. Indeed, the
conquest of Africa could resolve the issues that had been, thus far, ineffectively dealt with by the Italian state.76 While meridionalists believed that
the problems of the Mezzogiorno were primarily a challenge of internal
politics, he argued that it was in principle an “enormous work of national
resurrection . . .”77 He continued, “We are slaves of foreign cultivation:
we have subjugated our spirit to foreign cultivation. Is it not time to tear
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93
ourselves from this slavery and to try to subjugate foreign spirit with our
culture? Is this not, ideally, an external question?”78 For him, the colonization of north Africa would change not only the nature of the southern
question, but could also offer new solutions to an age-old problem.
While Sidney Sonnino believed the colonies had some sort of political
significance, Leopoldo Franchetti instead focused on the territorial possession as a means of alleviating Italian misery. Franchetti saw the potential
for increased opportunity for workers and peasants in the colonies as he
adamantly opposed the enslavement of the indigenous peoples.79
Southern economist Antonio De Viti De Marco agreed that the promise of
a successful colonial campaign offering new work prospects to a people
starved for opportunity attracted the attention of the south. In fact, “[t]he
almost unanimous consensus of the Mezzogiorno contributed to giving an
ideological and propagandistic justification . . . making it appear a necessary consequence of the exuberance of the population and of the energy of
work in our country.”80 In 1895, in an application for promotion to officer
status in the colonial army, Sicilian soldier Pietro Ventura explained that he
had “one ambition and one need: the ambition to serve his country there
where the major dangers are; the need to alleviate his family from the
weight of supporting him unemployed in Palermo.”81
Francesco Perrone saw imperialism as an undeniable necessity of economic life, which was part of the natural physiological and economic evolution of a people. The desire for new markets for the surplus of industrial
goods contributed to the perceived need for colonies. He argued that
“colonialism is an inevitable characteristic of the capitalistic regime, it is a
fact that none of the industrial countries escape this furor of conquest.”82
Because of this capitalistic drive, industrialized northern Italy had a natural tendency toward colonization. This explained the continuous northern
thrust for expansion, first by overtaking the south, then by looking toward
Africa for further territory.
Expansion required an “exuberance of force,” first to win a military victory and then to rule the conquered territory. Instead of exuberance, Italy
had a “deficiency of force.”83 Italy suffered this weakness because “political
unity without real cohesion among the different provinces”84 promised
only a divided and vulnerable front before the “savages” fighting for their
independence and their homeland. Would Italy, despite these domestic
troubles, be able to expand, “as great nations had to have colonies, African
possessions, for some time fashionable . . . ?”85 Or would the problems
that plagued the south, the southern tribulations that weakened the north
prevent a successful imperial campaign?
The popular stereotypes of southerners as a savage, barbaric people resonated in the minds of imperialists. Despite their efforts to construct a
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unified Italy, a collective consciousness not divided by character and
ethnicity but rather united by a common history, a shared destiny, and a
mutual legacy, the images of the Mezzogiorno and its inhabitants put
forward in meridionalist discourse were too strong to simply ignore.86 The
perceived weaknesses of the south threatened to topple the fragile designs
of the imperialists. What right did an inferior race have to oppress
another? Indeed, some naysayers of the imperial campaign used meridionalist and physiognomical rhetoric to challenge the assertions of racial and
civil superiority of the proponents of imperialism. Sighele, for example,
argued that there were still people in Italy “whose civilization does not
surpass that of Abyssinian shepherds; who live with their customs, their
morals, their barbarous laws, not only without being molested by the
government, but often succeeding in imposing their will over it and
compelling it to complicity and to alliance, like between power and power.”87
Italy went to Ethiopia, citing moral obligation to civilize the Africans, to
eradicate barbaric practices when in fact these very institutions existed,
“perfectly legal, in the mountains of Nuorese [in Sardinia].”88 If Italy could
not control its own population of barbarians within its borders, what hope
did it have to subdue and discipline a people completely foreign to its own?
Indeed, anti-Africanists appropriated the same meridionalist rhetoric
adopted by imperialists to justify the quest for empire to a different end.
They used the negative imagery and problems enumerated by the southern
question in order to challenge the Italian state to remedy its own troubles
before taking on those of another land.
Indeed, for some skeptics, southerners appeared more backward and
more problematic than the indigenous peoples of the newly acquired
colonies. Italy could not and should not take on the complicated politics of
colonial rule when the state could not control, within its very borders, people who were arguably worse than the natives of Africa. How could Italy
presume to instill a sense of national duty to a foreign people if it could not
convince its own people of a collective national good? Indeed, Penne noted
that while both whites and blacks in Eritrea had always paid their taxes on
time without the intervention of a tax collector, in Sardinia, the Italian
state had great difficulties exacting payment.89 The people in Eritrea
worked toward progress and civilization in a manner unknown to the
people of certain regions in Italy. Eritrea, with the infusion of Italian
energy and blood, did “not ask any better than to be able to obtain a free
range and ‘equal treatment like that of the other brothers of Italy’ to be able
to develop more and more, affirm and consolidate themselves.”90 In
Sardinia, notwithstanding “government aid in the construction and the
exercise of the secondary railways and intervention for the construction of
roads and bridges, despite the institution of awards for the introduction of
CIVILIZING THE SOUTHERNER, TAMING THE AFRICAN
95
agricultural firms or the raising of livestock, one can say progress is
stationary.”91 With what audacity and impudence could Italy justify the
oppression of another people and the seizure of their homeland if in Italy
itself there lived a people who defied the efforts of the state to civilize
them? Indeed, Penne observed that the virgin forests of Sardinia were
destroyed, burned, using the Abyssinian system, and that the customs,
habits, even language of Sardinia, “if they are not similar to those of the
Abyssinian, are not even very close to those of our continent . . .”92 And
whereas attempts at the agricultural colonization of Sardinia were foiled
with the challenges of Sardinian “indolence, envy, malevolence and jealousy,”
and ultimately “burned crops and gun shots, . . . by our good fortune, this
does not happen . . . in Eritrea.”93 The conquering people were in dire need
of civilizing themselves; how could they hope to domesticate the savages of
Africa if they themselves were unenlightened? What kind of colony could
these people hope to construct? What kind of example would they set for
the natives?
Michels questioned Italy’s sense of entitlement in imperial conquest. He
argued that Italy, with all its problems, in which “forty per cent of the
population is still now ignorant of the most elementary knowledge of how
to read and write,” where cholera still threatened the population, where
many lands remained uncultivated, where social reforms have still yet to be
commenced, had no right to compel the subjugation of Africans.94 If Italy,
with its villages of broken streets and unpotable water, truly had a claim to
empire, to ruling people who were supposedly inferior to or more barbarous
than Italians, then what was to stop the British, the French, or the Germans
from making the same claims on Italy?95 As Michels noted, if the conditions of the communities of Italian settlers in the French colony of Tunisia
were any indication of how Italian colonies would be organized, one could
not hope for the betterment of the natives nor of the Italians themselves.
Indeed, in Tunisia, “the maximum space of the Italian quarter is called the
Little Sicily. Circulating among these Italians, one does not understand one
is in North Africa. They are crushed there with all their characteristics.
Their habitations are narrow, dark, frequently pestilent.”96 The same
adjectives used to describe the homes in the Mezzogiorno illustrated the less
than glamorous lifestyles of Italian settlers. Were the colonies, the answer
to the southern question, truly a remedy to the social problems of
the nation, or did they create even more difficulties for an already
overburdened state?
Unlike Franchetti and Sonnino, who saw colonial expansion as a means
of resolving the social questions of Italy, Giustino Fortunato remained a
resolute opponent to the imperialistic intentions of the Italian state. He
believed that the expenses for the enterprise far outweighed the potential
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benefits, as he was skeptical of the adaptability of the southern peasant to
the African climate. He remained unconvinced that the wars in Africa
would induce Italians to put aside their various regionalisms for a collective
national good.97 Fortunato believed that before participating in larger
international and colonial politics, Italy needed to refashion itself by
bridging the gap between the north and the south and actively inculcating
national ideals into Italian people of all regions, of all social classes, of all
ethnicities. International politics could not take the place of, or distract
lawmakers from, the domestic problems at hand.
Italy was neither seen as a country of progress nor of uniform development. The differences in economic conditions between the north and the
south and in cultural and social systems complicated the national situation,
which then in turn further exacerbated an already discordant debate on
imperialism.98 These differences created a strong division of colonial interests between the north and the south. While the industrial north found
itself in a favorable position with regard to the south and the colonies, the
agricultural south saw only another, potentially stronger competitor in a
market in which they were already behind. In fact, the colonies “aggravated
and worsened the economic conditions of the south” to the benefit of
northern industry.99 Opponents of imperialism underscored the similarities between the conquest of the south and of Africa. Again, the greed of
the north would overcome the needs of the south.
Negotiating Italy’s Imperial
Space: Competing Colonies
The military campaign in Africa was frighteningly similar to the experiences of
southerners who found the invading northerners to be brutal, prejudiced,
and cruel. Like the Eritreans, southerners defended their homeland, their
families, their homes from the conquering troops who knew no pity but
boasted much greed. For the south then, the colonial endeavor could be seen
as merely part of the northern tendency to oppress a weakened people.100 For
many in the south, the imperial endeavors and the discourse surrounding
control of the conquered peoples resonated strongly with their own experiences, politically, economically, and socially.101 The debate over colonial rule
inspired many in the Mezzogiorno to reexamine their own situations, question the treatment by the state, and revolt against northern oppression.102
For southern liberals, a connection was easily made between the problems of
the Mezzogiorno and the conquest of African lands.103
Many in the anti-African movement argued that those who truly had
the best intentions for the nation would not ask its sons, fathers, and
CIVILIZING THE SOUTHERNER, TAMING THE AFRICAN
97
brothers to spill their blood in Africa while a vast space of uncultivated
land in the south awaited the honest sweat and toil of resolute Italians.104
Anti-Africanists pleaded with the Italian state,
Bring our soldiers back from Africa. We have here slaves to avenge . . . ,
uncultivated lands to work, unpopulated towns to make flourish with
industries. It is not to make them die on the soil of an arid land not made for
you, ministers, . . . for a land that did not do anything to you and that you
alienated unjustly; it is not for this that Italy gives us its sons!105
Opponents of colonial expansion rebuked the promises of imperialists,
challenging them to look instead at the social problems that plagued Italy,
to explore the opportunities available to the state within the national
borders. They argued that Italy had work to do within the nation, in the
original colony of the south, the islands. They insisted that Italy had
Sardinia, Sicily, Puglia, the marshlands of the sea “with many lands to
drain.”106 Italy possessed “a quantity of public lands that do not bring in
anything and that instead, given to cooperatives could help to improve the
workers’ conditions and stop emigration abroad.”107 The state had the ability,
the responsibility to tend to the problems of the south. Andrea Costa, the
first socialist elected to the Italian parliament in 1882, argued that “it is
necessary therefore to better the conditions of life of workers and peasants,
to enlarge then the domestic market instead of searching in Africa for the
outlet for surplus products; we will have this outlet in Italy.”108 Many
Italian newspapers echoed the doubts expressed by the anti-imperialists,
drawing attention to the depressed economic conditions and the “most
detrimental plagues” that afflicted the Italian countryside.109
Opponents of imperialism argued that the true interests of the country
had nothing to do with the military campaign. Indeed, Salvemini questioned
whether the south had understood the consequences of its participation in
the imperial endeavor. With the establishment of Italian colonies in Africa,
the Mezzogiorno had to contend with another territory that also had
demands on the Italian government. Salvemini remarked with some regret
that the conquest of Tripolitania marked the end for the people of the
Mezzogiorno “who continue[d] to walk without realizing [they were]
dead! . . .” The south was trapped “between the north of Italy and
Tripolitania, . . . fallen, that is, between the devil and the deep blue sea.”110
Anti-Africanists hoped to end the nightmare of Africa so that “we can
think of the other Africa that we have here in the house and of the marauders
who live in Italy.”111 Libyan victory could spell disaster for the Mezzogiorno
and for its agriculture in particular. The “new colonies represent always a paradise to the people in industry and purgatory to the people in agriculture.”112
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Giovanni Carano-Donvito saw colonial expansion as another means for
the north, the industrialists, to profit at the expense of the south, the peasants.
The colony offered industry a source of raw materials and a new market in
which to sell their goods. For Italians of the south however, they would
find “hell” in the new African “competition . . . for their products of the
soil.”113 If Libya was considered an annexed Italian territory and fell under
the customs barriers of Italy, then it posed a direct threat to the agricultural
economy of the south. Libya could become another Sicily, Puglia, or
Calabria. It would compete with these southern regions as a producer of
oil, wine, citrus, sulfur, and tobacco and as a consumer of iron, cotton, and
sugar.114 Colonial enterprise potentially could prove detrimental to the
southern regions rather than offering the Mezzogiorno the much needed
relief. Many in the south feared that with the colonization of Libya, Sicily
would be reduced to “famine and revolt.”115
Faced with these possible outcomes, how could imperialists truthfully
contend that the campaign in Africa benefited the entire country and
offered an easy remedy to the problems that plagued the south? AntiAfricanists accused advocates of colonial expansion of turning a blind eye
to the social problems of the south, of attempting to conceal the gravity of
the situation in the Mezzogiorno for their own gain, of manipulating
propaganda and rhetoric in order to further exploit an already demoralized
and subjugated people. They questioned whether imperialists had considered “misery of our uncultivated countryside, of the thousands of Italian
villages without water, without a doctor, without a teacher?”116 Had they
ever considered the millions of illiterate people, people suffering from the
plague, “the thousands of poverty-stricken people that leave to export the
plagues of our Italy abroad every years?”117 Where was the national honor,
the imperial glory when in Sicily and Sardinia, “the frightening crisis rages
every day more, and . . . one hears . . . the rumbles of the threat of the
oppressed peoples, bled dry by taxation?”118 Had these imperialists forgotten
that starving Italian villages were “envious of the most miserable Abyssinian
villages?”119
After the occupation of Assab, a new understanding of the relationship
between emigration and colonies, derived from the first practical experiences
of the settlers in Africa, enriched imperialist discourse. Would the promises of
the imperialists be kept? Would colonial expansion truly resolve the three
problems—colonialism, emigration, and the south—plaguing the nation?
Would the government be strong enough to keep these three elements in play
through the complicated imperial political discourse?120 How much force and
power would be needed in order to keep the promises of imperial glory?
When reports of Italian military brutality toward the indigenous began
to infiltrate Italian newspapers, anti-Africanists roared with indignation
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99
and charged imperialists with accusations of barbarity. Gustavo Coen
compared the brutal tactics of imperial conquest with the viciousness of
southern brigandage against the welfare of the nation. Indeed, the violence
exhibited in both cases by both groups, one a national military force and
the other southern rebels, was merely a continuation of the glorification of
“a group of assassins, of traitors, of such corruption and of such baseness
that will never be equaled.”121 The Eritrean “revelations” then were not so
much a surprise as much as they confirmed the cruel, wantonly murderous,
racist savageries of war and imperial conquest.122
Coloring the Other in Southern Hues: Imperial
Discourse and the Indigenous Peoples
Legitimating the Italian Empire: Moralizing the Mission
For Italy, the new indigenous problem would provide yet another layer to
an already complex discourse on nation, nationalism, and national identity,
further complicated by even more visible differences of race. Northern and
southern Italians battled continually over the already limited resources of
the country; now with the mix of yet another needy, dependent, and racialized population, how would the government allocate the scarce funds of
the nation? Would, as some anti-Africanists and meridionalists argued, the
south suffer further repercussions from the imperialist movement? Or
would the Africans fill the lower rung of the racial hierarchy thus allowing
southerners to advance onto a higher rung? The Italian state constructed
yet another social structure that would involve the negotiation of a foreign
cultural system and that would not threaten the well-being of the southern
regions. In order to sustain national support first for the military campaign
and then for the colonial rule, imperialists insisted that the colonies were
instituted only for the benefit and the use of Italian citizens. Italian citizens
would always come first. Penne argued that if a choice had to be made
“between the backward white and the backward black—susceptible to
European civilization and rapid progress in a very limited fashion,” preference had to be given in every case and circumstance to the white farmer
who worked with such intelligence and efficiency.123
Imperialists presented the most attractive portrait they could of the
situation in Africa in order to gain the support of Italians as well as to
encourage them to invest their energy and labor in the new territories.
They depicted the indigenous population as being extremely favorable
toward Italians, the environment as exceptionally well-suited to white settlers,
in particular to Sicilians, who would find the climatic situation in Africa
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similar to their own in Sicily.124 Renato Paoli painted a rather rosy picture
of Italian imperial rule in Eritrea. He claimed to be surprised to have
encountered “not even a seed of the hate of race or of color . . . Blacks and
whites in Eritrea live pacifically together without loathing or without
prejudice of color . . .”125
The indigenous peoples appreciated the Latin system of imperialism
that played more of the role of benefactor than that of the conqueror. Luigi
Robecchi Bricchetti, an explorer from Pavia and member of an antislavery
society, argued that “[w]hile the Somali immediately realized that they could
expect from the Germans only abuse and selfishness and they rejected
them; [the Somali instead] like the Italians, they find us not arrogant, [but]
generous and with a big heart, maybe a little naïve.”126 Penne argued that
these “semi-savages who . . . do not know any pain other than the physical
and who do not have any other preoccupations besides . . . hunger” had
never before encountered such a “loving and thoughtful” state. Indeed,
“true colonial politics should have as its agenda, not the conquest of barbarous people, but the conquest of their friendship by means of the respect
of their rights and their autonomy.”127 With Italian colonization, the new
ruling government provided the people of the colonies with safe homes
that they did not previously have, with an exquisite bread the likes of which
they had never tasted nor even imagined, with food that was more nutritious
and more easily procured, and with potable water that had been virtually
impossible to find.128 A successful Italian conquest would help to better the
conditions in Africa.
If, as part of the Latin tradition of imperialism, Italy were to proceed in
their civilizing missions, then it was the duty of that nation to bring
progress and civilization to other parts of the world. Like the Romans
before them, modern Italians were to form a new empire founded on the
principles of tolerance and charity. Indeed, an article published on August
23, 1912, in L’Avvenire d’Italia proudly proclaimed that Italians, who held
“first place in world emigration, could reverse their energies and have in
one year, the dominating numbers on the coast of Africa, and thus . . . have
supremacy over the indigenous element.”129 An editorial in La Stampa di
Torino echoed this nationalist sentiment:
Let’s carry the banner and the civilization of the new Italy to these lands that
are fallen into barbarity, to these lands that were in the past part of the
Roman empire, with its victorious eagles and its redemptive civilization. Let
us remember, and let the memory be the flame in our soul!130
For Paoli, the establishment of Italian colonies was a natural progression into
a symbiotic relationship between two races. He argued that “the intelligence
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of the white man” could help supplement the “rather scarce power of
the intellects of the blacks” in much the same way that the material force
of the indigenous peoples could help sustain the weak whites who suffered
in the “exhausting and homicidal climate” of Africa.131 With Europe as the
“directive mind” and Africa as the “acting arm,” the two races could
“harmonically complete one another and help one another in their
endeavors.”132
Racializing the Other: Arguing the Superiority
of the Italian Colonized
Even more complimentary, the racial make-up and cultural traditions of
the particular regions of Africa over which Italy had control were far superior to other regions. Italians would surely be able to gain some material
and social benefits from the colonies and from the indigenous people if the
“natives” were not so different from Italians themselves. If racial and cultural differences were in some way ameliorated, then the establishment of
colonial rule, the collaboration of two peoples would be much facilitated.
To this end, some imperialists emphasized the work of physiognomists
such as Sergi who categorized the Berbers or the Libyans as part of the
Caucasian race of the EuroAfrican species.133 Indeed, the Somalis in the
south as well as in the north were part of the Semitic type. They were a
“dark colored race,” but they were not black, and had instead anthropological
affinities with the dark European types of the Mediterranean.134 Imperialists
viewed Somali as a more refined, more sophisticated, superior racial type
than other Africans. Robecchi Bricchetti described Somalis as having a
finer stature, more delicate, with small, refined features. He even compared
the Somali skeletal structure with that of the English and found the former
superior to the Anglo-Saxons as they had “greater unity in the uniformity
of height.”135 Indeed, he depicted the Somalis in most complimentary
terms, arguing they had greater affinity with the white than with the black
races. Robecchi Bricchetti noted that the white Arab populations of the
Mediterranean basin and Sicilians were not much fairer than the majority
of Somalis. They possessed a “perfect uniformity of features in man and
woman that clearly evidenced a unity of the race.”136 He was especially
appreciative of the beauty of Somali women whom he found “more graceful,
more childlike, more delicate, but . . . wonderfully uniform.”137 He claimed
that rarely did “one meet a young Somali female who is not beautiful.”138
The indigenous peoples of the Italian colonies were not only depicted as
racially superior to other Africans, they were also culturally and morally
finer. The Somalis made distinctions between the respectable and the
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unrespectable. In fact, the Somalis had little appreciation for manual labor,
and considered those who worked in mining as the more inferior and
servile elements of their race. The Somalis, “like their ancient Roman
fathers, consider manual labor as the work of slaves.”139 The Abyssinians,
on the other hand, were the “least barbarous” of the indigenous peoples of
the Italian colonies; however, they were “the most presumptuous, the
proudest, and the most terrible.”140 Abyssinian arrogance owed much to its
location as an oasis of comparative civility amid a sea of savagery. They
compared themselves to the people surrounding them and, “according to
the saying ‘fortunate are the one-eyed people in the land of the blind,’ they
found themselves to be perfect.”141 Pianavia, in her three years in Eritrea,
found the Abyssinians to be of a most noble race with the most elaborate
rules of etiquette.142 They embraced the Europeans and their customs,
viewed with curiosity the habits of the whites, and tried on the traditions
as a sort of costume. She described, “Who is happier than these people
when they have the opportunity to put on some European garments? And
you can believe that they take on a ridiculous demeanor and lose all their
elegance.”143
The depiction of Africans in the Italian colonies as somehow better
than other Africans, as in some way more cultured, more refined, more
sophisticated than other indigenous groups, allowed Italian imperialists to
gather the support of their people. In an interesting twist, some used the
work of scientists and social scientists who argued for the inferiority of
certain races to render the stereotypes of Africans as primitives a backward
prejudice of the past. Although physiognomists, supported by the work of
biologists and other scientists, had been arguing for a type of racial hierarchy, at the same time, some used their work as a means of challenging the
popular notions of African barbarity. Robecchi Bricchetti argued, “The
[Africans] are no longer barbarians. These truly barbaric distinctions
repulse the idea of human equality. Even without blindly accepting the
Biblical reference to the single origins of humankind, we have Darwin who
settles it, or at least mentions it.”144 Despite the fact that these “friendlier”
theories of race cast some doubt on the supposed moral mission of the
military campaign, as arguments of bringing civilization to the savages
held little ground if they were not indeed so inferior as previously
depicted, they did help to make colonial rule more palatable.
Racializing the Other: Arguing the Inferiority
of the Italian Colonized
Other imperialists were not so convinced by the arguments of racial
fraternity. They subscribed instead to the original ideas of imperialism that
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103
argued for the juxtaposition of the morally and racially superior conqueror
against the savage and barbaric conquered.145 These discussions of racial
inferiority mirrored the same debates on northern and southern unification.
The concerns over issues of integration and miscegenation were expressed
in the familiar language of meridionalism—only in this debate, the term
“African” replaced “southerner.”
In 1864, Filippo Manetta wrote La razza negra, an openly racist treatise
in which he justified the position of the southern states in the American
Civil War. He believed that the “dogma of the equality of human beings is
dangerous for our civilization . . .”146 He justified racial categorization and
domination, challenging, “Who among my readers does not feel superior
to the lazzarone of Naples or the cretin of Valle d’Aoste?” If difference
existed between individuals and could be recognized and acknowledged,
then why not between different nations or races? He insisted, “Why should
there not be a wide distinction between the European and the Negro, or
between these two and the Chinese and the Hindustani?”147
While the image of the primitive African better suited the moral
mission behind imperialism, it also allowed for the justification of more
brutal tactics in taming and controlling the indigenous peoples. In the face
of accusations by anti-Africanists of extreme cruelty and viciousness during
the military campaign, Scipio Sighele argued that Italy did not have to bow
down to international pressure and “make amends, before the world, for
[its] cowardice after Adua.”148 He argued that the state should in no way
consent to a “diminution of Italy,” because “a country that consents to a
diminution prepares for it and announces its disgregation.”149
Instead, Italy needed to take whatever measures necessary in order to
guarantee the security and success of the newly acquired colonies. Against
a barbaric people then, the state could justify its more violent actions as a
necessary evil for the greater good of the nation. If civilizing the indigenous
people were not a viable option, then even the unthinkable, extermination,
seemed a possibility. As Ferdinando Martini argued, “He who argues that
we must civilize Ethiopia is either telling a lie or some stupidity. We must
substitute race for race: or this or nothing . . .”150 Indeed, if the Romans, in
all their imperial glory, had failed to make a lasting impression on the
Africans, of civilizing the “dark continent,” then the modern Italians
needed to find an enduring method of colonial rule.
Some believed that the only means to a successful empire was through
the use of swift and great force. Africans did not understand negotiation or
compromise. They could only comprehend the use of might and thus, in
Renato Paoli’s opinion, the secret of attaining prestige on the entire continent of Africa was through the use of physical force to “impress [the
natives] with the resistance of the body.”151 Despite Paoli’s earlier tribute to
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the superiority of the Latin system of imperialism, he also recognized the
challenges that might occur in the conquest of a people who did not wish
to be conquered. Africans did not appreciate ingenuity, intelligence, or
culture; they did not admire technological invention or scientific discovery.
They could not recognize the value of European progress. He questioned
whether the association between “civil people” and Africans was even possible, and suggested instead that the only possible solution to the imperial
question was war. He described
a war that shelters and secures us from any possible future surprise and
which guarantees us definitively the possession of our colonies. And the
more it is necessary to wage this war, the more it is absurd to speak of peace,
even though Europe has its eyes upon us . . . we believe firmly that . . . one
cannot, at present, speak of peace . . . 152
Efforts to educate and improve the natives were valiant; however, even
should the Africans change their primitive ways, this would not guarantee
that they were ready or able to integrate with the conquering race. Enrico
Ferri predicted that “as the naturalist speaks today of many species and varieties disappeared in a time more or less remote, the ethnologist of the future
centuries will remember the American, the Negro, the Malaysian and
maybe also the Mongolian as extinct varieties of our species . . .”153 He held
that the mixing of blood could not generate “a good product.” He believed
that “the Italian race superimposed on the indigenous created individuals
even weaker, thinner, and lazier.”154 The inferiority of the African race was
so profound that it would only prove detrimental to the characteristics of
the Mediterranean race should the two be allowed to mix. Like water and
oil, the two groups were so different, the one so inferior to the other that the
combination could not possibly create anything meaningful, a statement
resonant with meridionalist meaning. Angelo Mosso delineated the differences between the Europeans and the Africans, arguing that “the brain of
the civilized man differs from the one of the primitive and savage man.”155
He continued by claiming that in Africa “human beings remained on a stage
only slightly higher than that of monkeys” and was not surprised that “in
the psychology of modern savage peoples, we have to consider them as
degenerate races.”156 Indeed, the Africans “do not know what savings are
and do not want to work because they do not feel the need to improve their
conditions.”157 As Penne explained, “our cioccolatini are mostly sickly and
not very developed, [they are not] robust physically and intellectually [are]
very deficient, so they . . . form an inferior race of the highest order.”158
Indeed, the barbarity and inferiority of Africans were in no way more
manifest than in the behavior of their soldiers. They were riotous and
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105
“absolutely parasitical.”159 They destroyed everything and performed no
positive actions. They were “corrupt, drinkers, slothful, avid plunderers”
and exhibited all the worst “defects of our medieval soldiers without possessing any of the generous virtues.”160 Robecchi Bricchetti viewed their
Christianity with much skepticism, arguing that although they hid behind
the Church, they were actually pagans with all their savage defects. He
believed that for all their Christianity, they had inherited “not even one
Christian virtue.”161 They did not know the meaning of loyalty and
betrayed one another, left and right, black and white equally. In peace,
“they [were] not vandals, but limit[ed] themselves to being thieves. They
[stole], they [did] not kill.” In war, “they [were] ferocious, more than ferocious, bestial.”162 The Africans were greed-driven, brutal, selfish.163 Indeed,
Robecchi Bricchetti believed that Africans treated their women well “not
out of affections, but because [women were] either a means of protection
or dishonest earnings.”164 Personal gain was of most importance to the
blacks. Indeed, the Africans tolerated whites not because they admired
them or liked them, not because they believed in the superiority of the
white race, but because they knew whites paid good money.165
Perhaps the best purpose served by the colonial relationship between
Italians and Africans was to create a new master/servant-slave dynamic by
which the rulers would acquire workers and the conquered would find
economic opportunity. As Giovanni Beltrame, a missionary, observed in a
diary of his African travels, once the Africans recognized the superiority of
the white peoples in their progress toward “equity and justice,” they
“showed themselves to be docile to the advice [of the whites] and always
disposed to serve them.”166 He argued that it did not require much “to procure the affections of the Negroes and to render them excellent servants
and courageous soldiers. No other race possesses more than this one the
quality of a good servant and an excellent soldier.”167
The intelligence of the African was inferior to that of the white colonizers and, although they could understand commands fairly well, “the
Negro’s spirit does not grasp anything other than that which is demonstrated.”168 Despite his “faithful memory,” the African could not reason and
formed only superficial and confused ideas. Africa would always be
divided between the “savage and the civil,” would always be an “intricate
and suffering arena of a struggle of the races, of customs, of institutions, of
very disparate economies, tending to superimpose themselves, to weaken
themselves, to transform themselves by reciprocal reactions . . .”169 It
would be the meeting place where “superstitious prehistory” would collide
with the “armed and violent irruption of modern history,” where the
“joyous and delicate flowering of a civilization that should be much superior to the present Europe” would occur.170 Africans lived in the breast of
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the birthplace of humanity and civilization and yet always remained semisavage. Indeed, religious missions and colonial expansion were of benefit
to the indigenous peoples as they had dire “need of a guide” because
without this guide they would “fall back into their primordial state.”171
Problematizing the Empire, Questioning
the New Italy: “Civilizing” the South and
“Taming” the African
Whether Africans themselves felt the need for a guide was an entirely different
discussion, and whether Italians had the right to insert themselves as the selfproclaimed directors of their recent conquests remained to be seen. Michels
pointed out the strange inability of Italians to understand that the Arab resistance was, from a very human point of view, necessary. It was the natural
national defense of any people, even those more civilized. He admonished the
masses and the educated elites who did not remember, when they praised the
conquest of Tripoli as a continuation of the holy war of the Risorgimento,
that Italy had only just recently driven away the foreigners from the country.
How could it forget its past as an oppressed land under foreign rule so easily
and become the oppressor in another country with such ease?172 In March
1896, the Milanese International Society for Peace wrote:
We who rose to the dignity of a nation, in the name of independence and
justice today step on them in the attempts to subjugate another people. We
who became brothers animated by love of liberty and of progress witness
today, inert, . . . the violation of the most elementary rights of man, . . . the
end of our economic and moral development.173
Indeed, Costa saw in Africa the same need for the ideals of liberty, equality,
and independence that existed in the struggles of the Risorgimento. He
argued that commonalities existed between the situation of the Abyssinians
under Italian colonial rule and the domination of Italians for centuries by
the Austrians.174 He admonished the Italian state, “[W]e have not given
you the authorization to do this; we have not given you the authorization
to put Italy at war with other people; we have not given you the authorization
to go and do in other homes that which the Austrians did in our home.”175
C. Corte, a senator in the Italian parliament, questioned whether a difference in skin color could actually transform “the just into the unjust and the
unjust into the just.” Had the Abyssinians fallen prey to this confusion
between moral and immoral as they, who were only defending their land
from invasion, were blamed for the brutalities of war, were “attributed the
responsibility of spilled blood?”176
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Anti-Africanists questioned the scale by which imperialists measured
superiority and inferiority, the foundation of imperialist justifications of foreign domination. They pressed imperialists to examine Italy itself, Europe
itself before judging others on their levels of civility. Geographer and republican Arcangelo Ghisleri argued that it was absurd to identify civilization with
the modern European race. “Why do they not look at the misery and the
degradation of thousands and thousands, millions of people in our societies
considered civilized? Are they really so distant from the misery and the degradation of the races that we claim inferior?”177 The criticisms of Italian imperialism spanned the political spectrum. Prominent conservative politician,
longtime deputy, and former minister Ruggiero Bonghi argued that “the
Abyssinians and the Arabs are not savage: they are brave people, persuaded,
convinced of a complex of moral ideas that have lived among them for
centuries . . . ,” and whoever doubted this assessment was “more barbarous
than the Abyssinian we want to civilize”178 In fact, some tribes had reached
those superior stages of barbarity when primitive but egalitarian institutions
developed providing a general welfare. If the criterion for superiority was
social morality, then the European peoples were not socially superior.179
Anti-Africanists questioned whether Italians truly had the right to
claim any sort of domination over another people when they themselves
had suffered under foreign rule, were plagued by internal divisions, and
were, at least half of the population, of a lesser European race.
We Europeans considered ourselves superior in everything to the Africans,
as . . . in the time of the discovery of America we considered ourselves
superior to the Indians, because we have riches, science, arts, industries,
rapid means of communication, etc.; but if the criterion of superiority must
be decided on morals, on the level reached by the principle of brotherhood
and solidarity, then we must recognize the actual state of things, it is certainly
not the European states that offer us socially superior populations.180
With all the problems Italy still had to solve, could they in good conscience
take on another in the name of racial or moral superiority? How did one
measure superiority? In La Razza Maledetta, Napoleone Colajanni agreed
with the characterization of the military campaign as a sort of “collective
brigandage.”181 The imperialists attempted to justify the brutality of the
actions in Africa by promoting the idea of inferior and superior races with
great self-assurance. These inferior races faced the wrath of the so-called
superior races who were intent on destroying them for the fertile lands and
mines. Yet these superior races ignored the recent work of sociologists and
anthropologists who found equally, if not more, inferior races within their
own borders, living with them, side by side.182
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The imperial campaign betrayed every promise of Italian independence.
Italians could not “get used to individually disrespecting Negroes, who are
men like us, the same way Abyssinia is a people like Italy . . .”183 Indeed, the
justification of colonies as a means to civilize other countries had no foundation and belonged to a primitive international society without law. As
Cimbali argued,“With the negation of personal liberty of peoples in whose
countries you want to establish a colony, you do not assure the triumph of
civilization, but that of slavery”184 Achille Loria observed that slavery was
neither a product of human wickedness nor of primitive religions because
it manifested in all religions and with all faiths. Slavery was the result of
circumstance and of a sentiment of territoriality.185
The natural reaction of socialists to colonialism was one of disdain and
disgust. The principle of equality of all people and of solidarity with
oppressed peoples was deeply ingrained in the socialist movements of
workers in Italy. The repudiation of colonial expansion played an integral
role in the discourse of the international proletariat, even if ideas of western
superiority and a Eurocentric worldview complicated their arguments of
egalitarianism.186 To Andrea Costa, the methods of expansion discussed by
the Italian state resonated with images of the Church and its missionaries.
The theme of the cultural and political autonomy of every civilization was
suffocated by the strong faith in the progress and primate of western
civilization.187 The state sent Italian soldiers to Africa, armed with faith in the
nation, imperial purpose, and a civilizing mission. Yet socialists questioned
the agenda of the state, challenging them to justify the reasons behind
sending Italian soldiers to their deaths. Was imperial conquest truly to
improve the lives of Africans and Italians? Would the colonies really serve
to better the economic and social conditions of both southerners and the
indigenous peoples? Or instead, did the Italian state use the campaign to
prove its military might to the rest of Europe, to win for itself international
glory? Socialists argued that the imperial enterprise was an empty excuse
to use extreme force against a weak people. “What are we doing here? We
send them to search for glory elsewhere; we send them to Africa to prove to
those barbarians that our country is strong, and for sea and land, they flap
their wings.”188 Indeed, how proud could the state truly be of their army?
According to Michels, Italy, as a European power, enjoyed little fame with
the Arabs. He argued that “when the Tripolitantian indigenous people saw,
at the beginning of the war, appear for the first time the Italian fleet,
they reassured themselves . . . saying that those ships were so beautiful
that they had to be from England, a neutral power, but certainly not from
Italy, the enemy.”189 Italian soldiers suffered the worst reputations due in
part to the lack of organization of the military commanders and the blatant
disregard of the state. So poor was the situation that the Italian soldiers
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were in that “they found themselves in inferior conditions and were treated
worse than askari.”190 Indeed, not only were the physical circumstances of
military life more difficult for Italians than for the askari, the latter were also
paid comparatively higher salaries based on their cost of living. While Italian
soldiers were paid slightly more in terms of actual lire, as the askari could
live with very little money in Africa, the salaries they earned actually went
much further.191
Anti-Africanists continued to question the intrinsic value of the
colonies in light of the domestic situation in Italy. How reasonable was it of
the Italian government to ask its poorest, most oppressed citizens to
put their lives on the line to conquer a people who would further compete
for the limited resources of the state? What price, economically, politically,
socially, morally, and ethically, would Italians have to pay in order to gain a
higher seat in the international arena? Already the first campaign in Adua
in 1896 had failed miserably at the expense of Italian international reputation and the loss of many Italian lives; could Italy sustain another loss?
More importantly, could Italy truly sustain a victory and all that the establishment of colonies would entail? Anti-Africanists proposed instead a
more controllable type of imperialism—the establishment of colonies
abroad through the emigration of Italians.
Conclusion
Although many Italian imperialists and nationalists hoped to prove to
other European countries their military might by successfully embarking
on a campaign of colonial expansion, the turmoil of the domestic situation
proved problematic to the formation of a united national front. The lack of
a collective consciousness and common Italian identity, the continuing
plight of the Mezzogiorno, and the popularization of racial categories
complicated efforts to mount a cohesive movement in the quest for
empire. In order to justify the enterprise in Africa, imperialists attempted
to construct a sense of Italianness, a bond by which an us/them dichotomy
could rally the support and sentiment of Italian people. The fashioning of
this collective identity required a renegotiation of meridionalist discourse
that had already popularized notions of division and difference in the existence of two Italies. As well, imperialists appropriated the language of
social scientists and their research on race and ethnicity in order to better
express and legitimate the imperial endeavors in Africa. Advocates of the
colonial campaign manipulated and reconfigured the vocabularies of
nationalism, meridionalism, and physiognomy to better rationalize and
argue for the continued efforts of Italy and its pursuit of international glory.
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The efforts of imperialists to gather support and inspire a sense of
nationalism and patriotism were not altogether convincing however. The
domestic situation raised many serious doubts as to whether Italy could
afford to embark on such a costly, both economically and emotionally,
mission. Would not Italy be better served by first resolving its own issues
before taking on the troubles of other peoples? Dario Papa, the director of
the Democratic Milanese newspaper L’Italia del Popolo, believed that the
internal conditions of Italy negated any sort of African politics.
When I think of the conditions of our country where there is more than
sixty per cent illiteracy; where millions of human creatures live with the
most squalid needs and run away from [these conditions]; where every day
the official statistics reveal such conditions of hygiene that put us behind the
other peoples of Europe, where religious superstition and atavistic ignorance reigns supreme; where, in short, there is much more to do to make
Italy achieve the levels of general civilization of certain countries [in
Europe] than to make Abyssinia reach our levels, my sentiment for the
Abyssinians assumes almost the character of a sentiment of a brotherhood
of misfortune.192
Anti-Africanists challenged imperialists who justified the imperial
endeavor as a means of alleviating the suffering of Italian emigrants.
Although imperialists argued that the establishment of colonies would
offer would-be emigrants economic opportunities under the rule of a kind
and caring mother country, anti-Africanists charged that colonial expansion would be no easier and would be as arduous as emigration to the
Americas. Indeed, the organization and construction of a successful colonial system required continuous and long sacrifices. “[A]ll the pains of the
thousands of emigrants . . . would not be certainly minor to that which
our compatriots could one day confront on the shores of the Red Sea and
in Abyssinia to extend the name and influence of the mother country!”193
White settlers, besides having to deal with hardships they did not face in
the homeland, such as tropical diseases, scarcity of rain, destruction of
crops by locusts, raids, also had to compete with the indigenous people,
who, by colonial law, were elevated to almost equal standing with them.
The indigenous, it was believed, could produce crops at a much lower cost
as they did not have the same needs—houses, shoes, hats, clothes, potable
water—as white people.194
The use of the already limited funds of the nation in the Libyan colony
was not only a waste of money and energy, it was to the detriment of the
Italian people themselves. If, instead, the Italian state had used those
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111
resources earmarked for colonial expansion to help those in need within
the national borders, Italians could have found much needed employment
in Italy rather than searching for economic opportunities abroad. Indeed,
only a country with excessive capital that had already exhausted all venues
of investment within the domestic markets could successfully and rightfully
seek a market in colonial expansion. Only under these circumstances would
the country be able to attract immigrants and sustain their livelihoods in
the colonies. Italy was not in this condition.195 Italy had arrived late to
Africa, and “it was useless to remain there: to civilize Africa one needed
capital, emigration of money and not of labor.”196
More than colonies in Africa, Italy needed to concentrate on the wellbeing of its emigrants. It needed to create its own space where Italians
abroad would be protected from the persecutions and prejudices of the
host populations, where they could retain their language and their nationality, where they would instead be subject to the authority of the mother
country.197 The need to preserve an excessive population that did not have
a place in the homeland not only offered imperialists a rationalization for
the imperial campaign, it also allowed anti-Africanists to argue that
emigration was by far a more important, more imperative issue for the
government to resolve. The Italian state needed to find ways to prevent
the emigration of Italian workers who labored, oppressed at times, for the
benefit of foreign governments, to create a bond that linked emigrants to
the homeland, from a juridical, political, and linguistic point of view, and
to construct its own colony capable of welcoming the energetic forces of a
healthy and robust people.198 Refocusing Italy’s energies toward emigration
would be infinitely more useful and efficient. As Taroni explained, “the
Italian soul is individualistic, almost anarchic, and does not lend itself to
imperialist ideas that are characteristic of the northern people.”199
However, all was not lost, as an Italian who “became Argentinian, Brazilian,
South American is not a lost force for Italy.”200 In fact, the Italian abroad
helped to open new doors and horizons and provided new energy that
“would make appreciated the name of Italy.”201 Giovanni Lantiggia of the
Milanese Republican Brotherhood, during an assembly on the African
campaign in 1887, proclaimed, “Garibaldi as well went outside of Italy, but
not to conquer the lands of others, but to liberate the enslaved people: and
our peasants, when they don’t find anything to eat in Italy, go to America,
where they can eat meat every day. They go where there is land to cultivate.”202
Italy’s future imperial success depended not on a system of territories, but
rather on that of men, “in the sense of defense and the diffusion of Italian
language and culture . . . and in the sense of the preservation of Italianness
between groups of Italian emigrants and their descendents.”203 Taroni
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argued that Italy should cede its African colonies and whatever influence it
had on the “dark continent” to France while France should cede its
American possessions to Italy and help Italy in the reorganization of South
America.204 It was to this end, the resolution of the emigration dilemma,
that Italy needed to focus its national efforts.
5
Politics and Permeability:
Italian Emigration
and Understandings of
Difference
Introduction
The exodus of hordes of Italians in the late nineteenth century for
northern Europe and the Americas forced Italian politicians to grapple
with the loss of human mass and labor.1 As many as 14,037,531 Italians,
from the north and the south, mainly men, migrated to other countries in
Europe, North America, South America, and Australia between the years
1876 and 1914.2 From the south alone, 4,913,136 people left their impoverished villages and cities to find new life and sustenance elsewhere.3
Emigration touched all aspects of the lives of the newly constructed
Italians; however, the south was particularly affected as the male migratory
movements that were called the adventurous and survival instincts of
fathers, brothers, and sons. Discussions of emigration involved all the various
vocabularies of nationalist discourse, from national identity to regional
ethnicity, from imperial campaign to internal colonization, from cultural
affiliations to biological difference, from ideas of otherness to policies of
protection. Emigration allowed writers, politicians, and intellectuals to
explore not only political and economic policy of the African settlements
and the “colonies” of Italians in the Americas, but to address the more popular, social, and cultural aspects of identity, family life, and mythology of
success surrounding the mass movements of the Italian people.4
The degree to which discourses on emigration permeated political
discussion demonstrates the extent and power of Italian emigration.5
Francesco Saverio Nitti, a strong advocate of Italian emigration, described
the mobility of Italians as a phenomenon that had touched all of Italy.
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Italians were forced to find work, oftentimes degrading and shameful, in
order to ensure their survival as well as that of their families. He observed
that Italy was not only the country that supported the largest emigratory
movements, but also the country that simply exhibited the greatest mobility
in general, noting that “there are two million men who move every year,
between internal emigration, emigration to European countries, and
emigration to countries outside of Europe, there are two million men in
movement.”6
The departure of the “youth” and “vigor” of the south was certainly
bittersweet for the families left behind. The more “permanent” emigratory
movements of southerners seemed to reinvigorate family economies as
emigrants regularly sent their money home7; however, the dismantling of
the traditional family unit and perceived “abandonment” of home and
mother country invited the criticisms of politicians from north and south
alike. While certainly many writers recognized the gravity of a domestic
situation that could not provide for the needs of its citizenry and the desperation of a public forced to seek subsistence outside its national borders,8
at the same time, the problems associated with emigration allowed critics
to use the familiar lexicon of meridionalist discourse to blame southerners
themselves for their precarious situation.
Although the emigration of northerners far outnumbered that of
southerners before World War II, much of the early debate over emigration
policy and its effects on Italians in Italy and those outside of Italy9 concentrated on the situation in the Mezzogiorno. The policy of determining the
official status of Italians abroad reflected the overwhelming concern on
southern emigration. Categories defining emigrants were based on a hierarchical system in which the south’s social and economic standing within
the nation were clearly exposed and in which the perceived advantages of
certain types of emigration were delineated. An emigrant was described as
a person who departed the country in search of work opportunities with a
passport. In order to obtain this passport through proper official means,
one needed to pay a certain tax. Because many of the people who needed
to emigrate could not afford this tax, a type of clandestine emigration
developed, which primarily involved hopeful men from the south.10 The
status of an emigrant related directly to his economic position. Explicit
differences between workers and nonworkers, emigrants and non-emigrants
were demarcated in the statute of August 3, 1913, n. 1075 (art. 3, 1).11
Nonworkers were those people who, like professionals and businessmen,
made the choice to move to another country. They were not compelled to
move due to lack of work. This availability of choice rendered these people
nonworkers and thus non-emigrants. Nonworker/non-emigrants emigrated
for reasons that neither affected nor damaged their social status. Instead,
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emigrants were those people forced to expatriate for purposes of work.12
The image of the emigrant as an illiterate, poorly educated, uncultured,
unskilled, impoverished individual who abandoned family and country
resonated throughout early emigration discourse. This depiction was further
compounded by the prevalent meridionalist discourse, prejudice and
ignorance of the southern situation, and the real circumstances surrounding
the draining of the Mezzogiorno.
The discourse on emigration and its connections to nationalist fears
and concerns spoke directly to the ongoing discussions of the southern
condition. Southern emigration, instead of paving the way for the transformation of the economic and social structures of the south and the
advent of a more equal capitalist expansion, became a means of sustaining
the distorted national economic mechanism.13 The “real” numbers of people
“permanently” leaving the country caused serious national alarm as politicians and writers “imagined” a new southern question in the Americas
where the problems of allegiance (identity, patriotism, culture), protection
(discrimination, violence, crime), and empire (settlement, integration,
citizenship) came to the forefront. Emigration discourse intertwined and
borrowed from the lexicons of meridionalism, physiognomy, and imperialism, using metaphors, representations, and comparisons from these
dialogues on Otherness and “Other-ing.”
The Politics of Movement: Reevaluating the
Southern Question in Discussions of
Southern Italian Emigration
As multitudes of Italians left the country in search of greater economic
opportunity in northern Europe and across the Atlantic in the Americas,
those left behind to govern the newly founded nation expressed their misgivings at an Italy unable to provide for its own citizens. Although writers
and politicians understood the benefits of Italian emigration, they also
engaged in discussing their concerns for the loss of human labor, the
breakdown of the traditional family unit, the confusion of citizenship,
national identity, and allegiance. The movement of so many Italian men
led them to reexamine the responsibilities of the government to its people,
both within national borders and those working beyond them. Increased
mobility as well as the desire and need felt by people to look for subsistence
elsewhere emphasized the perceived abyss between the northern and
southern regions.
Although two kinds of emigration, permanent and temporary, were recognized in Italy, writers generally agreed that even Italians who departed
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for the Americas left with the intention of returning. While northerners,
generally better educated and more skilled, tended to emigrate only temporarily to northern Europe to return to Italy enriched with technical
experience and new expertise, southerners were often perceived as having
abandoned their nation and their land. Seen as a mass “desertion” with
southerners abandoning the homeland, emigration, in reality, represented
the movements of people who were forced to do so due to the social and
economic inequities of the nation. Thus, in Italy, the provinces that experienced the most emigration were not those that were the most heavily
populated, but rather those that had been devastated by malaria, or those
suffering from oppressive agricultural contracts.14 Emigration was not
only necessary to the survival of the Mezzogiorno, it actually helped to
improve the social and economic structures seen as problematic to the
well-being of the new nation. In fact, emigration was an indelible reality
Italy would have to accept.15 Regardless of personal opinion on the mass
movement of Italian men, writers and politicians had to recognize the
extent of this development and the enormous significance of the draw of
the “lands of opportunity.” According to Angelo Mosso, emigration was a
“fatal need and a necessary form of life for Italians because it conforms to
their character. Emigration is not a bloodletting . . . but a corroborating
remedy, not a damaging crisis, but a fever due to growth, like those of
youth from which the body exits stronger and more complex.”16 Other
writers, such as Luigi Bodio, director of the Commission for Emigration in
1901, believed that emigration was necessary for the well-being of Italy.
Instead of lamenting the loss of youth and vigor, Italy should be grateful
and content that the talented emigrants of the motherland could find work
and meaning elsewhere. If it could not provide for its citizens, at least its
citizens could provide for the nation through emigration.17 Sonnino
argued that conditions in the south were deteriorating as “these ignorant
populations, suffering and enclosed in the confines of an ungrateful
country”18 fell prey to the seed of subversive ideas brought in from abroad
to Italy. Emigration was one of the few efficient methods that could
resolve, or at least alleviate some of the problems of the agricultural question
facing the south. It could gradually improve the conditions for workers
through “decreased competition in labor, and when well directed, [could]
also procure for the country new capital if the emigrants return[ed], [and]
influence and commercial outlets abroad if they definitively settle[d] in
their places of emigration.”19
Proponents of emigration such as Nitti strongly disagreed with Crispi’s
plans to limit emigration as such legislation was aimed directly against the
south. Not only was emigration extremely beneficial to southern economy,
he believed that it was foolish to punish the south for attempting to find a
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way to “self-medicate,” to cure its own problems while the north continued
to exacerbate southern misery.20 Nitti felt strongly that emigration was not
only advantageous to the south, but that it allowed the entire country to
explore new options and to branch out into new markets and communities.
Emigration was justifiable not only for the mother country, which
acquired capital, technical experience, and international influence, but also
for the host country, which gained the ingenuity of the Italian emigrants,
representatives of a legendary empire. He explained that emigration had
created a new Italy, that “the poor peasants of the north and the south, at
least those engaged in work for united good, have created the civilization
of Argentina . . . Italy is the only country that in its history . . . is an example
of a true resurrection, after centuries of servility and decline.”21 Not only
did Italians succeed in creating new communities and exploring the possibilities offered by these new settlements, emigration also helped to
improve the general conditions of the domestic situation as well. Nitti saw
emigration as a means of opening people’s eyes to the lessons of prejudice
and of forcing the government to confront the difficulties in legislating
two such different regions. Emigration was an undeniable necessity that
could provide security against hatred amongst the classes. It was a “powerful
school,” and “the only, great salvation for a country deprived of resources
and ferocious with men.”22 The government had considered emigration
too much as an issue of public security and too little an economic and
social advantage.
Although Nitti was a strong advocate of emigration and believed
ardently in the benefits it offered, he also recognized the historical and
political implications of having a large population living outside of the
national borders. He understood that the benefits of emigration came with
a price tag. The drop in population and the psychological loss of men,
fathers, sons, and brothers due to emigration exacted a heavy toll on the
people of the south.23 The government was responsible for the vast numbers
of Italians living abroad, as it could not provide for its own citizenry.
Indeed, “perhaps the largest Italian city is not Naples nor Milan, but New
York, where there are more Italians than in Naples or Milan. But he who
wants to judge the composition of Italian emigration cannot but experience a sense of intimacy and a profound sadness.”24
Not only were the sentimental aspects of emigration lamented, but the
detrimental effects on the loss of capital and labor were also of grave concern
to the new state. Bruno Chimirri, minister of finance in 1900, questioned
the perceived benefits of emigration. While the south had been told that
more study and patience was required for conditions to improve, “two
great calamities, emigration and earthquake” served as catalysts that
pushed southerners to reenvision the definitions of change and recovery.
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Chimirri called emigration “a calamity” because it was not to the benefit of
an agricultural society to see “its best workers leaving in swarms from our
shores to fertilize distant lands.”25 Certainly some southern immigrants
found their fortunes abroad, but at what price to the greater prosperity of
the nation? Instead of seeing emigration simply as a means of reforming
the south, the government needed to take an active role in alleviating the
circumstances that made the Americas seem so attractive to the miserable
poor. Italy needed a just fiscal system that took pragmatic advantage of
the resources of the nation and would help to eradicate the Italian necessity
to emigrate. What was truly necessary was a system of reform. Emigration
was only a temporary and illusory solution that delayed meaningful
discussion of the social and economic problems at hand.26
Making Southerners Italians Abroad: Fashioning
Citizens in the Americas
One means of protecting the integrity and interests of the Italian nation was
to guarantee the participation of young Italian men in the military.
Parliament passed legislation in order to ensure that the exodus of young
men to the Americas would not leave the Italian military without the necessary manpower.27 This type of legislation considered Italian emigrants to
be Italian citizens with both the rights and duties accorded them. Italian
men were called back to military duty as soon as their sojourns abroad concluded. At times of general mobilization, men were required to repatriate
themselves for active duty. Law no. 533, promulgated in July 1910, declared:
The inscribed natives and residents abroad or the expatriates before reaching
their sixteenth year in America, Oceania, Asia (excluding Turkey), Africa
(excluding the Italian dominions and protectorates—Egypt, Tunisia,
Algeria, Morocco) in case they were recruited are temporarily exempted
from presenting themselves to the armies as long as their residence abroad
lasted. In case of a general mobilization of the army and the navy, these emigrants were obligated to present themselves . . . to repatriate themselves in a
timely fashion.28
The idea of Italian men abroad still being responsible to their mother
country persisted in other dimensions as well. Not only did Italian men
have to lay down their lives for Italy, they also had the additional duty of
instilling a sense of Italianness, a consciousness of Italian identity amongst
one another and their families.29
Reminding emigrants of their historical heritage and in some cases,
teaching them to be Italians, however, required a more proactive approach.
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Italian emigrants abroad needed to take a more active role in the life and
politics of the host country, while at the same time they nurtured their
connection with the mother country. The difficulty of the task would be
enormous as “[t]his Italy, of which we have dreamed united by common
ideals, is not yet made; there still has not been formed a national consciousness in the people; the largest Italy of which we love to speak, is in
great part nothing but an illusion of our spirit.”30 Was the lack of unity and
communication due to the fact that the national language was still not
common among emigrants? Did the composition of the emigrant populations need to be improved so that the people could find a means of community and support abroad? The importance of education became even
more relevant as politicians queried why Italy did not have the largest
and most powerful colonies with six million Italians abroad. Was it truly
because “there [was] more facility of communication between a peasant of
the Italian south and a foreigner than . . . between peasants of different
parts of Italy?”31 As well, if Italy hoped to maintain a relationship with
emigrants as citizens, protecting their interests abroad as well as safeguarding domestic security, language served as an essential commonality
and tie between citizen and nation. Nitti warned that, “the peasants, who
speak only their dialect, finish by having children who do not know and do
not learn the language of the country.”32 He held, along with many others,
that one of the methods to cultivate national consciousness was through a
unified, common language. The government needed to ensure that it kept
the “roots” of their emigrants firmly in Italy. Language functioned as one
of the greatest means of constructing a national commonality and consciousness. The government needed to form powerful associations subsidized by
the government and aided by the consulates to defend and direct the study
of language abroad. In line with nationalist discourse, language and culture
were seen as means by which to achieve a national consciousness, even
among those citizens who found themselves abroad. Even as the relatively
young standardized Italian national language and a hegemonic culture
were still being inculcated into Italians in Italy, efforts were made to do the
same thing for emigrants abroad.
Several writers noted the significance of this nationalist cultural work.
The diffusion of Italian language and culture among emigrants could not
only improve the lot of people abroad but presented “a means of exalting
the sentiment of the country” amongst them.33 Southern economist
Enrico Barone commented on the timeliness of this project and warned
that time was of the essence. The Italian emigrant too easily lost his facility
with the native language when it served no purpose in his daily life.
Although bilingualism was an asset for the emigrants, “an Italian who
spoke French, German, or English loses quickly the ancient nationality, or
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at least does not transmit to his sons the love of the mother country.”34
With the loss of language,“the assimilation of the Italian emigrant proceeds
rapidly toward the foreign people who surround him; and the second
generation always ends the assimilation process with the help of other factors,
above all, politics.”35 The Italian language was even more important for
emigrants who had to battle in a foreign land and culture in a foreign
language. The perpetuation of the Italian language abroad was a means not
only of strengthening solidarity among emigrants, thus allowing them a
stronger, united political voice, but also of intensifying nationalism at
home as well.36 The mission before the Italian government was not to
“[overpower] the other languages and [excite] damaging battles with the
local governments, but [to conserve] intact the patrimony of the civilization
and our language in the midst of three million Italians who live in those
regions.”37
Emigration and Meridionalism: The Dawning of a
New Mezzogiorno in the United States
Undesirable and Unassimilable: The Chinese of
Europe in the United States
Discussion of the protection of citizens had particular resonance when
associated with the American discourse on emigration that labeled Italians
as “undesirable.” As political debate on emigration escalated in the United
States in the late nineteenth century, politicians in Italy confronted the
prejudice that greeted southern emigrants upon arrival. Senator William
A. Chandler’s description of Italian emigration as “a rapacious immigration
of people who have immensely distended stomachs because of their previous
fasting and who, ready to accept whatever work and whatever wages, acts
sinisterly on the latter and reduces the dignity of the first” gave Italian
politicians good cause for worry.38 Certainly, with meridionalist discourse
pervasive throughout Italy, the rhetoric of American emigration was not
unfamiliar to Italians. Indeed, Italian writers and politicians did not
immediately take offense at American criticisms, but often blamed the
Italian government for not controlling emigration and Italian emigrants
themselves for not being successful. Emigration from Italy was deemed an
“undesirable immigration, as the Americans say: people that no one wants,
weak workers, if they even are workers.”39 Interestingly, Nitti did not dispute
the idea that Italians abroad were indeed a burden on the host country.
Instead, he concurred that “it is unfortunately frequent to see worn out
people on the streets of New York, involved in itinerant activities and who
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collect garbage from taverns. They are almost all Italians and undesirable
guests.”40
Criminality also played a substantial role in emigration discourse as
emigrants brought with them the institutions of banditry and organized
crime to the host countries. The United States in particular showed grave
concern over the new social structures reconstructed by Italian emigrants
to the Americas. As understood by Luigi Villari, Americans believed that
“1) Italians are the most criminal people in the world, 2) in the United
States, the proportion of crimes committed by Italians is superior to those
committed by other races in the country, and 3) the Italian delinquents,
with the complicity of the [Italian] government emigrate in great numbers
to America.”41 For Henry Cabot Lodge, Italians were “ignorant, criminals,
illiterates, all around undesirable . . .”42 He continued, “Considering what
kind of people Italians are . . . it does not surprise me that there exists
amongst them a secret society for assassins.”43 Henry Rood, in an article on
Pennsylvania miners, believed that the mining region of the state had deteriorated due to
the invasion of the dregs of the continent,—Italians, Slavs, etc.—that has
driven away the Anglo-Saxon miners rendering it one of the most unstable
in America, so that the women do not dare to parade around the roads of the
countryside in carriages during the day and unarmed men are not safe after
sunset.44
Every foreigner carried a revolver and a “stiletto” (the knife and word that
came to symbolize the perceived Italian thirst for blood), and assassins,
aggressors, and the worst elements of human society prevailed among
them.45 Because of this perceived rise in criminality, American politicians
debated instituting laws to restrict or control the quality of the immigration
of Italians.46 The stereotype that Italians were more prone to criminality and
required strict surveillance and policing became increasingly common as
popular depictions of the mafia and neighborhood violence gained audiences
in novels, cartoons, magazines, and newspapers that engaged in sensationalism and violence.
These depictions did not go unquestioned or uncontested, however.
The crimes attributed to Italians were often not committed by the emigrants
themselves, but rather were ascribed to them due to political pressure,
social expectation, and bigotry. Napoleone Colajanni examined the rise in
crime rate that so alarmed the Americans and provoked their aversion to
emigrants from the Mezzogiorno. He questioned the statistics used by U.S.
officials, claiming they were exaggerated or simply wrong. Instead, the
delinquency of Italian emigrants in the United States was far fewer than
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that reported by American statistics. First, statistics on the proportion of
emigrants involved in criminal activity were based on erroneous data on
the number of Italian detainees. Second, the official census figures for the
Italian population in the United States did not reflect the enormous
growth of emigration during the most recent years. These numbers were
also incorrect because the comparisons between “native” crimes and those
committed by foreigners did not take into consideration the fact that
among the foreigners there was a disproportionate number of young adult
males compared to the native populations.47 Luigi Villari concurred that
the American statistics were misleading and that in fact the situation in
the United States itself skewed rates and acts of criminality. He explained that
whereas criminals were persecuted to the fullest extent of the law in Italy,
in the United States, delinquents were given more freedom to perpetrate
their crimes especially within their own communities. Thus, mafiosi in
America were more able to flourish in the newly established Italian communities.48 The ineffective methods of data collection fueled misperceptions
of high Italian criminality rates. Too often, “American statistics . . . [attributed] the crimes committed by Spanish, Portuguese, South Americans,
Greeks, and other Latin peoples . . . to the dagoes.” Italians also accused the
corrupt police forces of New York of committing various injustices toward
them because of prejudice and racism.49 Whether or not the culpability
of the crime rate in the United States lay in the arrival of Italian emigrants
and their culture of mafia, brigandage, and camorra, the quality of emigrants to
the Americas came under close scrutiny.
Pasquale Villari also disagreed with the American depictions of Italian
emigration as having brought crime and destitution to the United States.
Although he did not deny that criminality had increased in the United
States with the arrival of Italians to the Americas, he blamed not first generation Italians, but rather their progeny. Penal statistics revealed that the
number of crimes committed by Italian emigrants was less than those
committed by emigrants of other countries; however, the crimes perpetrated by the sons of emigrants far outnumbered those of their fathers.50
He recounted an interview with a pastor who explained that the children
of emigrants learned to speak English much more quickly and more fluently
than their parents. Children became “independent from [the parents] who
need help to understand [English]. The sons end up believing themselves
to be superior to the parents and abandon them without restraint, without
guidance in the environment in which they live. After a generation or two,
everything is changed.”51 The meridionalist stereotypes that had followed
the southern Italian emigrants to the United States were rendered true and
were perpetuated by the second generation. Thus, the culpability still lay
with southern Italians, however many generations removed. The prejudice
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that came from these stereotypes blocked the progress and success of
Italian emigrants who had to contend not only with a foreign culture and
an unfamiliar language, but also with the preconceived notions of an
unwelcoming host society.
Welcome or not, the improvements in methods of transportation helped
to facilitate emigration and allowed for more movement between the continents. The journey to America had much improved. With the advent of
dual propellers, the ships were well-lit, well-heated, and much faster. More
importantly, emigrants did not head toward the unknown—many of them
had already been to America and back several times. Travel between Italy
and the Americas had become so common that, for some in Basilicata,
going to America was akin to taking a trip to Florence or Milan.52 Indeed,
peasants who had never dreamed of having one hundred lire in Italy
returned from the Americas seemingly rich and prosperous, or at least better
off than when they had left. Nitti explained, “Whoever is unhappy goes to
America. They need not suffer in Italy. Asked of a twelve or thirteen year old
boy in Calabria—What do you want to do—The response was simple:—
I am waiting to grow up so that I can go to America.”53
The desire to go to America became more and more attractive as people
returning for visits appeared to have attained the success connected to the
myth of the promised land. Nitti described an interview with a peasant
who wanted to emigrate:
“Why run to America? But could it be because America is more beautiful
than our country, where many lands await your work to give it the most
secure payment?”—“No,—responded the peasant,—Italy is America for
you, not for us; we work, we impoverish ourselves and die; you enrich yourselves, it is demonstrated with the accounting . . .” And so it is, unfortunately, the most numerous unpropertied classes are therefore truly
extraordinarily poor, without hope of any savings, of any resurrection. They
cannot be poorer than they are, and he who travels for that earth, in front of
many people worthy of the most pity, can well say that death is for them a
repose, not a torment.54
The American dream affected not only those who suffered from abject
poverty, but also began to call to those with more skills and education as
well. The nature of emigration to the Americas changed from being
perceived as one of a poor, opportunity-starved people to one of a more
ambitious nature. After the departure of the lower orders, a new group of
people began to look toward America as a land of opportunity. Able, intelligent, educated men made up the second stage of the Italian migratory
movement. Italy, which until that point had only exported unskilled labor,
now began to export skilled laborers.55
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The nature of emigration changed not only with the arrival of skilled
laborers, but with the reunification of husbands with wives and parents
with children. Increasingly the so-called temporary migration transformed into one with a much more permanent flavor, with characteristics
of more permanent settlement.56 When emigration became more permanent, the government needed to improve its quality in order to insure the
continuation of “the name and influence of the mother country abroad.”57
Emigration had become a way of life for Italians, seen not only as a means
of alleviating the misery and poverty that so plagued the south, but also as
a way of propagating national glory and creating a new, successful southerner,
an adventurous, prosperous new brand of Italian. The permanence of emigration and the recognition that it would continue to play a significant role
in Italian politics and culture fascinated politicians and writers as to the
advantages and consequences of the movement of Italian citizens.
Old Lexicons, New Contexts: Placing the Southern
Question in North America
As writers and politicians engaged one another in debates on the nature of
emigration, they employed the vocabularies and languages that were
familiar and available. Emigration discourse involved ideas of difference,
adaptation, assimilation, and acculturation. More importantly, the reality
of emigration spoke directly to the southern question and to the conditions in the Mezzogiorno. In discussing the issue of Italians abroad then,
the arguments often appropriated the vocabulary offered by meridionalist
discourse and existing understandings of difference between the north and
the south. At a moment when the mass exodus of people was blamed on
the adventurous spirit, anarchism, and the false promises of shipping company agents, writers and politicians also examined the nature of the movement and the effects of emigration on the general conditions of life and
work, especially in the countryside. In examining the conditions surrounding emigration, the old wounds of the southern question were
reopened. The more painful, dramatic, and often embarrassing aspects of
Italian emigration called attention to the “social question” at the heart of
national politics and the realities and problems of the country. The different
categories delineated by emigration discourse followed those enumerated
by the southern question—primitivity, lack of collectivity, poverty, illness,
criminality, and indolence.
Emigration contributed to the prospective renewal of productive and
social systems, and to the moral and political life of the Mezzogiorno. It
presented a natural, spontaneous solution to the southern question and
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could eliminate or at least reduce the misery in the south. It not only
favored social mobility, but also sponsored the betterment of contractual
relationships between landowners and peasants, an increase in salaries,
and, indirectly, the technological improvement of agriculture in the south.
Others mistrusted this more positive perspective on emigration, questioning whether seeking fortune outside the nation best served the interests
of the country and the loyalties of its citizens. Nitti noted the opposition to
emigration, explaining that some had questioned why southerners
departed for such distant lands in America when there were vast territories
with small populations even in such poor provinces as Basilicata. These
opponents of emigration asked, “Why not fertilize [these lands] with
vibrant Italian forces? Why not hope for an internal colonization? Why do
the able peasants of the Veneto, the courageous populations of Emilia and
Lombardy not descend, as a fertilizing force in the Mezzogiorno?”58
Internal colonization as an alternative to emigration was particularly
attractive as many meridionalists saw southerners as needing opportunity
and reforms in their own lands. The history and legacy of Sicily had influenced the Sicilian populations, rendering them less-than-ideal emigrants.
Consul Cav. T. Carletti believed that the Sicilian populations transplanted
in Tunisia were “defective” due in part to centuries of misgovernment and
in part to their ethnic essence. To the first cause he attributed the crass
ignorance of the people, who were rough and uncultured. As well, the people
had a great sense of mistrust for any representative force of the government because it reminded them of the oppression of the powerful over the
humble. This sentiment faded away when Sicilians went abroad because
the consular services with “its nature as well as its functions, has an almost
paternal position, because it symbolizes the mother country for immigrants.”59
The inadequacy of Sicilian emigrants was recognized not only by
Italians but by the governments of the host countries as well. However,
concern was less for the well-being of their citizens and more for the
national repute being constructed by the movement of uneducated,
unskilled emigrants. Bodio explained that the United States willingly
accepted permanent waves of emigration that promised the assimilation of
emigrants with the American people. The United States welcomed those
who underwent a quick acculturation, actively participated in political life,
appropriated the language, and raised their children to be Americans “for
language and for aspiration and character.”60 The American government,
however, did not welcome “birds of passage . . . not because of the quantity,
but because of the quality of the immigration, which [became] the object
of serious control in the United States.”61 This undesirable, temporary
emigration was the subject of critical deliberation as Americans grew
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concerned over the restructuring of social and political systems due to this
new influx of people.
The quality of Italian emigration was naturally directly related to the
southern situation, and thus, the language of meridionalism became interconnected with emigration discourse. Fortunato noted that many marveled
at the rather negative impressions Italians made abroad. Italian emigrants
were greeted with much disdain or indifference; however, even in Italy
itself, southerners encountered the same contempt from their fellow
Italians. “[I]f across the Ocean our countrymen are not loved enough, [if]
they are still subjected . . . to the same evils they suffer in [our] country,
then . . . it is always a ‘southern problem’ of Italy—bitter fruit of misery
and degeneration—so in the United States as amongst ourselves.”62 The
southern question transferred itself to the Americas with all its stereotypes,
prejudices, and pessimism. As in Italy, southerners would suffer bigotry and
intolerance in the United States. The discourses of meridionalism and
emigration became intertwined, contesting and constructing one another.
In borrowing from the vocabulary and metaphors of meridionalist
rhetoric, discussions of emigration touched upon the key points of the
southern question. Among them was the miserable conditions of the south
as a primary “push” factor in the migratory movements of Italians from
the south. Although certainly the realities of the poverty-stricken south
were well-known throughout Italy, the circumstances of the Mezzogiorno
were not understood, accepted, or perceived as justifiable by the popular
masses of the north. The myth of Unification as an equal process that had
transformed the country uniformly still held strong in the north, and
while some politicians brought to the forefront the premise that the north
had in fact imposed their power and colonized the south, most northerners
blamed the south for their inability to succeed after the Risorgimento.63
The theme of abject poverty found its way into emigration discourse as
a means of legitimating the “need” of peasants, the failure of the Italian
government, and the continued exploitation of the south by the more
powerful, industrialized north. Peasants were forced to emigrate because
of the misery caused by this unequal relationship between the north and
the south. Emigration offered them an opportunity to escape the inequalities,
the misery of the situation in the south, and to find economic success
in the Americas with the prospect of returning with enough capital to buy
land and rejuvenate southern society and economy.64 As Francesco Colletti
explained, the major reasons behind emigration were “the misery of the
peasants, elevated demographic growth, the inflammable spirit of the population where the migratory contagion assumes the form of a collective
psychosis; the excessive taxation by local authorities on poor people; the
appropriation and waste of public lands.”65 The desperation of emigrants
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described by writers and politicians certainly had its foundations in some
reality; however, the depictions of this situation were seldom sympathetic
to the south.
As in meridionalist discourse, the miserable conditions of the
Mezzogiorno were pathologicized and portrayed as a disease in discussions on emigration. Described as plague, a fever, an illness, a contagion,
the wretchedness of the south was not only an embarrassment to the entire
country, but posed a direct threat to the health of the rest of the nation.
Emigration was considered “almost a shame for Italy: the ‘plague’ of emigration was indicated as a sign of sadness for the government and the
political order.” Nitti described the outrage, pity, and indignation
expressed by opponents of emigration: “There are many uncultivated
lands! Italy, magna parens frugum, wet nurse of crops and men, forced to
import grain and export men!”66
Like the miserable southern conditions that were compared to disease,
emigration was also characterized as a plague that had befallen the ill-prepared country. This illness soon spread throughout the south, like an
addiction, an infection. As Colletti described, “Emigration . . . was born as
a need, grew as a desire, and became an infective disease.”67 He continued,
“It was natural that, with similar psychological substrata, emigration
quickly became a common fact of life . . . [A] response to the questions of
the parliamentary inquest [read], ‘The young—it is said—suck with milk
the need to emigrate.’ ”68 Enzo Tagliacozzo confirmed that the government
took an active role in attempting to cure the affliction by “guard[ing] and
regulat[ing] emigration, preventing poor peasants from falling into the
hands of speculators, true merchants of human flesh . . .”69 Coletti concurred
that the government became increasingly concerned, noting that the
discussion of the “moral disease” of emigration and the spread of this
“fever” as symptoms of a greater desertion by the people of the motherland
were unfounded and unproven.70 The government could not provide
proof that this movement was truly a contagion.
The Mezzogiorno and its emigrants also threatened the strength and
vigor of the host country. By limiting the entry of “paupers . . . who for the
extreme tenuousness of the savings they bring with them, or for other circumstances cause fear that they could, one day or another, fall
into . . . public charity,”71 the American legislation threatened immigration
by arguing that it needed to protect the country from both social afflictions
as well as “certain maladies (madness, etc.).”72 The metaphor of illness
could also take the form of a real epidemic. With the plague of emigration
also came emigrants who, suffering not only from social diseases, could also
carry true parasites and infections. Luigi Villari addressed this concern,
arguing that the real problems of the south far outweighed the imagined
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health risks. Although the American government set off a “hysterical cry of
alarm against the unhealthy immigration from Italy and affirm[ed] . . . the
sanitary laws that would exclude the sick, they [were] systematically violated
by both Italian and American authorities.”73 He argued that the majority of
emigrants enjoyed good health when they left Italy, but after “a few years in
New York, Pittsburgh, and Chicago, [they become] sick, anemic, [have]
tuberculosis . . . that is admitted by . . . American writers.”74 Rather than
blaming Italian emigrants for infecting the American public, this type of
discourse allowed Italian politicians and writers to accuse the host country
of poor conditions that destroyed the healthy, well-meaning southerners
who sought fortune across the ocean. The unsanitary conditions in
America, coupled with the illiteracy of the emigrants, forced emigration
advocates to fight for protection abroad on two fronts, both in the host
country to improve the lot of unassuming emigrants and in the mother
country to better arm their people with the tools of education.
Still, despite the pessimistic depictions of emigration, politicians noted
some of the benefits of the migratory movements, among them the flow of
capital from emigrants to their families in Italy, the decreased crime rate,
and the end to overpopulation. Instead of seeing emigration as a plague or
a moral disease, advocates of emigration felt that the benefits far outweighed the disadvantages.75 Rather than being a drain on the youth and
vigor of the country, emigration allowed Italy to rid itself of unwanted elements, the criminal, the brigand, the lazy, and the uneducated. The stereotype
that Sicilians were some of the worst elements of the nation persisted even
as the nation was ridding itself of unwanted elements.76 Still, the negative
stereotypes were much more pervasive and oftentimes more useful for
those who were pessimistic about emigration.
Southern stereotypes necessarily played a role in emigration discourse
as a perceived majority of expatriates across the Atlantic were from the
Mezzogiorno.77 The very character of southerners, of men in particular,
was at the center of the debate on emigration and nature of the movement.
The failures of southern men when they inhabited Sicily became only more
transparent in their absence. Their inability to provide for their families in
Italy and their subsequent desertion of both country and family forced the
women into destitution and crime. According to Nitti, these women exhibited
pride at being able to earn enough wages to support the household while
their husbands sought their fortunes in America.78 Still, despite or perhaps
because of the independence of women, female and child criminality
increased. Arguably a direct consequence of emigration, which deprives
families “too long of its natural support and educator,” women were forced
to find a means of survival as men “went abroad to assure above all the
continuity of existence of the familial group.”79
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The breakdown of the family unit in Italy was mirrored in the domestic
situation of Italian emigrants in the host countries. Unable always to provide
for their children, some emigrants sought help from governmental agencies
in supporting their families. One stereotype had it that some Italian families
attempted to have their children remanded into correctional facilities or
sent to “poorhouses” so that the families would no longer be responsible
for their well-being. Advocates of emigration, however, denied the abandonment of children as characteristic of Italians, citing census figures that
showed the low percentage of “beggars” among emigrants.80
Even more sordid were descriptions of parents selling their children on
the streets of New York. This reality shocked and horrified people both in
the United States and in Italy. The harshness of the situation of emigrants
in the Americas forced some parents to seek desperate measures. The
Italian government was shocked at the report that Italian families sold
their children to “merchants” who took the babies to the Americas and in
turn sold them to the highest bidders abroad. These children would then
be exploited as either cheap labor or as panhandlers. “In New York, the
babies of Italy were sold, and the price for a male varied from one hundred
to two hundred dollars and the females, especially when they were pretty,
from one hundred to five hundred.”81 When the Italian Parliament forbade
the employment of children in vagrant activities, entire villages emigrated,
parents with their children, as children could no longer be used as a commodity to sustain domestic life in Italy. Instead, both parents and children,
no matter how poor, turned to the Americas for opportunities to seek their
fortunes.82 The desperation of the poor did not always stir sympathy.
Southerners, forced to forsake their country, arrived in the Americas only
to be subjected to further destitution and prejudice. In this case, the resignation of parents willing to sell their children seemed only to confirm the
stereotypes of southerners as lazy, immoral, irresponsible, and individualistic.
Crime and criminality remained a constant theme in meridionalism,
and emigration offered a means of alleviating the illicit elements of society.
For Italians in Italy, emigration appeared to have eradicated much of the
crimes associated with poverty, oppression, and overpopulation in the
south. As Nitti observed, “Today this grave social and economic damage
[brigandage] has disappeared. Emigration has taken away the first causes
of [brigandage’s] re-flowering. The most audacious and adventurous
spirit, the most insufferable natures take immediately the road to
America . . .”83 Criminality appeared to have diminished in proportion to
the numbers of emigrants.84 For many in the southern provinces, emigration was a necessity. To limit, suppress, or make emigration more difficult,
considering the administrative and economic conditions of the south, was
unusually cruel. In the south, there was one sad, fatal choice: emigrant or
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brigand. Opponents of emigration used the usual sentimental arguments
that moved the older generations and inspired patriotism and stirred a
love of country that legitimated all injustices and justified tyranny.
However, as Nitti argued, to speak of love of country to those who emigrated out of hunger, because of a lack of work, because salaries were too
low to allow sustenance, was pure stupidity. The beloved country, under
these circumstances, proved a difficult prison for southerners.85
Among the criticisms Italian emigrants faced was their lack of education.
Emigration brought to the forefront the problems of illiteracy present in
Italy. Whereas thirty years before peasants might have believed their illiteracy
to be natural in the social hierarchy, the psychology of peasants had
changed—they now felt the humiliation of not knowing how to read.86
With emigration, much had changed about southerners and their
characters.87 After experiencing prejudice and ridicule for their illiteracy,
emigrants who returned to Italy demanded better public instruction in
Italy in order to guarantee the betterment of the quality of emigration and
the possibilities for success in the Americas. The Italian Americans, the
new americani themselves, became the strongest proponents of the
movement to end illiteracy in the south.88 The poor condition of schools
in the south did not further the educational aspirations of the americani.
Of their teachers, peasants remarked, “they do nothing, they do not want
to do anything.”89
The concern of Americans as to the poor quality of immigrants, especially those who were illiterate touched a sore point with the Italian
government.90 The high illiteracy rate among emigrants caused grave
concern in Italy as politicians sought to control and limit emigration as a
means of defending the domestic situation as well as protecting their citizens
abroad. Nitti argued for a law restricting and forbidding the emigration of
the illiterate. Although many believed this extreme measure to be a restriction
on human liberty and freedom, Nitti believed, in fact, that every law represented a diminishing of personal freedom. Only on the principle of social
utility should these laws be pass. His law may have been wrong in principle, but in the case of the United States, where American citizens would
vote for a law restricting the immigration of illiterate people, it was a
means of protecting Italian citizens, maintaining national dignity, and
promoting literacy in Italy.91 Nitti argued that the law restricting the emigration of illiterate people should be accompanied by another making the
state responsible for education, thus uniting all efforts in improving
the national culture and consciousness.92
The idea of national consciousness and a sense of loyalty to the mother
country remained constant themes in emigration discourse, and it too
took on meridionalist tones as it examined what was perceived to be the
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lack of patriotic interest on the part of southern Italian emigrants. Nitti
attempted to see the best qualities in the stereotyped characteristics of
southerners. Although southerners, and especially the lower orders, were
oft criticized for their nature, he believed that they were “amongst the best
in the world: proud yes, but in fact because they are proud, secure and worthy; proud, but also sweet, affectionate, passionate in friendship, in devotion,
in gratitude no less than in love.”93
Others, however, were less complimentary. In the perceived desertion of
the mother country was the familiar accusation by northerners of southern
individualism and selfishness. For opponents to emigration, the willingness
of southerners to leave their country in the lurch, to participate in the
draining of the youth and vigor of the Mezzogiorno was proof that southerners were not assimilable into the larger nation. They did not partake in
collective action, choosing instead individual gain and personal success by
leaving their homes, families, and country. The southern tendency toward
individualism continued to harm the nation, even as those southerners
chose to abandon Italy. Some placed the blame for the hostile reception
that met Italian emigrants to the United States on the Italians themselves.
These “peasants,” from the “bottom of the most obscure agricultural village,”
arrived in the new country without protection, unable to speak the new
language and became the victims of greedy speculators from their own
mother country.94 The worst of it was, Nitti admonished, “to our
shame, . . . the most dangerous enemies are not the indigenous [people],
but Italians themselves who incite speculation of every kind to the detriment
of their countrymen.”95 Instead of community building, southerners preserved the individualistically driven connections they had abused in Italy.
Settled Italian Americans exploited and preyed on the vulnerabilities of the
newcomers from the Mezzogiorno.
The Face of Emigration: Physiognomy,
Science, and Movement
The type of ruthless competition and exploitation exhibited by southern
emigrants seemed to speak directly to the Darwinistic, positivistic discourse
developing during this period. The more determined, wilier, stronger emigrants would survive the perils of the new world. The rest would fall to the
wayside in the natural evolutionary process of human beings. Discussions
of emigration thus confronted physiognomical science and racial theory.
As racial distinctions between southerners and northerners became delineated by Italian physiognomists, so too did the biological make-up of
emigrants come under close scrutiny.
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Most physiognomists themselves wrote little of emigration—as a social
phenomenon, the movement of Italian peoples was either discussed
extremely vaguely or used simply as proof of southern degeneracy. Few
positivist anthropologists engaged directly with emigration discourse in
their examinations of race and biology. Perhaps the lack of writing on emigration on the part of criminal anthropologists reflected less their apathy
and more their inability to rationalize the initiative and ambition of southerners with their theories of indolence and inferiority. In fact, emigration
proved to be a means by which southerners could seek their fortune proactively, to find work, to escape restrictive social constructs, to better the
situation of their own lives and those left behind in the villages of the
Mezzogiorno. This determination directly contradicted the categorizations of southerners as lazy, lethargic, apathetic, and incompetent. The few
physiognomists who examined emigration ignored these more positive
signs of southern character and concentrated instead on depicting the
emigration of southerners as an abandonment of nation and duty, and
thus a symptom of their lack of collectivity and social consciousness.96
Although most positivist anthropologists themselves did not choose to
address the complicated issues of emigration, other politicians and intellectuals adopted the new vocabulary offered by the scientific studies of
race in order to describe their perspectives on migratory movements.
Physiognomists and their work on biology and ethnicity offered writers on
emigration a new framework in which to structure their arguments. Not
only did the newly developed racial lexicon offer a scientific, and thus
rational and superior, method of analyzing the lot of emigrants abroad,
race discourse also offered new categories by which emigration could be
catalogued. Issues such as environment, climate, slavery, blood, and primitivity that had appeared in physiognomical discourse appeared, appropriated, transformed, and reconceptualized by scholars and politicians on
emigration.
The environment in which the southern emigrants found themselves
certainly played a large role in the possibilities of success for Italians in
America. Italian writers and politicians underscored the racist history of
the United States and the continuing racial problems in the host country.
Italian emigrants, unprotected and abandoned from the moment of their
arrival in the United States, found themselves the victim of a racist, prejudiced society that allowed “greedy speculation” and the exploitation of
those seeking the myth of the promised land.97 The Italian government did
little to shelter its citizens from abuse and, in effect, allowed these speculators to “send hundred of Italians to die in inhospitable lands, without
refuge and without defense.”98 These emigrants found themselves in a
country where the “trading of Negroes was still, just a while ago, a matter
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of habit” and that treated these new arrivals in a “perfidious and cruel”
manner.99
The legacy of American slavery concerned Italian politicians who
understood that southern Italian immigrants, with the baggage of their
perceived racial inferiority, could face the same prejudices and bigotry
experienced by African slaves.100 Pasquale Villari believed that emigrants
“having arrived in America, are rarely treated much better than slaves.”101
Italians pointed to the American South in particular as an example of
maltreatment of perceived “inferior” peoples. While many southern
Italians did not necessarily have the darker skin of African Americans, their
lighter skin did not guarantee them access to the white elite. Instead,
Italians often occupied the intermediary position between white and
black, particularly in some of the southern states.102 Jeff Truly, a candidate
for the governor of Mississippi on March 18, 1907, promised his constituents,“I am against any inferior race.” He argued that Italian immigration
would not resolve the problem of labor in the United States and that in fact
the Italians posed a “danger and a menace to our ethnic, industrial and
commercial supremacy . . .”103 He pledged, “As governor of the State, I
guarantee you that not even one dollar of the State will be spent to promote
the immigration of those people.”104
The Italian press often reported on the lynchings of their compatriots
in the United States, and frequently highlighted the nonchalance of the
Italian government in receiving the news of such barbaric acts.105 On May
7, 1903, the honorable Cirmeni condemned the Camera dei Deputati for
the government’s silent acceptance of violent acts against Italian citizens
and scoffed at the pitiful indemnity paid by the American government to
Italy after lynchings of its citizens in the United States. He cited a vignette
published by an Italian newspaper edited in the United States in which the
American secretary of state offered a purse, ostensibly filled with money, to
the Italian ambassador with the comment, “These Italians cost so little—
it’s worth lynching all of them.”106 Scala postulated that one of the reasons
Italians were considered inferior, nonwhite, was because of their familiarity
with African Americans in the United States. He argued that because the
Italians did not feel the “innate repugnance” of the Americans of the south
toward blacks, they treated African Americans with more open intimacy,
going so far as to publicly fraternize with black males and enter into conjugal
relations with black females, much to the disgust of white Americans.107
White Americans did not want to deal with a population of immigrants
who, perhaps inadvertently, challenged the boundaries of race and threatened the norms of society. Americans had not yet confronted the fact that
their ideals, their myths had no correlation with the current reality.
Initially, it appeared that the United States could truly achieve its goals
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with its population, that “homogeneous in race, language, religion, and
ideals, had its foot on perfect equality and esteemed every honest work.”108
The arrival of emigrants changed not only the nature of the population,
but the very character of the dream.
Some Italian politicians believed that for American politicians, Italians
posed not only a serious threat to domestic security, but were unacceptable
because they were unassimilable. Italians in America chose to settle in separate communities, to continue their native practices. They were unable to
integrate into American culture. Unlike the original Anglo-Saxon immigrants who had little difficulty assimilating into schools and the life of the
country, Italians had more trouble with the process of Americanization.
The U.S. government needed not only to inculcate a sense of Americanness
in new immigrants, by way of language, education, culture, and politics,
they needed to denationalize these new residents in order to guarantee a
certain working order and social stability in the host country. Italians, with
their problems with the language, their distinctive cuisine, their religion
and cultural habits, and their racial characteristics, found the process of
acculturation and integration problematic.109 Americans then singled out
Italians as being particularly dangerous to the well-being of the nation
because of their inability to become American. The United States, with a
people divisible, distinguishable, varied, would then have difficulties
achieving the “e pluribus unum” so proudly hailed. The rebelliousness of
Italians could thus contribute to a degeneration of the American nation
and citizenry.
As Luigi Villari noted, some Americans deplored the fact that many
Italians in New York maintained the characteristics of Italian life rather
than “Americanize” themselves and their habits. He cited “a certain
Schultz, author of a volume entitled Race or Mongrel ”110 who believed that
with the “mixing of races is inevitably born degeneration” and that “the
people of Italy, Austria-Hungary, and the Balkans, being the most hybrid,
are the most degenerate . . . [and thus] the corruption of the United
States . . . is derived exclusively from the southern and Eastern European
immigration.”111 Those American politicians who held this perspective
proposed a stop to immigration from these inferior areas and the abandonment of any attempt to assimilate those immigrants already present in
the United States.112
The characterization of southern emigrants to the United States as
unassimilable did not escape the notice of Italian politicians. The concept
of unassimilability had been applied to another immigrant group to the
United States—the Chinese.113 Italian writers and politicians objected to
this comparison. Barone protested the depiction of the Italian emigrant as
miserable and starving, humiliated and degraded, arguing that the image
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of Italians as the “Chinese of Europe, content with paltry wages, is therefore
substantially false.”114 Instead, “the Italians, in a suitable environment, have
been able to complete work, that those people who throw the bloody insult
in our faces were unable [to complete].”115 Italian emigration had evolved
into a legend of sorts that had as its villains the poor and miserable southerners who destroyed the labor market with their willingness to be
exploited for ridiculously low wages, leaving in their wake the victimized
natives and the remnants of a more equal, more ideal society.
We were called the Chinese of Europe; and not wrongly if we must lend faith
to all that the newspapers say on the low tenor of the life of our emigrants
abroad. The painful state of [emigrants] . . . seems to give credence to those
who maintain that Italian emigration is one of an inferior race, born in a
poor and depressed environment, that, attracted by the prospect of a higher
wage, moves amidst races that are richer, more civil, better nourished, and
put the usual tenor of life of the . . . masses at risk, adapting itself well to
work for compensation that the indigenous consider wages of the starving.
From here [arises] the malice and the contempt . . . , from here the hunt for
Italians, painful and periodic manifestations of hate fed by the [American]
workers against the intruders . . .116
Italians faced not only the prejudice of the Americas toward inferior
races, but, according to opponents of immigration, their very inferiority
caused difficulties and placed obstacles in the path toward success. This
viewpoint did not belong solely to Americans; many Italian writers shared
this perspective as well. This line of discourse believed that the weakness of
the Italian race not only prevented emigrants from achieving great success
in their adopted country, it could not withstand the wretched circumstances of an inhospitable society and itself began to deteriorate from its
already inferior state. Pasquale Villari noted, “The poor Italians of New
York” are in conditions so miserable that “their physiognomy is so
degraded, and they have lost the national [Italian] features to such an
extent that they are barely distinguishable from the Celtic type of the
poorest Irish.”117
Some Italians believed that competition in the United States was particularly strenuous as the inferior Italian race had to battle with the heartier,
superior races of Northern Europe. Finding themselves amidst “a superior
people for methods, for audacity, and economic power . . . the dominant
race of today . . . the Anglo-Saxons,”118 the southerners faced the cruelty of
a multi-edged sword. Not only were they considered inferior in their own
country by their own compatriots, not only did their own government
believe that their hardship overseas was due in part to their inadequacy,
not only did the government of their host country deem them a danger to
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the social, political, and cultural liability because of their degeneracy, but
the “natives” abroad accused the Italians of adopting the ways of an “unassimilable” race, of essentially being “of color.” The Anglo-Saxon and Aryan
races were better able to succeed and assimilate because their cultures were
more similar to that of the United States, their languages were closer, and
they were stronger, smarter, more readily accepted.119 Italians were in constant battle with the stronger races represented by the English, Scottish,
Irish, Scandinavians, and Germans. Stronger, more resistant, better fed and
sheltered, and more desirous to live well, these competing groups did not
settle for the lower wages and humiliating work accepted by the Italians.
Nitti explained, “We have to battle with richer, more prosperous, also more
prolific races, united amongst themselves by ethnic and linguistic affinity,
[and] divided more or less from all of us not only by language and race, but
by habits and tendencies.”120 As well, the lack of unity and collectivity
among Italians further exacerbated the already difficult situation. Unable
to make heard a single political voice, Italians suffered from the perceived
characteristics of their race—lack of social consciousness, illiteracy,
indolence, and criminality.121
The New Italy in South America: Southern
Immigrants as the New Imperialists
Comparative Superiorities: Justifying
Italian Presence in South America
The weakness of the Italian race in comparison to the stronger Nordic
races made the American welcome less than hospitable. If Italian emigrants could not compete with the stronger races of other immigrant
groups in the United States, then perhaps the answer lay not in the north,
but rather in the south. Italian politicians began to look toward South
America as a more open, more hospitable land of opportunity for
Italians.122 They saw the cultural norms and conditions in South America
as more compatible with those of Italy and believed that Italians would
have better success in a fair fight with more equal or more inferior races.123
They urged fellow politicians to look carefully at the quality of emigrants
and at their prospects for success in the host country. The Italian government needed to “purify” its emigration, not only to guarantee the safety of
its citizenry abroad, but also to save its national reputation and to spread
its international influence. Nitti suggested that Italians should seek their
victory in South America, which “in large part is populated by races truly
inferior.”124 South America would provide a more suitable environment
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for Italian emigrants. Not only did they manage to survive in the south,
they managed to succeed and even gain a power base, dominate the regions
where they settled. Despite the tropical climate, yellow fever, and the struggle
against the Portuguese, Italians had “little by little [come to exclusively
inhabit] the most remote provinces of the large empire (Brazil) . . . where
the climate is mild and the vegetation is very rich.”125 Barone also commented on the success of the Italians in South America, proudly reporting
that the “Italians in the new countries of [South] America begin to belong
to the category of dominant people, but very soon, they will know how to
raise themselves, at least in part to the category of dominating people.”126
Nitti qualified the success of Italian emigrants, noting that only when
Italian was declared the official, mandatory language of the same category
as Spanish, when Italians became subjects of the South American states,
when the influence of the expatriates was felt in all the political, social, cultural, and economic systems of South America would “Italy be able to say
that it had conquered one of the largest markets in the world.”127
The triumph of Italians in South America brought hope to Italian writers.
After the derision and prejudice southerners faced in Italy and in the United
States, the achievements of emigrants in South America allowed Italians to
reclaim some of the international repute they had lost in their ill-fated
imperial campaigns. The success of these “new colonies” inspired a certain
optimism and gave fodder to proponents of emigration. Nitti argued that
if we do dare, the language and the name of Italy will reverberate in a few
decades, not hated, not derided, in an immense continent, where the greatest
future is for us, where we will find those riches and that power that we have
searched for in vain and with other methods elsewhere.128
Chimirri proudly proclaimed that Italian emigration, with its adaptability to
all climates, its willingness to work hard, its intelligence, “fertilize[d] the
arid steppes and cover[ed] with canals and railroad the lands which host
them.” These same emigrants, “with the sobriety and virtue of saving, send
to the mother country a continuous current of wealth.”129
Fortunato agreed, describing Italian emigrants as a “humble and high”
people who were exceptionally laborious, sober, perseverant and in whom
the “restless, nomadic, Latin soul returns today with difficulty to ascend
the great pacific way of human labor.”130 Amidst the groups of young
workers and peasants abroad, at the ports, in the mines, in the fields,
Italians at home could be proud of the “clear and harmonious sound of the
voices:—Are you Italians?—Yes, yes!—Bravi. Viva l’Italia!”131
Italian emigrants also offered a means of improving the situation in the
Mezzogiorno. The degeneration of the race in Italy could be remedied by
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triumphs of their adventurous counterparts in the Americas who sent
money and eventually returned with their force and vigor renewed.
Indeed, the regions in Italy that were experiencing a racial degeneration
could be rejuvenated by the returning emigrants who, with their new vigor,
hope, and fortune, would spread their new health amidst the weaker people
left behind in the south. With the money earned in the Americas and the
energetic force of a successful and dominant group, the south could experience a renewal.132 For many proponents of emigration, the movement of
Italians across the Atlantic offered the Mezzogiorno extra capital, reduced
the crime rates, and increased social mobility. In effect, it presented a possible
solution for the problems enumerated by the southern question. With the
resounding defeat of the Italian imperial campaign in Ethiopia in 1896,
emigration took on yet another facet. It provided a means for Italy to
regain its international reputation as an alternative to the “new” imperialism
of the nineteenth century.
Emigrants as Imperial Players: New Forms of Empire
The humiliating failure of Italian imperial endeavors in Africa left politicians
embarrassed, puzzled, and angry. In order to regain face, writers searched for
a means of international expansion without risking military defeat once
again. They found their solution in emigration, which they believed offered
an alternative to the more traditional, militaristic methods of imperialism.133
The communities of Italians abroad could be seen as colonies, spreading
their influence on foreign markets, governments, and cultures. As Girolamo
Boccardo contended, “If by colonies one intends not the possession nor the
domination of foreign lands but only the settlement of numerous swarms of
compatriots in distant streets, Italy already has many, and flourishing, on the
Plata, in Peru, in Bolivia, in Brazil, and elsewhere.”134 Whereas Italians had
failed in their imperial endeavors in Africa, they had proved more successful
in their settlements in South America. Italian emigrants seemed to have
experienced an unprecedented success in Argentina.135 According to Barone,
in South America, Italians had been able to both “resist foreign assimilation
and form strong and intrusive groups which, if helped and supported, can
constitute the nucleus of a future grand Italy.”136 In Europe and in North
America, Italian emigrants had led a relatively nomadic and unstable life and
thus felt more strongly the desire to return to Italy with their hard-earned
savings. They were unable to resist the acculturating forces of the dominant
culture, society, and people. In South America, the Italians had rooted themselves into the land, the civilization, and the history, strongly and firmly.
Minister of Finance Luigi Einaudi argued that “Argentina would still be a
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desert, its cities a mixture of straw and mud, without the . . . work, without
the colonizing audacity, without the spirit of enterprise of the Italians.”137 He
claimed that Italian emigrants had created the port of Buenos Aires and
“colonized entire provinces as vast as France and Italy . . .”138 Italians were in
Argentinean industry, they served as the “builders and architects of South
America,” and they represented the “entrepreneur who, emulator of the
English, has constructed public works on the shores of the Plata with more
than half a billion lire . . .”139 In South America, Barone found the perfect
conditions for Italians to settle and colonize. Through the natural hard work
and diligence of Italian character, Argentina had grown into a flourishing,
thriving center on the international economic market. The Italian government would be foolish to ignore the opportunities afforded by the success of
the emigrants. Indeed, South America offered emigrants and mother country the opportunity to create a new, strong political and economic force. A
new Italy, a colony, could be built in South America simply by the will of the
people when other, more militaristic attempts had failed. The government
needed “to concentrate [their] efforts there, instead of wasting them there in
timid or disproportionate enterprise . . . In South America there are—for
now at least—the conditions more suitable to our colonization . . . All that
world—that still has a long future ahead of it—will be for us, a conquest of
a peaceful economic battle . . .”140
Italian settlements across the Atlantic served as evidence of the might
and power Italy possessed in the international arena. Expansion could be
attained through means other than imperial wars. Instead, the emigrants
who left Italy represented the peaceful soldiers who would conquer the
political, cultural, social, and economic systems of a host country in dire
need of the ingenuity of these inflows of people. The strength of Italian
traditions, language, and religion successfully meshed with those of the
foreign society. As well, expansion could be seen in the work of the Italian
scientists who made ingenious discoveries and invented new technology
and brought glory to the Italian mind in international fields, in the production and trade of Italian goods, in the work of the Italian teachers and
missionaries in places such as Algeria and Eritrea.141 Although the imperial
campaigns had failed, Italy could still demand an international influence
and prestige through other means and in other arenas. Thus, emigration
could be used as a “powerful tool of colonization . . .”142 No longer simply
a symbol of Italy’s inability to provide for its citizens—it was reenvisioned
as a testament to a state’s capacity to extend its authority and influence
beyond its national borders.
Emigration, therefore, was a twofold blessing. While it helped to remedy
some of the maladies of the southern question in Italy, it also contributed
to the regaining of international prestige in the form of colonies. The
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northern emigrants returned to Italy with new technological skills, business
expertise, and industrial innovation. Southern emigrants returned with
new wealth and new hope to reconstruct the broken Mezzogiorno.
Emigration had already proven itself a reasonable and efficient means of
improving the lot of both citizen and nation. With their experiences
abroad, perhaps Italian emigrants were the logical answer to the question
of imperialism.143 Would Italian emigrants be able to stabilize Eritrea
where the military efforts had failed? The extent of Italian emigration
showed promise for the potential for Italian expansion in the form of its
foreign settlements. With emigration, Italy could equal the imperial prestige
of other nations with the direct influence exerted by emigrants on the host
country. Indeed, “Italian will be the language not only of a small civilization,
but of at least 100 million men spread our over a territory even larger than
Europe.”144
This other form of imperialism, the expansion of a nation’s identity
without a military campaign, required the careful planning of the Italian
government. The voluntary departure of emigrants for the Americas did
not by itself imply the success of Italy in spreading its culture and in gaining
international prestige. Italian emigrants abroad themselves needed to be
inculcated with Italian culture, language, patriotism; they needed to
acquire a sense of national consciousness, of national identity in order to
be agents in the naissance of new Italian civilizations abroad.145 Given the
magnitude of this national mission, the question as to how success could
be accomplished was answered by cultural organizations that existed both
in Italy and across the Atlantic. Perhaps the most famous and long-lasting
of these societies was that aptly named after the father of Italian literature,
Dante Alighieri. The Dante Alighieri Society, which had helped to disseminate the standardized Italian language within Italy, was transferred abroad
to make certain that Italian was taught to emigrants and their children.146
The Dante societies taught the new Italian language to those emigrants
who spoke only dialect and more importantly, by undertaking this work,
came to take on the cultural work of constructing national consciousness.
The principal work of the Dante needed to be focused where “Italianness
is in continuous and harsh battle with other nationalities.”147 Ruggiero
Bonghi explained that with the name alone, the Dante represented a
refined culture. The Dante needed to inculcate a sense of Italianness that
would include Italians in Italy as well as emigrants abroad.148
The making of Italians both inside and outside of national borders
could not only be the work of private societies. If emigrants were to
actively retain and maintain their Italianness, Italy would also have to
assume the responsibilities owed to its communities abroad. At what point
would the conditions of the Italian emigrants improve? If emigrants were
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truly “poor, deluded victims and emigration [was] a shameful, infamous
speculation . . . what are the rights, what are the duties of the government?”149 The Italian government had the responsibility to protect the
citizens that it had forced to emigrate. Bodio believed that the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs should take to heart the protection of emigrants and “disarm,
as much as possible, the hostile sentiments . . . against our countrymen.
And [this disarmament should be based] on the principle of the most loyal
cooperation in the intent to suppress the causes of provoked emigration in
the country as abroad.”150
Questions of Identity: Citizenship and Hyphenation
While Sidney Sonnino agreed that emigrants to the Americas could provide
Italy with external colonies through which they could exert political influence
and disseminate Italian culture, he disagreed with Barone’s contention that
emigrants should retain their Italian citizenship. Instead, he argued that as
means of protecting their interests and maintaining their dignity, Italian
emigrants must preserve Italian culture and language under the protection
guaranteed with citizenship in the host country. On November 28, 1900,
Sidney Sonnino, who believed that emigration was “a way to gain time to
be able to resolve the social question peacefully,”151 argued that in order to
“create a new Italy down there, to develop our own economic and commercial relations, the sentiments of common blood, of brotherhood
between emigrants and mother country, the use amongst emigrants of the
Italian language must be maintained always active.”152 However, the Italian
government needed to do everything in its power to assist emigrants in
procuring “local citizenship” while maintaining their Italian roots. With
dual citizenship, Italians would neither feel separated from their mother
country nor unwelcome in the host country. As citizens of the host country,
they would no longer be considered “as carcamanos or as gringos (as they
call them in Brazil and the Republic of Argentina).”153 By allowing emigrants to be active participants in the society in which they lived and by
welcoming the emigrants back into the mother country, both the Italianborn emigrants and the new Italians born abroad could protect themselves
overseas, spread Italian culture, and return one day as a victorious imperial
force.154
Italy needed to develop “at the same time a national culture and a love
for Italy and . . . make them foreign citizens [thus giving] them a political
force that now they do not have.”155 The Italian government needed to
make emigrants understand the importance of seeking a political voice in
the Americas.156 Emigrants should be encouraged to seek citizenship in the
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countries in which they resided in order for them to have a political voice
to protect their interests. By maintaining their ties to Italy however, emigrants also offered it the opportunity to influence the politics of other
countries, thus increasing its reputation internationally. Unfortunately, it
was often the emigrants themselves who “did not desire to become
American citizens, who did not want dual citizenship and renounced the
vote.”157 The government needed to regulate dual citizenship and assure
emigrants that when they returned to the homeland, they would be no less
Italian than before they left.
Historian and political economist Gino Arias argued that dual citizenship
was very important for the emigrants also because the Italian state could
not or would not protect its citizens abroad. In order to protect themselves
in America, emigrants were better served seeking the shelter of the host
country. Arias accused the Italian state of treating emigrants with apathy,
of turning its back on its citizens. The government made it known that an
Italian abroad was an “Italian citizen with all [his] rights, but as soon as
[he] set foot on American soil, as a measure of prudence, it will be opportune
if [he] became an American citizen; thus [he] can count on American
protection, because [he] could count on [Italy] only until a certain
point.”158 The idea of dual citizenship was introduced as a means of maintaining a relationship between emigrant and mother country and cultivating
a power base for Italians in America.159
The second generation, described by Pasquale Villari as those responsible
for crime in the United States, could guarantee protection for Italians abroad.
Bodio believed that dual citizenship was the most opportune solution that
would reconcile the problems concerning territorial sovereignty of both
nations. He saw dual citizenship as a transaction between two different types
of nationality—that of place of birth and that of blood. Thus, a person “born
in Argentina of an Italian father would be considered an Argentinean as long
as they lived in America, and when they . . . returned to Italy, would be considered an Italian.”160 Arias concurred, adding that dual citizenship would
finally recognize the unique political position of emigrants who linked the
mother and host countries together.161 He encouraged the clarification of the
rights and limitations of dual citizenship, as legally, the protection of the citizen was ambiguous as to jurisdiction. The problem arose when a law existed
in the host country, but not in Italy, then rendering that act invalid in Italy. For
example, when one divorced in the host country, s/he returned only to find
that divorce null and void because divorce was illegal in Italy.162
Despite the ambiguity of dual citizenship, even Americans believed that
Italians should seek the protection of the U.S. government offered them
via citizenship. Italian immigrants were scapegoated for the rising crime
rates while Americans turned a blind eye on their own political corruption.
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American citizenship would offer Italians the protection they needed
against legislative discrimination, social branding, and cultural stereotyping.
Emigrants needed to consider American citizenship as “a sacred honor and
take . . . this motto: ‘I am an Italian, I am an American. I am not guilty of
having done anything to mar the honor of one or the other name.’ ”163 As
noted by Luigi Villari, Americans encouraged the inclusion of Italians into
the U.S. system not only because of the protection it could provide, but also
because Italians were particularly adaptable to the American situation.164 As
the children of Italian emigrants in the Americas constructed new identities
between the two worlds in which they found themselves, it became
increasingly clear that emigration had become a way of life for Italians
abroad as well as for those left behind.
Even those who sympathized with the sad plight of emigrants forced to
leave their country out of despair and desperation saw in the transference
of these people to the Americas an opportunity for Italy to expand its
international horizons. Even if these emigrants were abandoned to their
own resources, received little sympathy, were considered “paupers,” and
were treated with great disdain by the people of the host countries, they
represented the new spread of Italian civilization throughout the world.
Nitti recognized that “Emigration not only will be . . . the most potent
cause of the decrease of social attrition, it will not only raise the spirit of
entire populations, but it will give to our country force and vigor for the
future and will open new horizons.”165 These exploited, miserable people,
who left a nation and a government that had systematically ignored their
needs, were the new expansionist force that offered Italy a new future, a
new way of saving face.
The colonies were not without their problems and the settlements
could offer not only the best of Italian culture to the host country, but also
the worst, especially regional strife and internal divisions. The colonies
were not “Italian” simply because the “colonists” shared the same mother
country. Those who did not feel unity with other Italians in Italy would not
necessarily find affinity with the “paisan” in America. A colonial empire
divided by regional differences certainly could not bode well for Italy.
Although the new Italian colonies were admirable in their vigor and
strength, they also showed the world the “internal dissention, . . . divisions, . . . suspicions, . . . [and] rancor” among Italians at home and
abroad. Italians in Italy and overseas were “not divided only between the
North and the South, but . . . [were] divided in the same province by men
of the same earth: two neighboring lands consider themselves as two
distant lands.”166 And in New York, “where there are perhaps more Italians
than in Rome and Naples, . . . every small village of southern Italy has its
street, its society, its divisions.”167
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Internal and External Colonization: Southerners
as Colonizers or as the Colonized?
Despite the justification of emigration as a tool of imperialism, a weapon
for international glory rather than a symbol of national disgrace, arguments against emigration to the Americas gained ground. The government
had done little to change the situation in the south and internal colonization
seemed a possible solution to the miserable conditions. Rather than concentrate on external colonies, perhaps focusing energy, money, industry,
and innovation toward the south would be a more fruitful enterprise.
Boccardo wrote of internal colonization in the United States as a possible
method for transforming the south of Italy. If Italy did not “[have] the
Far West, [it did have] instead Sardinia, [it had] uncultivated lands in the
Agro Romano and in the southern provinces that form [Italy’s] Near
South.”168 As an alternative to the departure of emigrants who exerted their
energies overseas and cultivated the agricultural and industrial wealth
of other nations, the Italian government could offer southerners the
opportunity to work for the betterment of their own regions.169
To counter this line of reasoning, politicians pointed out the fact
that reform in the south would require a radical change in laws, culture,
institutions—transformation that would neither be supported by lawmakers nor by emigrants who would be forced to abandon their dreams of
America to stay in arid Sicily. Sonnino wrote on May 7, 1883, that many
had suggested the colonization of the thousands of hectares of Italian
lands. However, the process of cultivating this earth would require “radical
laws that reordered all the institutes of land ownership,” a step that the government and members of the middle and upper ranks were not yet willing
to take.170 Not only would the social, legal, and political transformations
required to successfully found colonies in the Mezzogiorno and in Sardinia
be vast, the capital required in order to make such settlements feasible
would be immense. So too would be the cost of constructing productive
settlements in Africa. Italian emigration to the Americas provided a much
cheaper alternative to military conquest of Africa and industrial progress
in the south.171
If internal colonization seemed too costly an expenditure, then other
politicians conjectured that instead of living abroad under foreign rule,
emigrants could inhabit colonies in Africa under the direct rule of the
Italian government. Some writers believed that imperial conquest could
resolve many of the southern emigration problems.172 Considering the
treatment of some emigrants to the Americas, where they were treated as
little more than slaves, the Italian government had the responsibility to
offer a feasible alternative to trans-Atlantic migration.173 Reports back to
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Italy of the maltreatment of emigrants only heightened the desire to create
colonies in Africa under Italian rule, which would protect the well-being of
its citizens.174 Luigi Villari complained that if Italians in the United States
lived in communities separated from Americans, it was not the fault only
of the Italians, but also of the Americans who made it clear that the new
emigrants were unwelcome.175 The cold reception that emigrants met with
in the Americas only further separated the Italians from the Americans.
Americans considered the Italians “a problem” and Italians, knowing this
assessment, soon “lost the scarce interest [they had] in American things.”176
Americans needed to emphasize all that was “noble and beautiful in
America and to treat [the Italians] for that which they are . . . human
beings like Americans themselves.”177
Emigration to Africa would not be an innovation as Sicilian emigration
had existed even before the Unification and continued through the process
of constructing the nation. In fact, the migratory movements from the
south had been “directed almost entirely to Mediterranean Africa, and
above all to Algeria and Tunisia that constituted to our eyes an extension of
the Country, another limb of the island.”178 The other limb of the country,
Africa, provided a means for Italy to care for its would-be emigrants.
Papini and Prezzoloni believed that East Africa and a good part of west
Africa had been available for Italian conquest; however, after the fiasco of
the military efforts, the Italians possessed only Eritrea and Libya.
But to us more than to others, the colonies should be necessary: First of all
because having a strong emigration, we have need of our own places where
Italians can find themselves under the authority of the mother country,
without being obligated to submit to the difficulties and persecutions and
restrictions of foreigners . . . and lose their language and their nationality.
The colonies of South America did not have for us the importance that they
could have if they were administered and directed by us Italians, and unfortunately, a large part of those that form them remain Italian only in name.179
Politicians sought to deflate arguments that used emigration as a justification for the imperial campaigns. Fortunato contended that the imperial campaigns in Africa were pure folly as a country as weak and young as Italy could
not afford to participate in the games of other nations in which the rules were
measured by square kilometers. Furthermore, emigrants would not choose to
move to Africa, a land more arid and more barren even than their own Sicily.
In Africa, “in contact with nomadic and rapacious populations, in climactic
and soil conditions much worse than our own, the peasant will not go even if
compelled by force, even if protected by the army.”180 Fortunato did not have
much faith in the abilities of Italy, a poor and weak nation, “to attempt the
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colonization of any land of the black continent.”181 Francesco Perrone agreed
with Fortunato. He wrote, “Like Somalia and like Eritrea, also LibyaTripolitania and Cyrenaica—they cannot, for now, be colonies of peopling:
the emigrant of the Mezzogiorno, whether peasant or artisan, searches for the
rich wages of the Americas; if bourgeois, searches for the environment for
traffic; if professional, searches for cities and populous centers.”182
Southerners were much more attracted by the riches offered by the Americas
than by the protection offered by the Italian government in its colonies.183
Fortunato also believed that instead of fantasizing of colonies and empire, the
government should focus on protecting the true colonists, those who had the
power to spread the glory of the Italian civilization. Emigration offered
the Italian government a means of alleviating the population problems that
Fortunato believed plagued the country. It freed up much needed space,
brought more money into the country, and sustained the citizens that the
state could not provide for domestically. The sanity and health of the individual and the prosperity of the nation could be guaranteed by the continued
success of emigration abroad. Fortunato appealed to his fellow politicians to
stop the dreams of empire and colonies in Africa, but rather to consider seriously the work of protecting and defending the thousands of emigrants who
“voluntarily plow[ed] through the treacherous sea, descend[ed] onto New
York, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and [sent] to Italy, every year, in the fury
of deprivation and fatigue, from one hundred fifty to two hundred million
lire.”184 He argued that the hard labor and generosity of the Italian emigrants
staved off starvation and poverty in entire provinces of the Mezzogiorno. He
pleaded, “We must protect them and defend them, these brothers of ours.
I think it is a supreme debt of Italy to have a full conscience as to how
important . . . for its good fame, for its own good, the care and the tutelage of
these two million sons of ours who are in South America.”185
Luigi Bodio enumerated a plan by which emigration and the colonies
would be better protected and Italians would be better informed. Only if
the government were to protect its interests abroad, its investments in the
shape of human beings, would Italy be able to reap the benefits of this new
colonial endeavor. He believed that the government should (i) base its laws
of colonization on an extensive direct offer of small lots of lands given in
ownership to its cultivators, (ii) institute an “office of information” that
would communicate news regarding the domestic and external colonies
and monitor the actions of emigration agents, and (iii) along with the private
societies that emigrants frequented abroad, found government-sponsored
“associations of public good,” which would work in conjunction with the
agencies of emigration.186
Emigration remained a controversial, heavily debated subject, particularly
as issues of citizenship and jurisdiction continued to concern politicians in
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both the mother and the host countries. The languages of emigration and
imperialism became inextricably intertwined and often confused and
interchangeable. Even as descriptions of emigration as a “tool of imperialism”
became popular, so too did arguments that used emigration as a justification
for the African campaigns.
Conclusion
The movement of Italian peoples to Europe and the Americas touched an
emotional nerve among politicians, scholars, and writers. The initial
departure of millions of men, followed by entire families, transformed
family units, relationships, and marriages in a manner that had never been
experienced by the newly founded Italian kingdom. In particular, the perceived need of southerners to seek sustenance and survival outside the
national borders seemed a direct accusation by Italians of the failures of
their government. If the new state could not provide for its citizens and
depended instead on the opportunities and wealth of other nations, how
then would the international and domestic reputation of Italy fare in other
arenas? The discussions on the effects and consequences of emigration
then began to overlap with the other national discourses of the time as the
nature of identity and consciousness came to the forefront of a heated
debate on the responsibility of state and citizen.
Emigration touched upon the facets of identity heavily examined by the
other discourses that spoke to collectivity and otherness, commonality and
difference. Appropriating vocabulary constructed by meridionalist, physiognomical, and imperialist language, treatises on emigration fashioned a
new grammar that grappled with the new issues presented by communities
of Italian abroad. Politicians and other social/cultural commentators
examined and understood emigration through the already existing lens of
Other-ing, which had become familiar and almost comfortable. Emigration
reconceived the social problems enumerated by the southern question
(poverty, illiteracy, criminality, indolence, individuality), translated into
the scientific language of physiognomy (race, ethnicity, and biology),
contextualized into the imperialist enterprises (colonies, international
influence, economic markets) in order to understand the larger ramifications of the mobility of a citizenry less and less attached to the mother
country. Central to all these discourses then, and in particular to discussions on emigration, were the politics of identity and the fashioning of a
national consciousness.
These issues are repeating themselves even today as Italy has transformed
itself from a country of emigration into a country of immigration. Within
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the last forty years, Italy has witnessed an influx of people from Africa,
Asia, South America, the Pacific Islands, and Eastern Europe who believe it
to be the promised land. The development of these new migratory movements resonated with the historical experiences of Italy as a primary
exporter of people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed,
contemporary examination of this new human interchange draws upon
the very vocabulary, grammar, and themes of the earlier discourses on
Italian emigration. Despite the experiences of Italians themselves, many
cultural critics, scholars, and politicians in Italy today have not been able to
extend their discussion beyond the same issues examined by earlier commentators on emigration. Indeed, the same fears expressed by the host
countries, which were so offensive to the Italian state in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, can be heard in the political platforms
against immigration to Italy today. Even in the twenty-first century, the
same themes of meridionalism, racial theory, imperialism, and emigration
reverberate in an increasingly mobile, increasingly diverse, and yet
increasingly homogenous world.
With the entry of second- and third-world peoples into Italy, immigration
is being portrayed as a foreign and hostile invasion that it cannot sustain,
culturally, politically, or economically. The antagonism and opposition to
the influx of extracomunitari has added a complicated dimension to discussions on identity and nation. The term extracomunitari itself, meaning
“outside the community,” that is, the European community, has come to
mean non-Western European, has come to infer a person of color. Their
countries of origin matter less than their perceived homogeneous identity
as “Other.” Still, the construction of this new Other does not completely
destroy the historical and perceived cultural and ethnic differences within
Italy. Although Africans and Arabs are known derogatively as sottoterroni
and sottocafoni, subcategories of terroni (a derogatory term used to refer to
the southerners’ ties to the earth [terra] and to their lack of culture), at the
same time, these new “sub-southerners . . . do the work that [the] terroni
will no longer do.”187 Southern laziness paved the way for the entry of these
unwanted but needed populations. Thus, despite the changes in racial and
political dynamics, the historical resonance of the southern question rings
clearly.
Conclusion
Land of Emigration, Land
of Immigration: Toward
a New Diasporic Italy
talian notions of difference, be they of gender, race, ethnicity, region,
nation, or merely of distance, intersected one another, communicated,
informed, appropriated, and manipulated one another in order to find
their own legitimacy, to define themselves, to construct the Other. The
southern question, a potent and compelling argument that helped to create
the image of a homogenous Mezzogiorno, offered an entity against which
northerners could understand themselves, a region that could be blamed
for the shortcomings of the national government, a people to be held
responsible for its poverty, and a culture that hindered, perhaps even prevented, the patriotic glory of a young Italy struggling to find its place in
Europe.
The discussion of the south was so pervasive, so influential that it
became a possible means through which other discourses of difference,
physiognomy, criminal anthropology, imperialism, and emigration, could
be legitimized, ratified, and understood. These discourses informed one
another, were informed by one another, touched upon the same topics,
used the same familiar stereotypes, borrowed from the lexicon and grammar
of the other languages.
Many of the authors who had engaged in meridionalist debate and
raised concerns over issues of patriotism, morality, crime, special legal and
judicial systems, poverty, and cultural divide were instigators of other
political debates regarding difference. For example, many of the same
politicians and intellectuals involved in the meridionalist debate also wrote
on the first imperial campaigns of Italy. Francesco Crispi, Leopoldo
Franchetti, and Napoleone Colajanni, who had written extensively on the
southern question, also contributed many treatises on the military endeavors
I
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CONCLUSION
and later on the ramifications of its failures. Included in the discourse during
this time were concerns that these campaigns mirrored the internal colonialism of the south. Inspired by the positivist school, Cesare Lombroso
and his followers began their research in the physiognomical sciences in
the late nineteenth century, overlapping and interconnecting with meridionalist discourse as they sought to find a biological, racial explanation for
the problematic south. Numerous studies, including those of Alfredo
Niceforo, Giuseppe Sergi, and Enrico Ferri, rendered southerners racially
inferior to the Italians of the north and through “scientific” means, justified
different approaches in governing and policing the south. These scientists
would later engage in studies on the imperial front, examining the people
of Libya, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, helping to legitimate Italian colonial
endeavors. Francesco Saverio Nitti, Giustino Fortunato, and Arcangelo
Ghisleri participated not only in discussions on the conditions of the
south, but expressed their concern on the flow of emigration from Italy
toward the Americas, focusing on many of the same problems (crime,
poverty, illiteracy) as had been enumerated in meridionalist discourse.
The permeability of these languages, which allows them to be used to
describe many types of Otherness, the use of gender to describe the south, the
pathologicization of the Mezzogiorno in relation to the science of physiognomy, the debates over internal and external colonization, preoccupations on
creating a sense of Italianness within and without national borders—all
demonstrate the flexibility and malleability with which these discourses
transformed themselves and one another.
The study of the interconnectedness and exchanges between discourses,
in this case between the southern question and debates on physiognomy,
imperialism, and emigration, only begins to touch upon the ways in which
the imagined becomes reality, idea becomes fact, an Other becomes self.
Following the interaction of discourses of difference can help to further
the understanding of the construction of identity, the process of nationalism,
and the continuous competition of conflicting ideas for dominance.
Indeed, the anonymous introduction to the 1991 edition of Antonio
Gramsci’s Southern Question argues that the analysis of the conditions of
the Mezzogiorno and of the relationship between the north and the south
can help us to understand the southern question as it exists in contemporary
issues.
It’s useless to point out the enormous difference between the South analyzed
and described by Gramsci and that which we know today. What is the source
of the continued fascination and interest that this piece of writing maintains? . . . [T]he seeds of certain interpretative categories are present within
it that . . . are central to the discussion . . . [and to] the themes of the heredity
CONCLUSION
151
of the Risorgimento, the revocation of the meridionalismo of the Turin
years, the description of that racist Northern ideology that, incredibly, seems
to have remain unchanged, and which today still feeds the common sense
that is at the base of the phenomenon of the “Leghe.”1
Even today, the southern question, the lead ball of Italy, its stereotypes and
its myths remain present in political and social debates, in popular representations of the mafia and the Mezzogiorno, in jokes, racial epithets, and
cultural slurs. It continues to maintain a resonance even in the presence of
other Others.
This work signals the significant amount of research still to be done on
the ways in which contemporary Italian conceptions of race, nation, and
national identity have been defined by the historical development of the
infamous “southern question,” the nineteenth-century debate on the
divide between northern and southern Italy. How do the “new” southern
question and the growth of its latest components develop in the face of
new immigration and settlement? What is the resonance of the inception
of the meridionalist discourse, created during Unification when north and
south faced the inevitable challenges of living together as Italians, with the
new discussions of Italian nationalists as Italy confronts the present-day
realities of living with multiculturalism, xenophobia, racism, and the
European Union? How does a nation of emigration negotiate its new identity
as a nation of immigration?
Contributing to these new understandings of race and citizenship is the
recent influx of immigrants from Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe, which
has racialized the discourse on Italian national identity. Finding a definition
of Italian national identity that can eradicate religion, class, regional, and
now racial distinctions has proven a more formidable task than expected.
In 1996, a political debate ensued on the idea of an Italian aesthetic model
when the Italian viewing audience chose a naturalized Italian citizen of
Italian and Dominican descent, a “black” woman, to represent the country
as Miss Italy. Was Italy truly represented by this woman of color? Was she
truly Italian? What constituted an Italian and how would the nation come
to terms with the new naturalized citizens of color? What did it mean to be
Italian? Would the issue have raised less uproar if it had concerned a black
male player on one of the national sports teams? In fact, Carlton Myers, a
black Italian British basketball player on the Italian national team, was
chosen as the flagbearer of the Italian athletics delegation at the 2000
Sydney Olympics, a decision that met with very little discussion of race,
nation, or citizenship.
Italy has witnessed a great demographic change during the last quarter
century as over one million immigrants from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe,
152
CONCLUSION
and South America have arrived on the peninsula. The land of emigration,
which, between 1867 and 1988, sent almost twenty-seven million Italians
abroad to other parts of Europe, but most famously to the Americas—the
United States, Brazil, and Argentina—has become a land of immigration.2
The word “immigrant,” which until the 1980s implied “southerner,”3
became imbued with new, more complicated meaning as the stereotypically
“adventurous” Italians, who sought the land of opportunity elsewhere,
discovered that “Others” found their milk and honey in the industrial areas
of northern Italy, in the textile and leather industries in Tuscany, in the
agricultural fields of the south. In fact, in 1985, while the legal “foreigners”
in Italy numbered 425,000 (among them some 51,000 Americans and
other nonimmigrants), Italian emigrants numbered around 1,000,000 in
the United States, 366,000 in Canada, 261,000 in Australia, 531,000 in
Germany, 340,000 in France, 392,500 in Switzerland, 83,000 in the United
Kingdom, and 762,000 in Belgium.4 The image of Italy as a land of “emigrants” that began in the late nineteenth century and continued to the
mid-1980s only began to change in 1973 when immigrants entering the
country finally outnumbered the Italian emigrants leaving the country.5 In
the 1970s, people from Tunisia, Cape Verde, Mauritius, and the Philippines
settled in Italy, and in the 1980s, another two dozen nationalities, mainly
from Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe, joined the more established
communities.6
While the influx of immigrants of color to Italy mirrors the postwar
trend in Europe, Italy did not expect to see the type of increase that other
nations, France, Germany, Great Britain, experienced. Until many western
European nations enforced restrictions on immigration in the early 1970s,
their governments had boldly recruited men from the colonies to work
(temporarily) in construction and industry. Italy experienced a newer
form of immigration, one characterized by permanent immigrant communities of non-European or non-European Community (hence the term
extracomunitari) peoples, many of whom were illegal, unregulated, and
undocumented.7 From 1986 to 1990, Italy became Europe’s largest receiver
of mass immigration. By the end of 1990, 781,000 foreigners held residence permits in Italy. By 1991, the numbers had risen to 896,767.8
A decade later, in 2001, the number rose to 1,203,717.9 While roughly a quarter of these foreigners originate from so-called first-world countries in
Europe and other parts of the world, the majority of immigrants hailed
from lesser developed nations, the largest numbers from Tunisia, Morocco,
Senegal, Egypt, Iran, China, the Philippines, former Yugoslavia, and
Poland.10 The estimates of the number of undocumented immigrants, the
clandestini, as they are popularly known in Italy, range anywhere from
100,000 to 420,000.11
CONCLUSION
153
These new arrivals to Italy engage in a number of different occupations,
although stereotypes do exist as to the nature of their employment due to
their nation of origin and gender. Filipino and Cape Verdian women, as well
as some immigrants from Somalia and Ethiopia (brought to the country to
work as private servants by returning colonial Italians), quite commonly
engage in domestic work, from private housekeeping to care of the elderly.
Immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East are seen as primarily working in low-level service, jobs in restaurants, bars, and hotels. The
Chinese generally are perceived to work either for the textile industry
(oftentimes in sweatshops) or in Chinese restaurants. Moroccans,
Senegalese, and Pakistanis typically work the streets, selling objects from
Africa, roses, trinkets.
These new immigrants have replaced southerners as those engaged in
low-level labor. The southerners, who, during the years of the Economic
Miracle, moved in masses from the agricultural south to the more industrial
north and continue to face the derogatory remarks of a nation unable to
forget or forgive the poverty of the south, are now challenged by a new
group of settlers vying for identity and acculturation. During the Great
Migration, southerners were considered part of a “foreign legion,” based
on the nineteenth-century meridionalist discourse that saw southern culture,
language, customs, attitudes as wholly different and alien to that of the
north.12 The term “foreign legionnaire” was meant to be an affectionate,
albeit paternalistic and racially hued, term for the unskilled southern
laborers at the OM factory (FIAT) who spoke an incomprehensible dialect,
who were darker, shorter, and physically different from their northern
counterparts in the factory.13 Yet what really constituted the difference
between “foreigner,” “emigrant,” and immigrant? Were southerners emigrants who left a country unable to provide for its own citizenry, immigrants in new nations wary of the so-called Chinese of Europe who
brought with them “disease,” “mental illness,” “crime,” and “poverty,” and
foreigners in their own land as they migrated north in search of economic
possibility?14 The questions of inclusion, of assimilation in the mid-1950s
and 1960s remained eerily familiar, as the same discourses of politics, class,
religion, and difference of the nineteenth century took on more modern,
postwar hues. It is still arguable whether the southerner is in fact wholly
Italian or whether the regionalisms far outweigh the nationalisms. While
jokes and malicious comments about the “terroni” are still commonplace,
and while “Sicilian” is sometimes still distinct in newspapers, magazines,
television, film as being different from “Italian,” yet other groups, of color,
of different nations, different tongues, force Italy to reevaluate its understandings of race and of citizenship. How do Italians reconcile the racialized
differences of the foreigners of the 1950s and 1960s, many of whom were
154
CONCLUSION
referred to pejoratively as “africani,”“arabi,”“turchi,”“negri,”“marrocchini,”
with the new arrivals who are in fact africani, arabi, turchi, negri,
marrocchini?15 Who, indeed, are the foreigners and who are the immigrants now? In what ways do the new “foreign legionnaires,” who are
employed by as much as 63 percent of Milanese businesses and companies,
have to deal with the old meridionalist terms of being strangers in a land
already teeming with internal stranieri ?16 How do Italians construct contemporary ideas of national identity in the face of multiculturalism, in
confronting a diverse society wherein second-generation Chinese or
Moroccan children speak in regional dialect better than the so-called
native sons? How do Italians define the parameters of Italianness, of language, culture, habits, food—when the best pizzaiolo of Italy was judged to
be someone of Egyptian descent? Will Italy, the last of the European countries to fully base its laws of citizenship on blood and ethnicity, the jus sanguinis, be able to change its notions of nation and identity from one of
“descent” to one of “consent?”17 Can immigrants of color find ways to
become Italian, represent the Italian while southerners still struggle with
their divided past? If southerners are the original “Italians of color,” can
these new immigrants in fact become Italians “of color?” How does a
nation that has historically experienced a social, economic, and racial
divide between the north and the south unite as Italian in opposition to
communities of people who are perceived as even more socially, economically, and racially different?
As the flows of immigration continue to complicate the questions of
nation and citizenship, the fashioning of a new Italian national identity
both resonates with the as yet unanswered nineteenth-century southern
question and literally echoes the changing face, be it lighter or darker, of
the new Italians. Italians have reconceptualized the nation and national
identity in an era in which geopolitical borders are increasingly blurred by
the European Union and in which notions of Italianness become increasingly uncertain with the influx of immigrants from Asia, Africa, and Latin
America. Contemporary Italy, a country historically divided by regional
diversities, now confronts a new version of the old land, disrupted by yet a
new set of differences.
Notes
Introduction
1. Interview conducted with Paola Russomando, Via Paolo Sarpi 22, Milan,
October 17, 1994.
2. Cited in Gabriella Gribaudi, “Le immagini del Mezzogiorno,” in Robert Lumley
and Jonathan Morris (eds.), Oltre il meridionalismo. Nuove prospettive sul
Mezzogiorno d’Italia (Rome: Carocci, 1999), 89–111, 92.
3. An ethnic slur referring to the agricultural work done by many southern
Italians.
4. As John Dickie contends, “Some commentators on the race debate in fine secolo
Italy have resorted to the kind of nonexplanation that attributes racism to ignorance (yet people are prejudiced because of the way they organize what they do
know rather than because of what they do not). There is also a tendency to
ignore the variety and indeed vagueness of the use of the term ‘race,’ and thereby
to reduce racism to a single and unchanging thesis according to which race is the
causa causarum in human affairs. There is also the temptation to see bigotry
only in those instances in which racial language is used, or to see racial chauvinism as the secret essence of all forms of ethnic prejudice. All of these tendencies
are intermittently present in work that takes the problem of intolerance towards
the south as one of racism.” Dickie, Darkest Italy. The Nation and Stereotypes of
the Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 5.
5. Ibid.
6. I borrow here, of course, from Benedict Anderson and his influential work,
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism
(New York: Verso, 1991).
7. Nelson Moe, The View from Vesuvius. Italian Culture and the Southern Question
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
8. “More recent studies have found a more fruitful line of interpretation by translating the problem of racism in to the terms of ethnocentrism, if by ethnocentrism we
understand the construction of essentialized differences between geographical
entities or between socially and culturally defined groups. Whether those
differences are between ‘races’ between city and country, center and periphery, colonizer and colonized, believer and heathen, the essentializing effect is comparable.
Racism, as a subset of ethnocentrism, can be redefined as a range of discourses
(racisms) that produce many different concepts of race. Races do not exist,
156
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
NOTES
either as groups distinguished by hereditarily transmitted aggregates of
characteristics, or in any other sense as far as human biology is concerned. The
notion of race is biologically useless. ‘Race’ is thus not ‘an objective term of
classification’ denoting a physical reality that may or may not exert an influence
on our behavior. It is an analytical fiction, a trope that can be incorporated into
and transformed by a variety of styles of argument. Just as ethnocentrism is
not restricted to instances in which racial terms are used, so that concept, as well
as being part of elaborate theories, can have ideological effects in ‘ “less formally
structured assertions, stereotypical ascriptions and symbolic representations.’ ”
Ibid.
Nelson Moe, “ ‘This is Africa’: Ruling and Representing Southern Italy,
1860–61,” in Krystyna Von Henneberg and Albert R. Ascoli (eds.), Making and
Remaking Italy: The Cultivation of National Identity around the Risorgimento
(Oxford: Berg, 2001), 119–153, 121.
Silvana Patriarca, “Indolence and Regeneration: Tropes and Tensions of
Risorgimento Patriotism,” American Historical Review 110 (2005): 380–408,
383.
Ibid., 384.
As Patriarca warns, the conceptual function of language does not imply that
“actors and speakers are mere tools of a language, or to use a different metaphor,
helpless fishes in a dangerous sea of discourse.” Ibid.
Silvana Patriarca is less convinced that pre-1848, southern Italy plays a major
role in the formation of this interchange of discourse. She argues that southern
Italians were not necessarily found lacking in comparisons with northern
Italians. Instead, while politicians were intimately aware of the difficulties of
unification especially in the debates on confederation, and difference was recognized and discussed, these variations were not emphasized; instead, they
were “de-emphasized and reconciled.” Ibid., 395–396. Marta Petrusewicz
argues that after 1848, the idiom of the southern question, engaging still with
the earlier works of European travelers, becomes part of the political language
that resonates with post-Unification renderings of meridionalism.
(Petrusewicz, Come il Meridione divenne una questione. Rappresentazioni del
Sud prima e dopo il Quarantotto (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 1998).
Jane Schneider, “Introduction: The Dynamics of Neo-Orientalism in Italy
(1848–1995),” in Jane Schneider (ed.), Italy’s “Southern Question”: Orientalism
in One Country (Oxford: Berg, 1998), 1–23, 4–8.
See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
Ibid., 58–59.
Dickie, Darkest Italy, 5.
Moe, The View from Vesuvius.
Quoted in Schneider, “Introduction,” 8.
Ibid.
The south, as referred to by Alfredo Niceforo in his book of the same title,
L’Italia barbara contemporanea (Milan: Sandron, 1898).
Beverly Allen and Mary Russo (eds.), Revisioning Italy. National Identity and
Global Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 5.
NOTES
157
Chapter 1 The Dawning of the Mezzogiorno: The South
in the Construction of Italy
1. This brings up the interesting thesis that in fact the southern question required
the participation of complicit southerners to not only lend legitimacy to the
discourse, but also to disseminate these ideas as somehow “native.” For more
information, see Jane Schneider, “Introduction,” and Marta Petrusewicz,
“Before the Southern Question: ‘Native’ Ideas on Backwardness and Remedies
in the Kingdom of Two Sicilies,” in Jane Schneider (ed.), Italy’s “Southern
Question”: Orientalism in One Country (Oxford: Berg, 1998), 1–23 and 27–49,
respectively. See also Petrusewicz, Come il Meridione divenne una questione:
Rappresentazioni del Sud prima e dopo il Quarantotto (Soveria Mannelli:
Rubbettino, 1998) and Claudia Petraccone, Le due civiltà. Settentrionali e
meridionali nella storia dell’Italia (Bari: Laterza, 2000).
2. As Petrusewicz argues, “Thus conceived, southern ‘retardation’ did not constitute a ‘Question . . .’ ” and though “[i]ntellectuals were severe in criticizing
their country . . . they had no inferiority complex.” Petrusewicz, “Before the
Southern Question,” 41.
3. As Giuseppe La Farina, a Messina-born politician and historian and one of the
founders of the National Society, wrote to Cavour, “The Bourbons enclosed
Naples with a Great Wall of China, and the Neapolitans were so used to considering their city as a world unto itself that to make it enter into the common
life of a nation, one needs not only to invite it, but to compel it.” Camillo
Cavour, La liberazione del Mezzogiorno e la formazione del Regno d’Italia, vol. III
(Bologna: Zanichelli, 1949–1954), 356.
4. Giuseppe Massari, Il Signore Gladstone ed il governo napoletano. Raccolto di
scritti intorno alla questione napoletana (Turin: Tipografia A. Pons e C., 1851), 11.
Quoted in Petrusewicz, “Before the Southern Question,” 46.
5. Anonymous [Trinchera di Ostumi, Francesco], La quistione napolitana.
Ferdinando Borbone e Luciano Murat (publisher unknown, 1855), 26. Quoted
in Petrusewicz, “Before the Southern Question,” 46.
6. Petrusewicz, “Before the Southern Question,” 27.
7. See the recent article by Silvana Patriarca, “Indolence and Regeneration:
Tropes and Tensions of Risorgimento Patriotism,” American Historical Review
110 (2005): 380–408.
8. For more information, see Alberto Burgio, “Per la Storia del Razzismo
Italiano,” in Alberto Burgio, (ed.,) Nel nome della razza. Il razzismo nella storia
d’Italia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999), 20–21.
9. For more information on the writings of foreign travelers to the south of Italy,
see Attanasio Mozzillo, La frontiera del Grand Tour. Viaggi e viaggiatori nel
Mezzogiorno borbonico (Naples: Liguori, 1992).
10. Representations of the southern regions as barbarous and indolent, as well as
comparisons to Africa and the Middle East, existed prior to Unification, most
interestingly in correspondence to Count Cavour. He received several letters in
which Naples and Sicily were described in unflattering terms. In late October
of 1860, Lady Holland wrote to Cavour, “All the cities of Naples and Sicily are
158
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
NOTES
in a state of indecency, almost inferior to those of the ancient tribes of Africa.”
Cavour, La liberazione del Mezzogiorno, III, 244. In another letter, General Nino
Bixio, a commander who fought with Garibaldi in the south in 1860, warned
Cavour “to remind Nigra that the Neapolitans are Orientals and do not understand anything but force . . .” Camillo Cavour, Il carteggio Cavour-Nigra dal
1858 al 1864, vol. IV (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1929), 301.
Quoted in Attilio Mangano, Le cause della questione meridionale (Milan:
ISEDI, 1975), 7.
He wrote, “And because the physical differences used to generate analogous
moral differences, between the inhabitants of this part of Italy you see in at the
same time extreme indolence and energy, the ways of the most exquisite courtesy before an almost savage rusticity.” Heinrich Leo, Storia degli Stati Italiani
dalla caduta dell’Impero Romano fino all’anno 1840 (Florence: Società Editrice
Fiorentina, 1842), 17.
He wrote, “no land is richer with lively, readily ingenious men of an enterprising spirit and boldness than [southern Italy], where they live a life full of
poetry, very sensitive to the marvels of that sky and passionate for the soil of
the country: and in this itself is perhaps the reason for the indiscipline in
which they live and of the difficulty in leading them.” Ibid., 17. This directly
corresponds to later stereotypes of southerners being indolent and lazy, the
originators of “la dolce vita.” It touches upon criticism of the southerners as
being too individualistic and having no ideas of collectivity, a theme that
would later come to the forefront of meridionalist debates.
For more information, see Augusto Placanica, “L’Identità del meridionale,”
Meridiana 32 (1998): 153–187.
Massimo Salvadori, Il Mito del buongoverno. La questione meridionale da
Cavour a Gramsci (Turin: Einaudi, 1960), 194–195.
Quoted in Petraccone, Le due civiltà, 230. Giacomo Leopardi, Epistolario
(Florence: Le Monnier, 1849).
Cesare Balbo, Delle speranze d’Italia (Florence: Le Monnier, 1855), 36.
Pasquale Villari, Introduzione alla Storia d’Italia, excerpted from Nazionale
(Florence, 1849), 19.
For more information, see Luigi Zini, Storia d’Italia dal 1850 al 1866 (Milan:
Guigoni, 1866).
Ausonio Franchi (ed.), Epistolario di Giuseppe La Farina (Milan: Treves, 1869),
551.
Ernesto Artom, “Il Conte di Cavour e la Questione Napoletana,” Nuova
Antologia (November 1, 1901) in Bruno Caizzi (ed.), Nuova Antologia della
Questione Meridionale (Milan: Edizione di Comunità, 1975), 314.
In a supplement to the Giornale Officiale di Sicilia dated November 26, 1860,
the disadvantages of Sicily caused by the Bourbon government were cause for
worry as the island lagged significantly behind parts of northern Italy. From
the Giornale Officiale di Sicilia, supplement no. 148, December 26, 1860, in
Rosario Villari, Il Sud nella Storia d’Italia (Bari: Laterza, 1961), 86.
Bruno Caizzi describes the difficulties in unification as “the first contact
between the civilization of the north and that of the Mezzogiorno, the first
NOTES
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
159
experiences of a common government aroused distrust and relit the ancient
provincial spirit of many Italians of one or the other street; who began to
speak again of two Italies, economically and morally diverse, spiritually
irreconcilable . . .” Caizzi,“Introduction,” in Bruno Caizzi (ed.), Antologia della
Questione Meridionale (Milan: Edizioni di Comunità, 1950), 17.
Cavour, La liberazione del Mezzogiorno, II, 176. Moe argues that “if the phrase
‘sono abbrutiti,’ with its implications of a historic process of barbarization,
offers the hope of a reversibility in the process that is extrinsic to the subject,
interiorized images . . . compile that corruption in the profound nature of the
subject, overshadowing more than a doubt on the hope for reform and
redemption.” Nelson Moe, “Altro che Italia!, Il Sud dei Piemontesi, 1860–61,”
Meridiana 15 (1992): 53–89, 62.
Cavour, La liberazione del Mezzogiorno, II, 137.
Ibid., IV, 71–72.
Ibid., III, 208.
Moe argues that “the problem that this passage illuminates, in reference to the
formation of a national conscience, is [that the problem is] not only to transform the barbarians into Italian citizens, but to bring them to a cessation of
hostility, on the field of battle as well as the imagination.” Moe, “Altro che
Italia!,” 87.
Mozzillo, La frontiera del Grand Tour, 10–11.
Cavour, La liberazione del Mezzogiorno, III, 163.
Quoted in Benedetto Croce, Storia del Regno di Napoli (Bari: Laterza, 1972),
246.
In a letter to Garibaldi from General Cialdini, the commander of the Savoy
forces in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies dated April 21, 1861, wrote, “the
merit of having liberated southern Italy was not due only to you. You were on
the Volturno in the worst conditions when we arrived . . . Capua, Gaeta, Messina,
Civitella did not fall because of your work, and 56,000 Bourbons were
defeated, dispersed, made prisoners by us, not by you. It is therefore inexact
that the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was liberated by your hands.” Quoted in
Paolo Alatri, L’unità d’Italia. 1859–1861, vol. II (Rome: Orientamenti, 1960), 393.
For more information, see Demetrio De Stefano, Il Risorgimento e la questione
meridionale (Reggio Calabria: La Procellaria, 1964), 175.
Cavour viewed military intervention as the only mode of unifying the north
with the south. He wrote, “The goal is clear . . . [t]o impose unity on the most
corrupt, weakest part of Italy. On the means there is not doubt: moral force,
and if this is not enough, physical.” Cavour, Il carteggio, IV, 292–293.
Quoted in Petraccone, Le due civiltà, 25–26.
“Acts of the most ferocious barbarity were completed: mutiliation, stoning,
rending, burning, nothing was forgotten; the official was the last victim;
wounded, he was tied to a tree and finished by stoning. Women and maidens
distinguished themselves in the atrocities. Yesterday morning the vendetta of
God visited Ponte Landolfo and Casalduni. Already a large part of the population, presented with an enormous punishment, had to find refuge; there
remained those who wanted to resist . . . The shadow of Italian soldiers were
160
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
NOTES
placated. The terror invaded the vallies and were diffuse up to the ports of
Naples. Frightening examples, but just, but necessary.” Gazzetta di Torino,
August 18, 1861, quoted in Petraccone, Le due civiltà, 57.
This violent presence in the south was compared to the brutality found among
the natives of the Indies. On August 16, 1861, Diomede Pantaleoni wrote on
brigandage, “The nature of this brigandage is of the most ferocious, and one
must [look at] the [Indian] Sepoys movement with the English to find something analogous to the atrocious, savage scene of cruelty and of ferocity that
bloodies these provinces.” Franco Della Peruta, “Contributo alla storia della
questione meridionali. Cinque lettere inedite di Diomede Pantaleoni (1861),”
Società 1 (1950): 76.
Camillo Cavour, La questione romana degli anni 1860–1861, vol. I (Bologna:
Zanichelli, 1929), 70.
Cavour, La liberazione del Mezzogiorno, V, 231–232.
Cavour, Il carteggio, vol. IV, 376.
For more information, see Arcangelo Ghisleri, La Questione Meridionale nella
Soluzione del Problema Italiano (Rome: Libreria Politica Moderna, 1906), 52.
Francesco De Sanctis, Il Mezzogiorno e lo Stato unitario, Franco Ferri (ed.)
(Turin: Einaudi, 1960), 32.
Quoted in Artom, “Il Conte di Cavour,” in Caizzi, Nuova Antologia, 314.
Ibid., 320.
Massimo D’Azeglio and Diomede Pantaleoni, Carteggio inedito, Giovanni
Faldella (ed.) (Turin: Roux, 1888), 430.
Ippolito Nievo, Lettere garibaldine (Turin: Einaudi, 1961), 117–118.
Cavour, La liberazione del Mezzogiorno, III, 328.
Quoted in Moe, “Altro che Italia!,” 79.
See Leopoldo Franchetti and Sidney Sonnino, La Sicilia nel 1876 (Florence:
Barbera, 1877).
Quoted in Ernesto Ragionieri, Italia giudicata 1861–1945 ovvero la storia degli
italiani scritta dagli altri (Bari: Laterza, 1969), 11–12.
“L’Italia una e indivisibile” as a phrase appeared in the text of the plebiscite of
October 21, 1860.51.
Cavour, La liberazione del Mezzogiorno, V, 404.
Atti del Parlamento italiano. Discussioni della Camera dei Deputati (Sessione del
1861, 1 periodo) (Turin: Botta, 1861), 361.
They were particularly struck by the constant demand by southerners for jobs.
This “impiegomania” or job frenzy would always feature in representations of
Neapolitans as a negative characteristic. In December 1860, in a letter to Farini,
Pasquale Villari wrote, “the job frenzy from barbarity, and barbarity comes
from isolation.” Cavour, La liberazione del Mezzogiorno, IV, 42.
Atti parlamentari, April 4, 1861, 416.
Atti del Parlamento Italiano. Discussioni della Camera dei Deputati (Sessione del
1861, 2 periodo) (Turin: Botta, 1862), 6.
La Gazzetta di Torino, January 6, 1861. In his official correspondence from
Naples, compiled in May, 1861, Costantino Nigra wrote, “Contemporary
histories . . . are full of blame for the Bourbon administration. However no
NOTES
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
161
history has been able to reveal entirely the immensity of this plague.”
Cavour, Il carteggio, IV, 379.
Giuseppe Cesare Abba, Da Quarto al Volturno. Noterelle di uno dei Mille
(Bologna: Zanichelli, 1960), 249.
Giuseppe Bandi, I Mille da Genova a Capua (Milan: Rizzoli, 1960), 130, quoted
in Petraccone, Le due civiltà, 47. A myth describing the unawareness of
Sicilians at the concept of a “national” Italy tells of how they upon the landing
of the Mille and on hearing the cries of Viva Garibaldi! Viva L’Italia!, believed
La Taglia to be Garibaldi’s wife. For more information, see John Dickie,
Darkest Italy. The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900 (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).
Quoted in Petraccone, Le due civiltà, 24.
Epistolario di Nino Bixio, vol. II (Rome: Vittoriano, 1942), 57. Letter dated
February 18, 1863.
Quoted in Petraccone, Le due civiltà, 64.
For more information, see Placanica, “L’Identità del meridionale.”
Salvatore Lupo, “Storia del Mezzogiorno, questione meridionale, meridionalismo,” Meridiana 32 (1998): 19–20.
Salvadori, Il Mito del buongoverno, 36–37. See also Gino Arias, La Questione
Meridionale (Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli, 1921), 196.
Chapter 2 Making the South “Italian”: Writing the
Post-Risorgimento Southern Question
1. Additional works on the southern question include Francesco Barbagallo,
Mezzogiorno e Questione Meridionale (Naples: Guida Editori, 1980); Dario
Lopreno, La question Nord-Sud en Italie: histoire du Mezzogiorno: de l’unite
italienne à nos jours (Berne–New York: P.Lang, 1992); Salvatore Cafiero,
Questione meridionale e unità nazionale, 1861–1995 (Rome: Nuova Italia
Scientifica, 1996); Robert Lumley and Jonathan Morris (eds.), Oltre il
Meridionalismo. Nuove prospettive sul Mezzogiorno d’Italia (Rome: Carocci,
1999); John Dickie, Darkest Italy. The Nation and Stereotypes of the
Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Nelson Moe, The
View from Vesuvius. Italian Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002).
2. On these issues, see Krystyna Von Henneberg and Albert R. Ascoli (eds.),
Making and Remaking Italy: The Cultivation of National Identity around the
Risorgimento (Oxford: Berg, 2001); Massimo Rosati, Il patriottismo italiano:
culture politiche e identità nazionale (Bari: Laterza, 2000); Fiorenza Tarozzi and
Giorgio Vecchio (eds.), Gli Italiani e il tricolore: patriottismo, identità nazionale
e fratture sociali lungo due secoli di storia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999).
3. John Dickie understands the southern question as a national question
“because it was though entirely as a subset of another group of issues which
concerned nation building, how regional and national cultures were related
and how Italy might progress and compete with other countries.” Therefore,
162
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
NOTES
stereotypes become essential to nationalist discourse because they “produce[d]
the kind of essentialized differentiation which is necessary for the idea of the
nation to take hold in our minds, for it to seem like an obvious, objective reality.”
Dickie, Darkest Italy, 53.
This particular trend is in line with the thesis proposed by Emilio Sereni in
Capitalismo e mercato nazionale in Italia (Bari: Laterza, 1974).
See Francesco Barbagallo, “Il Mezzogiorno, lo stato e il capitalismo italiano
dalla ‘quistione meridionale’ ai ‘quaderni del carcere,’ ” Studi Storici 29 (1988):
21–42.
For more information, see Marta Petrusewicz, “Before the Southern Question:
‘Native’ Ideas on Backwardness and Remedies in the Kingdom of Two Sicilies,”
in Jane Schneider (ed.), Italy’s “Southern Question”: Orientalism in One
Country (Oxford: Berg, 1998).
Jane Schneider writes, “Within Italy, a discourse about the South emerged
simultaneously in many fields . . . only after the Unification of Italy did an
image of the South as internally homogeneous and qualitatively ‘other’
become consolidated, displacing a picture of open-ended possibilities in which
the region’s particular or divergent institutions, laws, and customs were noted
but not reified.” Schneider, “Introduction: The Dynamics of Neo-Orientalism
in Italy (1848–1995),” in Jane Schneider (ed.), Italy’s “Southern Question”:
Orientalism in One Country (Oxford: Berg, 1998), 8.
Furthermore, as Silvana Patriarca argues, “In this discourse the South was a
symbol, a signifier whose referent is to be found essentially in the politics of its
makers.” (Silvana Patriarca, “How Many Italies? Representing the South in
Official Statistics,” in Schneider, Italy’s “Southern Question,” 77). Augusto
Placanica explains, “In reality, the Meridione . . . was born when it, defined
only by being the southern part of a reality of state that was just unified and
determined as such, became, ex abrupto, the south of this completely unified
new entity. Because, before this, of what could it have been the south, if not a
mere geographic expression, or a reality more literary than real?” Placanica,
“L’Identità del meridionale,” Meridiana 32 (1998), 158.
Giarrizzo, G, Mezzogiorno senza meridionalismo. La Sicilia, lo sviluppo, il potere
(Venice: Marsilio, 1992), xv.
Moe argues that “the novelty of Villari’s Lettere meridionali may . . . lie not
only in their launching of a new analytical field but in their inauguration of a
new intellectual function: that, precisely of the Meridionalist, the writer, from
northern or southern Italy, who endeavors to provide a representation of the
South to the nation’s elites, especially in the North.” Moe, “The Emergence of
the Southern Question,” in Jane Schneider, (ed.,) “Italy’s Southern Question:
Orientalism in One Country” (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1990), 61.
For more information, see Barbagallo, Mezzogiorno.
Pasquale Villari, Le lettere meridionali ed altri scritti sulla questione sociale in
Italia (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1885), 300.
Ibid., 173.
Ibid., 189.
NOTES
163
15. For more information, see Dickie, Darkest Italy.
16. For a more detailed discussion on the linguistic and symbolic legacy of slavery,
see Steven A. Epstein, Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage
in Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).
17. Villari, Le lettere meridionali, 173.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., 113–114.
20. Pasquale Villari, “Il Mezzogiorno e la Questione Sociale,” in Rosario Villari
(ed.), Il Sud nella storia d’Italia (Bari: Laterza, 1975), 105–118, 114.
21. Ibid.
22. Moe, The View from Vesuvius, 226–227.
23. Quoted in Moe, The View from Vesuvius, 227. Villari, Le lettere meridionali, 397.
24. Villari cited Neapolitan Pasquale Turiello, a patriot and political writer, who in
Governo e Governati had written: “In Italy, and in the Mezzogiorno above all,
there is too much individuality, to little habit in associations for work done in
common . . .” Ibid., 156.
25. Massimo Salvadori, Il Mito del buongoverno. La questione meridionale da
Cavour a Gramsci (Turin: Einaudi, 1960), 48. Antonio Salandra, minister of
agriculture, minister of finance, minister of the treasury, and prime minister
in the early twentieth century, criticized the heavy-handedness of Villari’s
criticisms of southern society. He argued, “Villari says that ‘the middle
classes of Naples use the rod against the plebes.’ Now he has certainly not verified this fact in his last travels. The other manner of exaggeration . . . consists
too much in putting down . . . the evils that infest our society, without taking into account the analogous evils . . . that infest other societies, even those
more civil; and most especially in insisting too much on certain parts of Italy
without taking in account the others.” Villari, Il Sud, 156–157.
26. Villari noted that foreign newspaper continued to query, “When will Italy
finally be civil?” (Villari, Le lettere meridionali, 61).
27. Ibid., 54.
28. Ibid.
29. Villari, “Il Mezzogiorno e la Questione Sociale,” 117.
30. Ibid.
31. Villari, Le lettere meridionali, 11.
32. Ibid., 18.
33. Ibid., 14.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., 42.
36. Ibid., 53.
37. Ibid., 92–93.
38. Ibid., 79–80.
39. Ibid., 106.
40. Ibid., 108.
41. Ibid., 232.
42. Villari, “Il Mezzogiorno e la Questione Sociale,” 111.
164
NOTES
43. Pasquale Villari, Scritti sulla questione sociale in Italia (Florence: Sansoni,
1902), 144.
44. Ibid.
45. Villari, Le lettere meridionali, 150–151.
46. Two factors encouraged Franchetti and Sidney Sonnino to examine the situation of the south and embark on an “enlightened battle” in their search for a
remedy to the problems they uncovered. First, both shared a great fear of socialism and second, they wanted to instigate reforms based on “a science and an
Italian economic, administrative and political tradition.” Leopoldo Franchetti,
“Politica parlamentare e politica nazionale,” Nuova Antologia, July 1, 1900, 167.
47. In their inquest into the situation in Sicily in 1876, Franchetti and Sonnino
believed that they had discovered a profound social dilemma on the island—
corruption. Sonnino argued that corruption had spread beyond the affluent
classes to the “low, inferior strata of society . . . it is the barbarity of primitive
people.” Sidney Sonnino, I contadini in Sicilia (Florence: Barbera, 1877), 465.
48. Leopoldo Franchetti, Condizioni economiche ed amministrative delle provincie
napoletane (Florence: Tipografia della Gazzetta d’Italia, 1875), 21.
49. Schneider, “Introduction,” 10.
50. Franchetti and Sonnino, La Sicilia, vol. I, 308–309
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. Moe, “The Emergence of the Southern Question,” 70.
54. Franchetti wrote, “We are all Italians, their disgraces are our disgraces, we are
weak with their weaknesses.” Leopoldo Franchetti, Condizioni economiche e
amministrative delle provincie napoletane. Appunti di viaggio—Diario del viaggio,
Antonio Jannazzo (ed.) (Bari: Laterza, 1985), 3.
55. He wrote, “The material prosperity of Mezzogiorno signifies a larger market for
industrial products from the North, signifies the elimination of the sense of
chronic revolt of southern agricultural plebes and therefore more solidarity and
a stronger material force in confronting the outside world.” Leopoldo Franchetti,
“Mezzo secolo di unità nell’Italia meridionali,” Nuova Antologia, May 1, 1911, 97.
56. Barbagallo, Mezzogiorno, 34.
57. Salvadori, Il Mito del buongoverno, 240.
58. Villari, Il Sud, 317.
59. Francesco Saverio Nitti, L’Italia all’alba del secolo XX. Discorso ai giovani d’Italia
(Torino–Roma: Roux e Viarengo, 1901), 12. He continued, “The Mezzogiorno
was therefore, in 1860, a poor country; but it had accumulated many savings,
had great collective goods, possessed with the exception of public education,
all the elements for a transformation. Instead, the diffuse opinion in Italy
then . . . was that the Mezzogiorno was a rather rich land; a land naturally rich
that only for the fault of the government had not achieved all that it could: liberty was enough, perhaps aggravated by taxes, to give its riches to all.” Ibid., 114.
60. Francesco Saverio Nitti, Il Mezzogiorno in una democrazia industriale (Bari:
Laterza, 1987), 91.
61. Giustino Fortunato, Antologia dai Suoi Scritti, Manlio Rossi-Doria (ed.) (Bari:
Laterza, 1948), 19.
NOTES
165
62. Fortunato wrote, “There are still two Italies, as bad as the word sounds, that
reminds one’s ear of the echo of a French song descended from Charles VIII: we
have conquered the Italies; two Italies, not only economically unequal, but morally
diverse: this is the true obstacle to the formation of a secure structure; of which we
must all finally convince ourselves, and from the conviction pull out an animated
will to constitute in harmony the two disjunctive parts, reinforcing the steep bank
of the abyss, that the Roman pontificate made more deep, the bridge between one
and the other that nothing more can either subvert or shake.” Ibid., 26.
63. Ibid., 21.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid.
66. Giustino Fortunato, Il Mezzogiorno e lo stato italiano (Bari: Laterza, 1911), 3.
67. Niccola Marselli, “Gl’Italiani del Mezzogiorno,” Nuova Antologia, vol. XLIII,
Serie II, February 15, 1884, part II, March 1, 1884, 662.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid., part I, 41.
70. Ibid.
71. Pasquale Turiello, fearing for the nation as a whole, searched for the origins
of Italian inferiority and found it in the Renaissance when Italy became
“inferior to other nations, still semi-barbarous, in that which is most important: in virility and in discipline.” Turiello, Governo e Governati in Italia, vol.
I (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1889), 7. He attributed the beginning of Italian
decline to the individualistic traditions of the Renaissance, which did not
help to further develop the collectivity so essential to the success of a nation.
Turiello believed that by studying Neapolitans, the most pronounced virtues
and vices of Italians in general would be revealed. He saw the strength in
individuality and the combination of amiability and the merit of the individual as strong virtues. However, the excessive “agility” of the Italian individual and the subsequent lack of discipline were serious flaws in the Italian
character.
72. Nitti, L’Italia, 13.
73. Ibid., 15.
74. Nitti, Il Mezzogiorno, 99.
75. Nitti, L’Italia, 128.
76. Francesco Saverio Nitti, Scritti sulla Questione Meridionale, vol. I, Saggi sulla
Storia Del Mezzogiorno Emigrazione e Lavoro (Bari: Laterza, 1958), 367.
77. Fortunato, Antologia, 23–24.
78. Quoted in ibid., 61. Fortunato counseled, “We are . . . what we are, with all the
weaknesses, with all the misery that represents the grave legacy of many centuries
of slavery; we have, it is true all to redo, improving . . . civil and political orders,
with which, in such a short time and with much energy, the sparse members of
the country have been recomposed; we must, it is certain, hasten our steps, also at
the expense of sweat and danger, if we want not to surpass, but at least to equal the
civilized countries of Europe, rendering us worthy of our future.” Ibid., 93.
79. Nitti, Il Mezzogiorno, 162. At the same time, the climate also offered
southerners the ability to survive famine and harsh winters. Nitti wrote, “The
166
80.
81.
82.
83.
84.
85.
86.
87.
88.
89.
90.
91.
92.
93.
94.
95.
96.
97.
98.
99.
100.
101.
102.
103.
104.
105.
106.
107.
108.
NOTES
mildness of the climate and the clemency of the skies render unnecessary any
substantial food.” Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 299.
Ibid., 301.
Ibid., 303. Although emigration was seen as a means of expressing southerners’ desire to improve and expand, he also saw the need for emigration as the
failure of the Italian government to provide for its citizens. Nitti, Scritti, I, 360.
Enzo Tagliacozzo, Voci di realismo politico dopo il 1870 (Bari: Laterza, 1907), 69.
Turiello, Governo e Governati, 244–253.
Scipio Sighele, Contro il parlamentarismo in La delinquenza settaria (Milan:
Treves, 1897), 258–259.
Villari, Il Sud, 92–93.
Ibid.
Fortunato, Antologia, 117.
Fortunato, Il Mezzogiorno, vol. II, 253.
Ibid.
Nitti, Il Mezzogiorno, 93.
Ibid., 95. He continued, “in Naples, the corruption of public life, for the fault
of some elements and bad actions of government, has created a state of
abnormal things . . . Bad elements are not lacking in any land, like microbes
of a sickness found a little everywhere: it is no less true that only the weak
organism or those predisposed to evil are generally those affected.” Ibid., 96.
Pasquale Turiello, “La Vita Politica nel Mezzogiorno,” in Guemo e Goremeti in
Italica (Bologna: Zancichelli, 2002), 355.
Tagliacozzo, Voci di realismo politico, 72.
Scipio, Sighele, Il Nazionalismo e I Partiti Politici (Milan: Treves, 1911), 111.
Quoted in Francesco Perrone, Il Problema del Mezzogiorno (Naples: Luigi
Pierro, 1913), 266.
Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Atti Parlamentari, Camera dei Deputati,
Tornata del 7 Giugno 1875, 3965.
Napoleone Colajanni, Settentrionali e Meridionali d’Italia (Milan: Sandron,
1898), 30–40.
Ibid., 347.
Ibid., 341.
Quoted in Demetrio De Stefano, Il Risorgimento e la questione meridionale
(Reggio Calabria: La Procellaria, 1964), 20.
For more information, see ibid.
Ibid., 341.
Arcangelo Ghisleri, La Questione Meridionale nella Soluzione del Problema
Italiano (Rome: Libreria Politica Moderna, 1906), 62.
Salvatore Lupo, “Storia del Mezzogiorno, questione meridionale, meridionalismo,” Meridiana 32 (1998): 33.
Colajanni, Settentrionali e Meridionali, 344.
Ibid. Colajanni also questioned the myth of Garibaldi’s Mille: “The ignorant
or malevolent, who falsify history, speak or write of the legendary expedition
NOTES
109.
110.
111.
112.
113.
114.
115.
116.
117.
118.
119.
120.
121.
122.
123.
124.
125.
167
of the Mille and of the liberation of Sicily, as if this came about by the miraculous
work of Garibaldi, without efficacious participation of the populations,
almost against him . . . [W]rote the same Garibaldi, ‘In Catania we found a
volcano of patriotism. Men, money, provisions for my naked people . . .’ ”
Ibid., 341.
Bruno Chimirri, La Calabria e gl’interessi del Mezzogiorno (Milan: Hoepli,
1915), 3.
Nitti, L’Italia, 119.
For more information, see Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Atti Parlamentari,
Camera dei Deputati, Tornata del 7 Giugno 1875, 3966.
Nitti, Scritti, I, 127.
He wrote, “[N]orthern Italy, perhaps because of prejudice, certainly wrong,
saw with profound aversion every attempt to create in the Mezzogiorno an
industrial life. The Mezzogiorno had functioned too long as a colony of consumption for Lombardy and Piedmont . . .” Nitti, Il Mezzogiorno, 151.
Nitti, L’Italia, 125.
Ibid., 130.
Ibid., 131.
Francesco Barbagallo, introduction to Nitti, Il Mezzogiorno, 76–83. Nitti
argued that, “Profound truths are also at the base of every solution to the
Neapolitan problem: the population does not want and cannot emigrate; the
city of Naples to renew itself must become an industrial center; Naples has
particular aptitude toward the development of those industries in which are
required intelligence on the part of the workers.” Ibid., 108.
Ibid., 113.
Salvadori, Il Mito del buongoverno, 289. On Salvemini, see the recent work by
Charles Killinger, Gaetano Salvemini: A Biography (Westport, CT: Praeger,
2002).
Gaetano Salvemini, La questione meridionale e il federalismo (Milan: Critica
Sociale, 1900), 158–159.
Quoted in Barbagallo, Mezzogiorno, 31.
Gino Arias, La Questione Meridionale, vol. I (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1921),
201–202.
Quoted in De Stefano, Il risorgimento, 62. Ciccotti’s conference paper was
entitled, “Mezzogiorno e Settentrione d’Italia,” and was delivered in Milan on
March 8, 1898.
Francesco La Penna warned, “The inferiority of people are all relative to the
diverse contingencies, variables with these same indefinite and indefinable
contingencies. All the people of the land, now in a state of inferiority, had
their most splendid history; and Europe, that now is at the avant-garde of
every moral and civil progress, was barbarous when the Oriental and African
people themselves, that today give us much over which to ponder and think,
were civil.” La Penna, Il Mezzogiorno per un Vendrasco Pugliese (Trani: V.
Vecchi, 1903), 62.
For more information on Crispi and his use of southern identity and stereotype, see the fascinating article by John Dickie, “La Sicilianità di Francesco
168
126.
127.
128.
129.
130.
NOTES
Crispi. Contributo a una storia degli stereotipi del Sud,” Meridiana 24 (1995):
125–142.
Ibid., 135.
To understand the pervasiveness and lasting power of the myth of the
Mezzogiorno, John Dickie draws attention to Denis Mack Smith. Stereotypes
of the south repeat themselves even in contemporary times as Mack Smith
falls prey to describing Crispi as a “volcanic revolutionary by temperament . . . like many Sicilians he was proud and oversensitive to criticism.”
Ibid., 129.
Ibid., 137.
Ibid., 137–138.
“All of the ancient admiration toward the proud and primitive peoples of the
south ended, the positive myth of the Grand Tour was finished. Two portions
of Italy, that reciprocally ignored one another, had lived until now in tranquil
separation, and that now found themselves suddenly living reunited, began
to establish distance and to express overall judgments and values, from
which the South of Italy emerged censured and removed. And the south
could not respond with anything other than specular self-representations, of
an ideological and non-critical framework: and . . . – from the myth of brigandage became exalted positive elements, indominability, the vendetta
against the many injustices endured yesterday and today, the capacity to suffer but also to vindicate themselves of betrayal, to aspire to high aims, like the
northerners, better than the northerners.” Placanica, “L’identità del meridionale,” 164–165.
Chapter 3 Science and the Codification of Race: Physiognomy
and the Politics of Southern Identity
1. For a detailed description of the individual contributions of various scholars
on the origins of southern prejudice, see the interesting work of Vito Teti, La
Razza Maledetta. Origini del Pregiudizio Antimeridionale (Rome:
Manifestolibri, 1993).
2. Cesare Lombroso, L’uomo delinquente. In rapporto all’antropologia,
giurisprudenza e alle discipline carcerarie (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1896–1897).
See the recent translation by Mary Gibson, Criminal Man (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2006).
3. On Lombroso and his new school, see Mary Gibson, Born to Crime. Cesare
Lombroso and the Origins of Biological Criminology (Westport, CT: Praeger,
2002); Delia Frigessi, Ferruccio Giacanelli, Luisa Mangoni (eds.), Cesare
Lombroso: delitto, genio, follia. Scritti scelti (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1995);
Renzo Villa, Il deviante e i suoi segni: Lombroso e la nascita dell’antropologia
criminale (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1995); Daniel Pick, The Faces of
Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989); Daniel Pick, “The Faces of Anarchy: Lombroso and
NOTES
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
169
the Politics of Criminal Science in Post-Unification Italy,” History Workshop
Journal 21 (1986): 60–81.
Claudia Petraccone, Le due civiltà. Settentrionali e meridionali nella storia
dell’Italia (Bari: Laterza, 2000), 154–59.
Mary Gibson, “Biology or Environment? Race and Southern ‘Deviancy’ in the
Writings of Italian Criminologists, 1880–1920” in Jane Schneider (ed.), Italy’s
“Southern Question”: Orientalism in One Country (Oxford: Berg, 1998), 111.
Paolo Mantegazza, Physiognomy and Expression (New York: Scribner’s Sons,
1914), 3.
Ibid.
The historical sketch of physiognomy is based on ibid., 1–23. For more information on ideas of race, color, and slavery in this early period, see Steven
A.Epstein, Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 18–23.
For more information on Lavater, see Ellis Shookman (ed.), The Faces of
Physiognomy: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Johann Caspar Lavater
(Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993).
Phrenologists argued that psychological characteristics were located in specific
areas of the brain. They also studied the shape of the skull believing it was
indicative of personality and moral capacity. On phrenology in Europe, see
Angus McLaren, “Phrenology: Medium and Message,” Journal of Modern
History 46 (1974): 86–97; and “A Prehistory of the Social Sciences: Phrenology
in France,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (1981): 3–22.
Cesare Lombroso, Antologia Lombrosiana, Luigi Ferrio (ed.) (Pavia: Società
Editrice Pavese, 1962), 53. From L’uomo bianco e l’uomo di colore. Lettere
sull’origine e le varietà delle razze umane (Padua: F. Sacchetto, 1871).
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Giovanni Luigi Cerchiari, Fisionomia e mimica (Milan: Hoepli, 1905), 303.
Sergi wrote, “If Italy did not hesitate like other people of the Mediterranean, it
is due in part to the social education received from the Romans; but today as
the roman laws no longer exist, as modern conditions impede the rise and
dominance of superior men, there reappears individualism with little social
sentiment, without the advantages that made great the ancient nations; the
weakness of the state together with national decline are the results.” Sergi, Arii
e italici. Attorno all’Italia preistorica (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1898), 195.
Ibid., 191.
Ibid.
Ibid., 196.
Cited in Roberto Maiocchi, Scienza italiana e razzismo fascista (Florence:
La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1999), 172. For Pigorini, therefore, in opposition to
Sergi, the autochthonous populations of African origins were extremely primitive. He believed instead that civilization was imported into Italy by people of
the north, and originally, by Aryan people. Ibid., 174. Niceforo expressed a
similar judgment on the two races of Europe and Italy. He wrote, “There are
170
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
NOTES
therefore before us two characters: from the race that has a very high level of
individuality there is the brilliant production of the arts, of literature, of
science; from the race that has a more developed social sentiment, there is a
more ordered and more solid society, less tumultuous and therefore less easily
shaken, more susceptible to a collective progress and truly organic.” Niceforo,
L’Italia barbara contemporanea (Milan: R. Sandron, 1898), 294–95.
Giustino Fortunato, Il Mezzogiorno e lo stato italiano (Bari: Laterza, 1911), 537.
Response by A. De Bella in Antonio Renda, La questione meridionale. Inchiesta
(Milan–Palermo: Sandron, 1900), 175.
For more information, see Giuseppe Sergi, La decadenza delle nazioni latine
(Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1900), 216.
Sergi’s studies of race were remarkably influential and other anthropologists
used his work as a model for their own research. Niceforo, one of the most influential of the criminal anthropologists, directly related his ideas to those developed by Sergi. He wrote, “This European race is Celtic. Europe and the Asian
basin—European—African come to be so divided by a sort of diagonal; in the
north extends the European or Celtic race, in the south the Mediterranean race,
more recently called by Sergi the EuroAfrican species. The line where the fusion
of the two races occurs passes also through Italy, in such a way that divides it
once and for all into two zones, one the northern zone inhabited by the Celts that
appropriated [the region] having driven the Mediterraneans from the south, and
the other the southern zone inhabited by the Mediterranean race.” Alfredo
Niceforo, Delinquenza in Sardegna (Cagliari: Edizioni della Torre, 1897), 92.
Sergi, Arii e italici, 188.
Ibid., 79.
Garofalo, a Neapolitan magistrate and criminologist, was the third member of
the group to found the positivist school of criminology with Ferri and
Lombroso. Ferri, director of the socialist newspaper Avanti! from 1901–1905,
would later become a proponent of Fascism after 1924.
For more information, see Enrico Ferri, Studi sulla criminalità (Turin: Bocca,
1901).
Enrico Ferri, L’omicidio nell’antropologia criminale (Turin: Bocca, 1895), 247.
Francesco Perrone described, “The pessimistic theory—that was supposed to
make us resign ourselves to the tragic destiny of inferiority without hope
of . . . leveling ourselves with others and surpassing them—was the
ethnic–anthropological one that was glittering with life, that had eyed for
some years the heated debate of the southern question.” Perrone, Il Problema
del Mezzogiorno (Naples: Luigi Pierro, 1913), 61.
Ibid., 61–62.
Ibid., 57.
Giovanni de Gennaro in Renda, La questione, 215.
Sergi observed, “Also in Italy the difference of characters is visible, from the
populations of the north where the Aryan race predominates, to that of
the Mezzogiorno where still is housed with little mixing the primitive
Mediterranean race. Lombards and Piedmontese are more active, hardworking,
NOTES
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
171
resourceful than the Romans and the other populations further south than
Rome. Another difference of characteristic one can see in the way the cities and
villages are kept by one and the other. Those that Italian southerners have are
still primitive, while those of the north demonstrate progress in order and
symmetry . . .” Sergi, Arii e italici, 198.
Sergi, La decadenza, 269.
Ibid., 252–253.
Ibid., 253.
Ibid.
Lino Ferriani in Renda, La questione, 34.
Perrone, Il Problema, 57.
Ibid., 61–62.
D. Ruiz, in response to Antonio Renda’s query on physiognomy, wrote, “And in
speaking of this, I argue that one has to exclude the diversity of race, to which
instead is usually attributed a great importance: almost such that Italy has been
recently populated by dissimilar races, each one jealously maintaining itself
segregated from the others to ensure the purity of the origins . . . In fact, if the
diversity of race could by itself explain the difference of civilization, such difference should be revealed in the Mezzogiorno itself, where most of the population presently traces its origins to different races, superimposing one on the
other, and not entirely mixed; and these different features can be detected even
now by an ordinary observer without the help of philosophy and ethnology.”
Renda, La questione, 91.
Response by Giuseppe Sergi in ibid., 143.
Also in response to Antonio Renda, Pasquale Rossi enumerated the many races
that had contributed to the racial make-up of the Italian people. The success of
Roman conquest allowed for the mixing of several ethnicities, races, nationalities. The modern Italian person had in him the traits of the many peoples who
had contributed their blood and genetics. He explained, “And the causes are
many: race, climate, historical events . . . Race, that is apathetic and serene,
because we are, in great part, distant nephews of the magnigreci, of the people
that are the most limpid and serene that have ever existed, and while the
Middle Ages, that was a long mission carried on by people, caused, in northern
Italy on the Aryan population (protoCelts and protoSlavs) that lived there and
that had limited individuality and an elevated sense of the collective as an ethnic character, the establishment of other Aryan peoples, and so the ethnic
character became reinforced; [and which caused] in southern Italy on the
Mediterranean people of a highly developed individuality and a low sense of
collectivity, the mixing of other people of the Mediterranean, and thus the
hereditary qualities were reinforced . . . Thus we carry a legacy of character
from the people that have come among us: from the Arab people jealousy and
sensuality; from the Greeks, serene genius and a cold and indifferent soul,
while here and there live disparately, some oases, Albanese, Normans, etc. and
give a diverse note in the plumbeous uniformity of character. In Sicily where
Aryans and Mediterraneans met, there is, even in the features, a variety that
172
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
NOTES
reminds one now of the Moors, now of the blond son of Odin, that reverberates
in all the manifestations of that strong race.” Ibid., 89.
Response by Mario Pilo, in ibid., 158.
Francesco La Penna, Il Mezzogiorno per un Vendrasco Pugliese (Trani: V. Vecchi,
1903), 18.
See Gibson, “Biology or Environment,” 99–115; Pick, “The Faces of Anarchy.”
La Penna, Il Mezzogiorno, 61.
Renda, La questione, 177.
On Sicilians, Ghiradelli wrote, “The Sicilians are passionate and melancholic, well made in body, courageous; they are often practiced in fighting,
they leap and dance very agilely, and become very nimble. Italy most often
gives birth to weak men, although a few (by exception) may be very robust;
they are distinguished rather by imitation than by invention [Mantegazza
notes here that “it seems impossible that an Italian could write so great a
heresy”], they are of middling stature and rather thin.” Mantegazza,
Physiognomy, 237.
Scipio Sighele, Un paese di delinquenti nati Estratto dall’Archivio di Psichiatria,
Scienze Penali ed Antropologia criminale, Vol. XI–Fasc. V–VI (Torino: Fratelli
Bocca, 1890), 29.
Ibid., 25.
Ibid., 6.
Francesco Torraca, Pungolo, August 24, 1877.
Cesare Lombroso in Renda, La questione, 31. See also Gibson, Born to Crime,
103.
Niceforo, L’Italia barbara, 36.
To prove his point, Niceforo compared patterns of crime in Italy to patterns of
crime in the United States. Tinged with racial innuendo about blacks and
Native Americans in the States, Niceforo saw the same analogies of primitivity
and violence in the United States. He wrote, “Look in fact at the United States:
in the more civil states flourished crimes of fraud; instead, in the states in the
center and the west—the more refractory from modern evolution, where still
lives and expands the savage breath . . . you still find brigandage and banditry.”
Ibid., 36–37.
Massimo Salvadori, Il Mito del buongoverno. La questione meridionale da
Cavour a Gramsci (Turin: Einaudi, 1960), 197.
Niceforo, L’Italia barbara, 57.
Sergi wrote, “The savage tendency emerges . . . in the individuality that brings
crimes of blood and together also the associations that commit crimes, or with
the mafia or with the camorra or other analogous collective delinquencies that
express an individualism with emerging proselytism without law and against
the law and with damage to legal society.” Sergi, La decadenza, 243.
Niceforo, L’Italia barbara, 45.
Ibid.
Niceforo proposed certain scientific and statistical measures to understand
primitivity. “The statistical indices of barbarity: 1) diffusion of culture, 2)
frequency of violent crime, 3) sentiment of mercy, 4) industry, 5) intensive
NOTES
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
173
cultivation, 6) credit, 7) wealth, 8) density of population.” Alfredo Niceforo,
Italiani del nord e Italiani del sud (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1901), 578–79.
Ibid., 6.
For a more detailed study on the works of Niceforo, see Teti, La Razza
Maledetta.
Petraccone, Le due civiltà, 160.
Niceforo, Delinquenza, 97–98.
Ibid., 98.
Paolo Mantegazza also noted the ethnic differences between the people of different cities in Italy. He wrote, “Each province of Italy has a particular manner
of expressing emotion. While the Milanese laugh readily and loud, and in this
resemble the Celts, the inhabitant of Cagliari is extremely serious, because he
has been largely subject to Spanish influence. The Tuscan is the most Italian of
all Italians, and in consequence the most defiant and reserved of all; the
Neapolitan makes telegraphic gestures with his arms; the Romagnol is rough
and frank; and the Roman, worthy in his statuesque movements, always retains
the fatidic S.P.Q.R, inscribed in invisible characters.” Mantegazza,
Physiognomy, 241.
Niceforo, L’Italia barbara, 14.
Alfredo Niceforo, Forza e Ricchezza: Studi sulla vita fisica ed economica delle
classi sociali (Milan–Rome: Fratelli Bocca, 1906), 128.
Niceforo, Italiani, 190. Diet was such an integral factor in the evolution of race
that Niceforo conjectured Italians were “inferior to the Anglo-Saxons because
we eat less and worse than they do.” Niceforo, Forza e Ricchezza, 164.
Ibid., 225. Niceforo explained that “[t]he north has a lower number of illiterates, a greater number of kindergartens, of enrolled and of attendees of the
normal school, in the evening and summer schools, in the private schools, in
the normal [schools], in the classical [schools], in the boarding schools, in the
technical [schools], cares greatly for the instruction spending more than they
do in the south,—the students in the north study with more love than those in
the south and have, because of this, a higher rate of successful students; the
libraries are more numerous and more diffuse, so also the periodicals, editorial
productions, professions dedicated to intelligent works and artistic production. Also brilliance is more powerful and more creative.” Ibid., 273.
Ibid., 228.
Niceforo, Italiani, 118.
Ibid., 120.
Ibid., 124.
Niceforo described,“The essential character of the primitive and almost savage
peoples, that you find in the psychology of the Sicilian character—and that is
on the other hand also the psychology of the Sardinian people—is unrefrained
love for weapons, love that goes naturally joined with a hint of aggressivity.”
Niceforo, L’Italia barbara, 212.
Niceforo, Italiani, 295.
Ibid., 116.
Ibid., 242.
174
NOTES
82. Niceforo wrote, “The people, where industry is diffuse—writes Schönberg—
marks the most modern stage of the economic evolution and are the people of
civilization (Culturvölker); the peoples where industry is lacking and that are
arrested in other inferior economic forms, are people of the lowest civilization,
are people of nature (Naturvölker).” Ibid., 376.
83. Niceforo, L’Italia Barbara, 297.
84. Niceforo warned, “Neither will Italy escape these psycho-anthropological laws:
the territories occupied by the Celtic invasion were those that had the smallest
number of crimes of blood, those occupied by the Mediterranean invasion, on
the other hand, were rich with crimes committed against people.” Niceforo,
Delinquenza, 94.
85. Niceforo, L’Italia barbara, 227.
86. Nitti himself noted that “[t]he peoples of southern Italy, result of a mixture of
various races, has perhaps from many encounters, perhaps more still from
their rapidity in its conception, a vague tendency toward the life of adventure.
There is, above all in the people of Basilicata and Calabria, a sense of unconscious
mysticism that invades the popular spirit.”Francesco Saverio Nitti, Il Mezzogiorno
in una democrazia industriale (Bari: Laterza, 1987), 295. He continued, writing,
“We will just touch the question of superstitious sentiment of the Sicilian
populations, but it is enough to put to the test how much in that sentiment is
savage and primitive.” Niceforo, L’Italia barbara, 201.
87. Ibid., 247.
88. Ibid., 247–248.
89. Scipio Sighele, e.g., was, with his European counterparts Tarde and Le Bon, a
theorist of crowds. Their work feminized crowds in a negative light as hysterical and irrational. Collaboration and cooperation with other European theorists
helped to legitimate and substantiate the scientific work of Italian anthropologists. See Pick, The Faces of Degeneration.
90. “The less sensual people today are also more capable at methodical and continuous work, are more submissive to a general rule of discipline and of collective
organization, being less restless. The more sensual instead, excited, restless, submissive to a type of continuous excitation, find it difficult today to adapt to
methodical work and to submit to collective discipline . . . [W]e want simply to
admit into evidence the fact that the lesser sensuality of certain peoples introduces, in their individual and collective psychology, certain characteristics that
can be one of the many causes of modern progress.” Niceforo, Italiani, 315.
91. Niceforo, L’Italia barbara, 267.
92. Ibid.
93. Niceforo quoted Guglielmo Ferrero who remarked, “Does not it seem like a
dream, thinking that these customs of Arab tribes, older than Muhammed,
relive in our days, in our province, that these enterprises have as protagonists,
not Touaregg or Beduins, but Italian citizens, and as the theater, not the Sahara
Desert but the Sardinian mountains?” Niceforo, Italiani, 588.
94. Another commonality that Niceforo found between southerners and people of
the Middle East and Africa were in the typical and traditional form of armed
NOTES
95.
96.
97.
98.
99.
100.
101.
102.
103.
104.
105.
106.
107.
108.
109.
110.
111.
112.
113.
175
robbery. He argued that it was the “same type of raid that modern travelers in
Africa had reported having seen on the black continent among the primitive
peoples.” Niceforo, Delinquenza, 46.
Niceforo, L’Italia barbara, 53.
Ibid., 264.
Ibid.
Ibid., 52.
Ibid., 180.
Sergi, La decadenza, 269.
Niceforo, Delinquenza, 96–97.
Renda, La questione, 30.
Ibid.
For more information, see Rosario Villari, Il Sud nella Storia d’Italia (Bari:
Laterza, 1961), 442.
Renda, La questione, 192–193. An example of this defense is that given by
Francesco La Penna. He wrote, “The inferiority of the people is all relative on
different contingencies, variables with the same indefinite and indefinable
contingencies. All the people of the earth, now in a state of inferiority, has had
their most splendid history; and Europe, that now holds the avant-garde of
every moral and civil progress, were barbaric when the Oriental and African
people, who today give us much to do and think about, were civilized.”
La Penna, Il Mezzogiorno, 62.
Renda, La questione, 53. Antonio Renda, a historian and philosopher who
would later be a professor at the University of Palermo (1912), explained,
“The indecorous polemic, digressing from the field in which it was supposed
to be enclosed, gave vent to the accumulation of rancor, of stubbornness, of
misoneistic hate raised by the triumphal ascension of the young Italian scientific school; and, continuing the vulgar campaign of blatant insults, raised by
the courageous publication of the good book of Niceforo, against In Calabria
of Lombroso and then lastly against the editors of our journal, [this polemic]
embraced such an intellectual reaction, in order to strike the movement of
innovative thought—of which we are modestly followers—regional hatred,
passionate politics.” Ibid., 6.
Gaetano Salvemini under the pseudonym Rerum Scriptor in ibid., 40.
Ibid., 35.
Ibid., 202.
Filippo Turati, “Il delitto e la questione sociale,” in Luigi Cortesi (ed.), Turati
giovane. Scapigliatura, positivismo, marxismo (Milan: Editore Avanti!, 1962),
75–112.
Ibid., 193.
See the substantial and thorough biography of Colajanni by Jean-Yves
Fretigne, Biographie intellectuelle d’un protagoniste de l’Italie libérale:
Napoleone Colajanni, 1847–1921 (Rome: Ècole Française de Rome, 2002).
Napoleone Colajanni, Latini e Anglosassoni. Razze superiori e Razze inferiori
(Rome–Naples: Rivista Popolare, 1906), 429.
176
NOTES
114. Colajanni’s arguments were so influential that even Giuseppe Sergi wrote, “In
reality, what do we define as race, if not a result of a series of physical and
social factors? Giving the preeminence of social factors, one cannot destroy
that which is a product in collaboration with the physical causes. In fact we
have peoples, not races, that is an amalgam of different ethnic elements, that
have acquired an unique physiognomy for the community of life, under the
various common physical and social influences: erroneously identified as
race.” Quoted by Giovanni de Gennaro in Renda, La questione, 206.
115. Ibid., 79.
116. Ibid.
117. Ibid., 80.
118. Colajanni wrote, “Sicily and the Mezzogiorno have had periods of most
splendid civility, while the north was barbarous; the civilization and the barbarity, always relative, were alternated in the same places and still the races
remained unchanged.” Ibid., 81–82.
119. Colajanni, Latini e Anglosassoni, 18.
120. Ibid., 75.
121. Napoleone Colajanni, La delinquenza della Sicilia e le sue cause (Palermo:
Tipografia del Giornale di Sicilia, 1885), 19.
122. He wrote, “[The arguments] against the geographical distribution of crime
arrives at a good [and convincing] point with the opinion of one of the heads
of the positivist school of penal law. Garofalo writes, ‘What is the type of
[human] from which the delinquent is furthest away? The type of civil or
semi-civil man. Take the inhabitants of Vita Islands and New Zealand, and
you have the murderer; take the African Negro, and you have the thief . . .’ But
if theft is the characteristic product of the north, then why search for the typical
thief in Africa?” Ibid.
123. Colajanni, Latini e Anglosassoni, 97–98.
124. Colajanni, La delinquenza della Sicilia, 21.
125. D. Ruiz concurred, arguing, “If therefore the southern provinces of Italy, that
for historical reasons should have achieved a state more advanced in terms of
civilization compared to the others, remained instead at an inferior level, the
cause of the delayed progress, which cannot be found in the difference of race,
neither can be recognized in the form of government and in the political constitutions: therefore, one must look for it in the different conditions that in
some provinces have favored, with the development of the economic forces,
the (development) of the social state, while in others have hindered it.” Renda,
La questione, 92.
126. Colajanni, La delinquenza della Sicilia, 22.
127. Ibid., 68.
128. Francesco Barbagallo, Mezzogiorno e Questione Meridionale (Naples: Guida
Editori, 1980), 32.
129. Jurist and professor at the University of Messina, Ferdinando Puglia wrote, “it
does not seem to me that in a very short time one can make such observations
on the conditions of southern Italy, even more considering that the study, if it is
to be seriously done, I want to say, if it is to be truly scientific, cannot be restricted
NOTES
130.
131.
132.
133.
134.
135.
136.
177
to the present social, moral conditions, etc., but it must be extended to past conditions . . . [That] those observations have been incomplete, because they have
been limited to some provinces or part of a province; or superficial because all
these elements, that are necessary to resolve such grave questions as the ones proposed, have not been gathered with diligence; or not very exact because many of
those who have made them are moved by scientific preconceptions or by political
and sociological preconceptions.” Renda, La questione, 84–85.
Arcangelo Ghisleri, La Questione Meridionale nella Soluzione del Problema
Italiano (Rome: Libreria Politica Moderna, 1906), 23.
Renda, La questione, 64–65.
Ibid., 114.
Ibid.
Quoted in Perrone, Il Problema, 68.
Renda, La questione, 143.
Scipio Sighele, Pagine Nazionaliste (Milan: Treves, 1910), 207–08.
Chapter 4 Civilizing the Southerner, Taming the
African: Imperial Endeavor and Discourses of Race
1. On Italian imperialism, see Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller (eds.), Italian
Colonialism (New York: Palgrave, 2005); Patrizia Palumbo (ed.), A Place in the
Sun. Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-Unification to the Present
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Angelo Del Boca, L’Africa
nella coscienza degli Italiani (Bari: Laterza, 1992); Albertina Vittoria, “ ‘Il
sogno di un’ombra.’ Imperialismo e mito della nazione nei primi anni del
novecento,” Studi Storici 31 (1990): 825–842; Luigi Goglia and Fabio Grassi,
Il colonialismo italiano da Adua all’Impero (Bari: Laterza, 1981); Christopher
Seton-Watson, “Italy’s Imperial Hangover,” Journal of Contemporary History
15 (1980): 169–179.
2. The Sicilian fasci were peasant leagues believed to be under the influence of
the Socialist Party that headed a revolt in Sicily in 1893. The goals of the
movement were the improvement of the working relationship between the
peasants and the landowners and a more equal justice in the local administration. On the fasci, see Santi Fedele (ed.), I fasci siciliani dei lavoratori,
1891–94 (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 1994); Francesco Renda, I fasci siciliani,
1892–94 (Turin: Einaudi, 1977); Gastone Manacorda and Giuseppe Giarrizzo,
I fasci siciliani (Bari: Laterza, 1975).
3. Pasquale Verdicchio, Bound by Distance: Rethinking Nationalism through the
Italian Diaspora (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), 27.
4. Ibid.
5. Paolo Arcari, La coscienza nazionale in Italia (Milan: Libreria Editrice
Milanese, 1911), 36–37.
6. Yet Cimbali also saw pacifism as potentially harmful toward the development
of a healthy nation since the “false hate against war in general condemns
populations, nations, peoples, and tribes into being eternal forced and slave
178
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
NOTES
members of this or that foreign oppressive state.” Ibid. Stefano Jacini, who
served as the minister of public works in the government of the historic right
in 1860–1861 and 1864–1867, assumed a cautious conservative stance in the
government. He opposed war policies that depended on the amassing of
expensive armories. He argued that the colonial campaign was an unreasonable
and unfair strain on populations that were already suffering from poverty and
extreme taxes. Jacini did not wish to be seen as a naïve pacifist, and in fact
believed in a future war, “a war of continents, fought by millions of men, fast,
fulminating, and destructive.” Enzo Tagliacozzo, Voci di realismo politico dopo
il 1870 (Bari: Laterza, 1907), 34.
Guistino Fortunato, Antologia dai Suoi Scritti, Manlio Rossi-Doria (ed.) (Bari:
Laterza, 1948), 109.
Ibid.
Ibid., 110.
An anti-African campaign that appealed for the recall of African troops coordinated its efforts in Milan. Those who opposed the dissemination of racist theories surrounding imperialism were the republicans gathered around Arcangelo
Ghisleri and his journal Cuore e Critica. Romain Rainero, L’anticolonialismo italiano da Assab ad Adua (Milan: Edizioni di Comunità, 1971), 184. Efforts to
thwart the anti-African campaign included trying to “appeal to the patriotism of
the organizers, making them realize the need of keeping high the national prestige and love of the nation.” Archivio di Stato di Milano, Questura, Cartella 54.
Enrico Corradini, Il nazionalismo italiano (Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1914), 246.
Arcari, La coscienza nazionale, 8.
Corradini, Il nazionalismo, 16.
Ibid., 17.
Arcari, La coscienza nazionale, 33.
Giovanni Bovio, April 29, 1901, Camera dei deputati in Giovanni Battista
Penne, Per l’Italia Africana (Rome: Enrico Voghera, 1906), XXI.
Arcari, La coscienza nazionale, 177.
As Salvemini explained, “Metaphors are too apt to supplant ideas when emotions have supplanted reason.” Gaetano Salvemini, Scritti di politica estera
(Milan: Feltrinelli, 1963), 437–438.
In 1914, Corradini argued that inciting Italy to enter the new world conflict
would remind Italians of the glorious days in Libya “in which all the Italian
people was in harmony and all the harmony was an enthusiasm and all the
enthusiasm was joy and all the joy was because the Italian nation finally re-found
itself.” Corradini, Il nazionalismo, 257.
Scipio Sighele, Il Nazionalismo e I Partiti Politici (Milan: Treves, 1911), 89.
Many Italians were incredibly envious of the fortune of Germany, a country
they believed to be as young and inexperienced as Italy. How the Germans
managed to find both domestic and international success baffled Italians. As
Giovanni Diotallevi expressed, “How I am ashamed certain times to be Italian
as I continue always to compare ourselves with the Germans; especially with
the anger at not being German. Marvelous people, even with all their defects!”
Arcari, La coscienza nazionale, 162.
NOTES
179
21. Roberto Michels, L’imperialismo italiano (Milan: Società Editrice Libraria,
1914), 179.
22. “L’Italia Nuova” in La Riforma, January 17, 1896.
23. Ibid.
24. Michels, L’imperialismo, 179.
25. Ibid.
26. G. Rabizzani and F. Rubbiani (eds.), Sonnino (Milan: Casa Editrice
Risorgimento, 1920). Writings by Sidney Sonnino, 121–122.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid. September 27, 1913. Indeed, he cited Mazzini, the progenitor of Italian
nationalism, who believed that North Africa was the natural field of action for
external Italian politics, in order to justify his rationalizations for the imperial
campaign.
29. Sighele, Il Nazionalismo, 77.
30. Francesco Saverio Nitti, Scritti sulla Questione Meridionale, vol. I, Saggi sulla
Storia Del Mezzogiorno Emigrazione e Lavoro (Bari: Laterza, 1958), 316.
31. Ibid.
32. Sighele, Il Nazionalismo, 88.
33. See J.L. Miège, L’Imperialismo coloniale italiano dal 1870 ai giorni nostri (Milan:
Rizzoli, 1976).
34. Massimo Salvadori, Il Mito del buongoverno. La questione meridionale da
Cavour a Gramsci (Turin: Einaudi, 1960), 116.
35. Quoted in Ibid., 135.
36. Ibid., 116.
37. Michels, L’Imperialismo, 66.
38. Clodaco Taroni, La nuova Roma dell’Italia coloniale (Milan: Stab. Tip.
Poligrafia Italiana, 1908), 3.
39. Antonio Renda, La questione meridionale. Inchiesta (Milan–Palermo: Sandron,
1900), 80.
40. Ibid., 81.
41. Salvemini disagreed with this manipulation of racial categories. He noted,
“Rhetoric is always the master of the house. And it will never be possible to
make Italians understand . . . if today, we do not have the aptitude to organize
colonies . . . this does not mean that we will be forever a people who are good
at nothing: it means only that we must not make mistakes today and force ourselves tomorrow to be better than we have been until now.” Salvemini ridiculed
the use of the phrase, “the virtue of the race” popularized by imperialists. What
virtue could be found in a race that’s “unable to care for its own, sought to control another?” Salvemini, Scritti di politica, 111.
42. Penne, Per l’Italia, XXVIII.
43. Taroni, La nuova Roma, 111.
44. Despite his misgivings on the redemption of the “indigenous peoples,” it
should be noted that Martini did not apply exterminationist policies during
his rule as governor of Eritrea In fact, his administration indicated the beginnings of a reversal in Italian imperial ambition after the defeat at Adua in 1896.
45. Renato Paoli, Nella colonia Eritrea (Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1908), 296–297.
180
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
NOTES
Renato Paoli, Nella colonia Eritrea (Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1908), 296–297.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Taroni, La nuova Roma, 111–112.
Ibid.
Clodaco Taroni continued, “the true cause of the hate of North Americans and
Australians have for the yellow man is fear, the terrible fear of succumbing in
the economic terrain before an invasion of ‘sober people,’ of Chinese, of
Japanese. This privilege of race that has been conserved for too long in North
America and even more in Australia is destined to disappear shortly. Already
Japan has said the first word, and China . . . is preparing to say the last, the
most terrible, that of the final victory of the yellow [people]; because no one
can oppose the good right of the Chinese to be able to live in any country as
any other man, and China has as much population as ten times Japan, and
[they are] no less intelligent and sober and energetic.” Ibid., 115.
Ibid., 111–112.
Ibid.
Ibid., 112.
Ibid.
“La Partenza per l’Africa. Dialogo fra un soldato e la sua amante. Canzone
umoristica di Giuseppe Alfieri 1888,” in Che c’è di nuovo? Niente, la guerra.
Donne e uomini del Milanese di fronte alle guerre, 1885–1945 (Milan: Mazzotta,
1997), 49.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Giustino Fortunato, Il Mezzogiorno e lo stato italiano (Bari: Laterza, 1911),
338–339.
Ibid.
L. Nicora, “La mediazione per le Caroline,” Scuola cattolica (March 31, 1886).
Quoted in Maura Palazzi, “L’opinione pubblica cattolica e il colonialismo:
‘L’Avvenire d’Italia’ (1896–1914),” Storia Contemporanea 10 (1979): 43–87, 45.
Fortunato, Il Mezzogiorno, 425.
Sighele, Il Nazionalismo, 80–81.
Ibid., 76.
Ibid., 76–77.
Ibid.
Ibid., 77.
Guido Pescosolido, “Il dibattito coloniale nella stampa italiana e la battaglia di
Adua,” Storia Contemporanea 4 (1973): 675–711, 677.
Il Corriere della Sera, January 25–26, 1896.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Tagliacozzo, Voci di realismo politico, 132.
NOTES
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
84.
85.
86.
87.
88.
89.
90.
91.
92.
93.
94.
95.
96.
97.
98.
99.
100.
101.
102.
103.
104.
105.
106.
107.
108.
109.
110.
111.
112.
181
Corradini, Il nazionalismo, 61–63.
Quoted in Sighele, Il nazionalismo, 98.
Ibid.
Salvadori, Il Mito del buongoverno, 109–110.
Antonio De Viti De Marco, “Il Miraggio della Libia” from “Il parassitismo
tripolino e il Mezzogiorno” in L’Unità, March 16, 1912.
Archivio degli Affari Esteri, Archivio dell’Eritrea, Pacco 3. March 17, 1895.
Francesco Perrone, Il Problema del Mezzogiorno (Naples: Luigi Pierro, 1913),
309–310.
Giuseppe Sergi, La decadenza delle nazioni latine (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1900),
119.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Goglia and Grassi, Il colonialismo italiano, 425.
Renda, La questione, 60.
Ibid.
Penne, Per l’Italia, 111–112.
Ibid., 112.
Ibid.
Ibid., 113.
Ibid.
Michels, L’Imperialismo, 173.
Ibid.
Ibid., 85.
Tagliacozzo, Voci di realismo politico, 129–130.
Salvemini, Scritti di politica, 144.
Ibid., 145.
Filippo Turati, “In difesa dell’onore dei briganti,” Critica Sociale, November
30, 1891, 272.
Demetrio De Stefano, Il Risorgimento e la questione meridionale (Reggio
Calabria: La Procellaria, 1964), 94.
Ibid., 40.
Rosario Villari, Il Sud nella Storia d’Italia (Bari: Laterza, 1961), 213.
Pescosolido, “Il dibattito coloniale,” 696.
Rainero, L’anticolonialismo italiano, 165.
Ibid., 199. Andrea Costa, in a session of the Camera dei Deputati, December
5–7, 1888.
Ibid.
Andrea Costa, “La politica coloniale e I socialisti. Conferenza tenuta dal
deputato Andrea Costa nel teatro della Lizza in Siena il 17 aprile 1887” in
Rivista Italiana del Socialismo (1886–1888), 218.
Pescosolido, “Il dibattito coloniale,” 701–702.
Salvemini, Scritti di politica, 144.
Epistolario africano ovvero italiani in Africa, Pagine sparse (Rome: Tipografia
della Buona Stampa, 1887), 255–256.
Quoted in Salvemini, Scritti di politica, 143.
182
113.
114.
115.
116.
117.
118.
119.
120.
121.
122.
123.
124.
125.
126.
127.
128.
129.
130.
131.
132.
133.
134.
135.
136.
137.
138.
139.
140.
141.
142.
143.
144.
145.
NOTES
Ibid.
Villari, Il Sud, 427.
Salvemini, Scritti di politica, 106.
Il Messaggero, April 10, 1896.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Rainero, L’anticolonialismo italiano, 40.
Gustavo Coen, La questione coloniale e i popoli di razza latina (Livorno:
Raffaello Giusti, 1900), 244.
Ibid.
Penne, Per l’Italia, 135.
Palazzi, “L’opinione pubblica,” 75.
Paoli, Nella colonia Eritrea, 296.
Luigi Robecchi Bricchetti, “La Somalia Italiana,” Nuova Antologia, vol. XL,
serie III (July 16, 1892), 338–339.
Coen, La questione coloniale, 267.
Penne, Per l’Italia, 175.
“Le condizioni commerciali dell’isola di Rodi” in L’Avvenire d’Italia, August
23, 1912.
La Stampa di Torino, October 11, 1911.
Paoli, Nella colonia Eritrea, 302.
Ibid.
Salvatore Ottolenghi, “I tipi antropologici dei libici,” Nuova Antologia,
vol. CLXXI, serie V, May 1, 1914, 99.
Robecchi Bricchetti, “La Somalia,” 333.
Luigi Robecchi Bricchetti,“I Nostri Protetti,” Nuova Antologia, vol. LV, serie III,
January 1, 1895, 153.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Robecchi Bricchetti, “La Somalia,” 332. As well, whatever virtues and positive
characteristics Adua, the sainted city of Ethiopian Christianity, possessed,
were due to the legacy of Rome, “the sainted city of the Catholic globe.”
Pescosolido, “Il dibattito coloniale,” 704.
Robecchi Bricchetti, “I Nostri Protetti,” 149.
Ibid. Robecchi Bricchetti continued, “The Abyssinian race represents in east
Africa that which our society represents to certain individuals who believe
themselves to be learned have read a book, that is the arrogant pretension of
semi-civilized men.” Ibid., 142.
Rosalia Pianavia, Tre anni in Eritrea (Milan: Tipografia Editrice L. F. Cogliati,
1901), 48.
Ibid., 53.
Robecchi Bricchetti, “La Somalia,” 342.
Roberto Maiocchi, Scienza italiana e razzismo fascista (Florence: La Nuova
Italia Editrice, 1999), 156.
NOTES
183
146. Filippo Manetta, La razza negra nel suo stato sevaggio in Africa e nella suo
duplice condizione di emancipata e di schiava in America. Raccolta delle opinioni
dei più distinti antropologi d’Europa e d’America, nonchè di celebri viaggiatori
messe insieme e corroborate da osservazioni proprie (Turin: Tip. Del
Commercio, 1864), 44.
147. Ibid.
148. Sighele, Il Nazionalismo, 82–83.
149. Ibid.
150. Coen, La questione coloniale, 249. In L’Ora di Tripoli (Milan: Fratelli Treves,
1911), Enrico Corradini argued that Islam, “first dominated the Arabs and
then the Turks, ended the work begun in Africa by two populations of antiquity, the Greeks and our fathers, the Romans.” Indeed, Islam had destroyed
the progress and civilization set in motion by the ancient conquerors. The
Arab invasions had destroyed the communities of permanent agriculture,
replacing it instead with the more nomadic culture of shepherds. Africa then
lost the florid and rich agriculture bequeathed it by its European benefactors.
Salvemini, Scritti di politica, 130.
151. Paoli, Nella colonia Eritrea, 274.
152. La Capitale, January 29–30, 1896.
153. Enrico Ferri, Da Massaua sull’Altipiano Abissino. Conferenza tenuta
all’Accademia petrarca in Arezzo il 12 giugno 1887 (Arezzo: Picchi, 1887), 6.
154. Paoli, Nella colonia Eritrea, 13. To this end, the procurator of the king of
the Court of Appeals in Asmara argued in an elaborate study published by
De Angelis in 1905 that: “the citizen and the foreigner of white race can marry
an indigenous woman; but it is forbidden the marriage of a white woman and an
indigenous man of color, unless he had been naturalized and except in cases of
legal dispensation.” Penne, Per l’Italia, 233.
155. Quoted in Michele Nani, “Fisiologia sociale e politica della razza latina. Note
su alcuni dispositivi di naturalizzazione negli scritti di Angelo Mosso,” in
Alberto Burgio, Luciano Casali (eds.), Razzismo italiano (Bologna: Clueb,
1996), 41–42.
156. Ibid.
157. Ibid.
158. Penne, Per l’Italia, 233.
159. Robecchi Bricchetti, “I Nostri Protetti,” 143–144.
160. Ibid.
161. Ibid.
162. Ibid. In March 1912, E. Vassallo described Arabs as born soldiers who “had in
their blood the instinct of war and the passion for arms.” Arabs most desired
rifles, although to have one meant certain sacrifice and the willingness to pay
an exorbitant price. The Arab, “if maintained with a fistful of rice or dates,
could remain perfectly at war, breaking the systematic idleness of his life with
the only occupation he appreciated, that of shooting his rifle every now and
then.” E. Vassallo, “Gli Arabi” in L’Avvenire d’Italia, March 21, 1912.
163. “Their mentality is, like in all black races, inferior; those who live in the interior of the country, mistrust of foreigners, especially if white; they are
184
164.
165.
166.
167.
168.
169.
170.
171.
172.
173.
174.
175.
176.
NOTES
Muslim, that is true, but not fanatics as often is said; they have prejudices and
they certainly do not sin out of modesty; pride is indeed in the Somali the
main feature; they prefer death to contempt; easily they mistrust and dissimulate
out of habit; ready to sacrifice their life instead of subjecting themselves to any
dominion, they serve anybody for profit; they are undisciplined and loquacious, slow but with good memory.” Alberto Botarelli, Compendio di storia
coloniale italiana (Rome: Tipografia della Camera dei Deputati di C. Colombo,
1914), 154.
Robecchi Bricchetti, “I Nostri Protetti,” 143–144. The inferiority of the
indigenous women became one of the most difficult and pressing issues to
resolve. Renato Paoli urged Italians to bring “true civilization and not rags” to
the new colonies. Paoli, Nella colonia Eritrea, 81.
Robecchi Bricchetti, “I Nostri Protetti,” 143–144.
Luigi Gaffuri, Africa o morte. Viaggi di missionari italiani verso le sorgenti del
Nilo, 1850–1873 (Milan: Edizioni Unicopli, 1996), 37.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Arcangelo Ghisleri in Coen, La questione coloniale, 239.
Ibid.
Giovanni Beltrame, quoted in Gaffuri, Africa o morte, 37.
Coen argued that the Catholic Church appropriated the language from
anti-Africanist discourse in order to better serve their own purposes of
retaining the following of the people. By arguing the immorality of the imperial campaign, the Church hoped to sway Italians from the nationalist movement. He wrote, “The easy equation of civility and Italianness can touch
metropolitan Italy from Africa and it is this that the Catholic circles hope to
prevent by insisting on the unlawfulness of the Ethiopian conquest (‘the pretext of civilizing a people is not a reason to violate the rights of that people. If
not, we will still have here amongst us the Germans who took the pretext of
civilizing us . . .’), although they conceded something to the sentiment of solidarity toward the people and the ‘brave soldiers,’ innocent victims of the
state.” Coen, La questione coloniale, 319.
Archivio di Stato di Milano, Questura, Cartella 54, March 1896.
Ibid., Assembly of February 18, 1887.
Costa, “La politica coloniale,” 215. Ghisleri in Critica Sociale let out “a yell of
horror, indignation and protest . . . against the barbaric procedures by which
the civilians (in this case Anglo-Americans) have destroyed in the past and are
destroying before our eyes, the last vestiges of the indigenous civilization . . . It is the same impulse of Attila, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane: arms,
words and pretexts have changed, but the heart is identical. Military or merchant, conqueror or colonizer, the same wolf advances: and this, if nobody
says it, let me say it, this is definitely not civilization.” Arcangelo Ghisleri, “Le
razze inferiori e la civiltà,” in Critica sociale, January 15, 1891, 7.
C. Corte, “Il governo parlamentare e la politica coloniale” in Rassegna di
scienze sociali e politiche, April 1, 1887, quoted in Rainero, L’anticolonialismo
italiano, 190.
NOTES
185
177. Rainero, L’anticolonialismo italiano, 183.
178. Ibid., 210.
179. R. Candelari, Africa e Socialismo in Cuore e Critica, August 31, 1890, 186;
September 22, 1890, 202.
180. Quoted in Coen, La questione coloniale, 241.
181. See Vito Teti, La Razza Maledetta. Origini del Pregiudizio Antimeridionale
(Rome: Manifestolibri, 1993).
182. Villari, Il Sud, 432.
183. Rainero, L’anticolonialismo italiano, 188.
184. Ibid., 189–190.
185. Penne, Per l’Italia, 178. Penne argued that slavery in fact still existed in the
African colonies. “Even today slavery exists . . . in the African
colonies . . . Proceeding in their evolution, the colonies reach a third stage in
which slavery becomes impossible; because the growing population requires
a more efficient system. Then the colonies abrogate slavery; however they do
not replace it with the wage earning system existing in the homeland, but with
that economic form employed by the European society in the third stage of its
evolution, that is in the feudal age: serfdom.” Ibid., 184.
186. Ciro Dota, “Il dibattito sul problem coloniale nella stampa socialista
(1887–1900),” Storia Contemporanea 10 (1979): 1047–1087, 1048.
187. Costa, “La politica coloniale,” 153.
188. Ibid., 219.
189. Michels, L’Imperialismo, 88.
190. Penne, Per l’Italia, 166–167. The askari were the black soldiers in the Italian
army.
191. Penne, in order to prove his impartiality, cited the observations of Italian soldiers by Wylde: “The appearance of the native soldiers compares most
favourably with the poor Italian soldiers; the former are as smart as the latter
are slack, and it is a most painful sight for a civilian who as been accustomed
to see English troops campaigning, to see these poor fellows struggling along,
overladen, dirty and ragged, without what we in England should call any discipline or the amour propre of a soldier. The Italian soldier has to carry his
greatcoat, blanket, cooking pots, water bottle, a fourth part of a tent, and 186
rounds of ammunition; besides any other little things he may have, and often
a couple or three days’ rations as well. These people are conscripts and not
volunteers, and taken away from their country to fight what they consider an
unjust war against a warlike enemy whom they stand in great awe of—The
great coat, blanket and part of tent are carried in rolls over each shoulder, and
the rifle slung over all, the bayonet flapping at the side—The soldiers are
a fine, sturdy, strong, healthy-looking lot, and would do credit to any
country . . . and if properly looked after I believe would go anywhere, as
under the present very hard circumstances in which they are carrying on their
campaign, they seem cheery and in fairly good spirit.” Ibid., 166–167. An article published on December 1, 1913 in La Deutsche Tagezzeitung portrayed a
different view of Italian soldiers. “What a pleasant surprise! Exemplary order
in all the branches of the administration, one doesn’t believe one’s own eyes.
186
192.
193.
194.
195.
196.
197.
198.
199.
200.
201.
202.
203.
204.
NOTES
Are these the same dirty and lazy Italians we have learned to know in the southern
region of their country?” Archivio degli Affari Esteri, Archivio dell’Eritrea,
Pacco 44.
Dario Papa, Otto mesi d’Africa (Milan: Aliprandi, 1888), 6. Letter dated
August 24, 1888.
“Italia e Abbisinia” in Nuova Antologia, vol. IX, serie III, May 16, 1887, 305.
Penne, Per l’Italia, 122.
Salvemini, Scritti di politica, 113. Tripolitania: da Tripoli all’oasi di Kufra, trad.
G. Cora, Milano, F. Vallardi, 1889, 140 e 196. Renato Paoli agreed with this
assessment, arguing that “Eritrea requires emigration of capital, of educated
people, not of labor.” Paoli, Nella colonia Eritrea, 25–26.
Taroni, La nuova Roma, 7.
Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini, Vecchio e Nuovo Nazionalismo
(Milan: Studio Editoriale Lombardo, 1914), 31.
Michels, L’imperialismo, 179.
Taroni, La nuova Roma, 16–17.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Archivio di Stato di Milano, Questura, Cartella 54, February 1887.
Enrico Catellani, Padova, October 14, 1909 in Arcari, La coscienza nazionale,
91–92.
Taroni, La nuova Roma, 125–126. Taroni believed that Africa and South
America should be reserved for the Latin nations because they had, more than
other nations, contibuted the largest numbers to emigratory movements to
these two continents. As well, they were better suited to the climate and the
character of the conquered territories. Ibid., 5–6.
Chapter 5 Politics and Permeability: Italian Emigration
and Understandings of Difference
1. For statistical information on post-Unification emigration, please see
Gianfausto Rosoli (ed.), Un secolo di emigrazione italiana, 1876–1976 (Rome:
Centro Studi Emigrazione, 1978); on Italian emigration, see also Ercole Sori,
L’emigrazione Italiana dall’Unità alla seconda guerra mondiale (Bologna: Il
Mulino, 1979); George E. Pozzetta and Bruno Ramirez (eds.), The Italian
Diaspora: Migration across the Globe (Toronto: Multicultural History Society
of Ontario, 1992); Katherine Prior, The History of Emigration from Italy (New
York– London: Franklin Watts, 1997); Donna Gabaccia, Italy’s Many
Diasporas (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000); Piero Bevilacqua,
Andreina De Clementi, and Emilio Franzina (eds.), Storia dell’emigrazione
italiana. Partenze (Rome: Donzelli, 2001).
2. The figures come from Gabaccia, Many Diasporas, 68.
3. Ibid., 2.
4. Pasquale Verdicchio observed, “Alongside brigandage, a phenomenon that
deeply affected the South was emigration. It, too, has a certain mythological
NOTES
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
187
dimension within the struggle for survival. Emigration is represented as
the most successful of Southern revolutions . . . the end product of a
disillusioned and discouraged population for whom the hope of betterment
grew more and more distant with the reality of Unification, emigration was the
response to a nationalism that regarded geographic unity as more important
than the people on the lands it confined.” Pasquale Verdicchio, Bound by
Distance: Rethinking Nationalism through the Italian Diaspora (Madison:
Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), 37.
See Daniel J. Grange, “Emigration et colonies: un grand debat de l’Italie liberale,” Révue d’Histoire Modèrne et Contemporaine 30 (1983): 337–365.
Francesco Saverio Nitti, Il Mezzogiorno in una democrazia industriale (Bari:
Laterza, 1987), 334.
See Gino Massullo, “Economia delle rimesse,” in Storia dell’emigrazione,
161–183.
As Pasquale Verdicchio writes, “In other words, the problems of emigration
become secondary, and the topic only serves to offer a sympathetic illustration
of nation pitying its people, a nation that, unable to provide for a portion of its
population, offers the warmth of familiarity.” Verdicchio, Bound By Distance, 40.
The terms “gli italiani fuori d’Italia” and “gli italiani nel mondo” became more
common in reference to Italian emigrants after World War II due to the fascist
implications of earlier representations of the Italian diaspora as colonies.
Gabaccia, Many Diasporas, 193.
For more information, please see Luigi Favero and Graziano Tassello,
“Cent’anni di emigrazione italiana (1876–1976)” in Rosoli, Un secolo.
Ibid., 11.
Ibid.
Francesco Barbagallo, Mezzogiorno e Questione Meridionale (Naples: Guida
Editori, 1980), 52.
Francesco Saverio Nitti, Scritti sulla Questione Meridionale, vol. I, Saggi sulla
Storia Del Mezzogiorno Emigrazione e Lavoro (Bari: Laterza, 1958), 216.
Nitti pointed out that “To understand what importance emigration has, it will
be enough to put into view certain points:
1) There is no community in Calabria or Basilicata without emigration,
2) Around one million men have gone abroad,
3) The emigration is directed principally to America, but some go also to
Africa and Asia,
4) The number of men from Basilicata who emigrate is almost equal to the
number that stay in the country,
5) There are more men from Basilicata and from Calabria in New York than in
the major cities of those respective provinces,
6) Emigration began in the lands of small property and only recently penetrated the zone of the latifundia.”
Nitti, Il Mezzogiorno, 198–199.
16. Angelo Mosso, Vita moderna degli Italiani. Saggi (Milan: Treves, 1906), 53.
17. Luigi Bodio, “Della protezione degli emigranti italiani in America,” Nuova
Antologia, vol. LX, serie III, December 15, 1895, 630. He wrote, “Emigration for
188
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
NOTES
our country is a necessary thing. We must desire that some 100 of thousands
of people every year find themselves living abroad. If even double the numbers
were to leave now, we must not lament the loss of these people, but be happy
to know that they have found work outside. We have a population that is stuck,
given the present industrial and agricultural conditions, given the existing
relationship between available capital the number of arms.” Ibid.
Rosario Villari, Il Sud nella Storia d’Italia (Bari: Laterza, 1961), 179.
Ibid.
He writes, “With emigration, the people are resolving their own problems on
their own terms.” Nitti, Il Mezzogiorno, 207. For more information, see also
ibid., 308.
Ibid., 7.
Ibid., 322–323.
He writes, “Although like in all poor and primitive people the births are many
and superior to the average for the kingdom, the population diminished every
year because of emigration.” Ibid., 156.
Ibid., 335. See also Nitti, Scritti, I, 382.
Bruno Chimirri, La Calabria e gl’interessi del Mezzogiorno (Milan: Hoepli,
1915), 21–22.
See also Massimo Salvadori, Il mito del buongoverno. La questione meridionale
da Cavour a Gramsci (Turin: Einaudi, 1960), 225.
On December 23, 1888, a law was enacted, which, in appearance, protected
emigrants, but, in substance, served to hinder emigration. The government,
when it wanted, could limit the emigration of vigorous men, younger than
thirty-two, who could fulfill military service, and who otherwise were perceived as “abandoning Italy and leaving behind a state of great misery . . . to
improve their position.” Nitti, Scritti, I, 218.
Arias, La Questione Meridionale (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1921), 463.
See Matteo Sanfilippo, “Nationalisme, italianité et emigration aux Ameriques
(1830–1990),” European Review of History 2 (1995): 177–191.
Nitti, Il Mezzogiorno in una democrazia industriale, 337.
Ibid., 340.
Ibid.
Bonghi, “Per la società ‘Dante Alighieri,’ ” Nuova Antologia, vol. LX, serie III,
December 15, 1895, 603.
Enrico Barone, “La espansione coloniale italiana nell’America Latina,” Nuova
Antologia, vol. LXXXIII, serie IV, September 16, 1899, 279.
Ibid.
There was some talk of attempting to make Italian the national language in
Argentina, where Italian emigrants had the most influence, and arguably the
most success. This would be proof not only of Italian emigratory success
abroad, but of Italian national imperial success.
Barone, “La espansione coloniale,” 295.
Quoted in Nitti, Scritti, I, 389.
Nitti, Il Mezzogiorno, 129.
Ibid., 324.
NOTES
189
41. Luigi Villari, “L’opinione pubblica americana e i nostri emigrati,” Nuova
Antologia, vol. CXLVIII, serie V, August 1, 1910, 497.
42. Henry Cabot Lodge, “The Restriction of Immigration,” in North American
Review (January 1891) in Villari, “L’opinione pubblica,” 497–498.
43. Villari, “L’opinione pubblica,” 497–498.
44. Ibid., 498.
45. Villari noted that, “Lodge has not changed his mind throughout these years,
and charges again, . . . in favor of the exclusion of foreigners (read ‘Italians’)
who do not have any respect for morality for the laws or for order, who plot
secretly to assassinate their fellow countrymen, and whose simple presence
represents a danger to society.” Ibid.
46. Ibid., 499.
47. Napoleone Colajanni, Latini e Anglo-sassoni. Razze superiori e Razze inferiori
(Rome–Naples: Rivista Popolare, 1906), 400–403.
48. Villari, “L’opinione pubblica,” 500.
49. Ibid.
50. Pasquale Villari, Corriere della Sera, March 9, 1906.
51. Ibid.
52. Nitti, Il Mezzogiorno, 197. As well, female emigrants became more common as
marriages were arranged from afar, and young girls traveling with their father
or brothers arrived in America to be married.
53. Ibid., 198.
54. Nitti, Scritti, I, 360.
55. Barone, “La espansione coloniale,” 285.
56. On the Italian settlements, see Samuel L. Baily, Immigrants in the Lands of
Promise: Italians in Buenos Aires and New York City, 1870–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1999).
57. Bodio, “Della protezione,” 644.
58. Nitti, Il Mezzogiorno, 337.
59. Arcangelo Ghisleri, La Questione Meridionale nella Soluzione del Problema
Italiano (Rome: Libreria Politica Moderna, 1906), 63.
60. Bodio, “Della protezione,” 640.
61. Ibid.
62. Guistino Fortunato, Antologia dai Suoi Scritti, Manlio Rossi-Doria (ed.) (Bari:
Laterza, 1948), 84.
63. Verdicchio writes, “The North represented an ‘octopus’ that enriched itself at
the expense of the South, and . . . its economic–industrial increment was in
direct relationship with the economic and agricultural impoverishment of the
South.” Verdicchio, Bound by Distance, 26.
64. Nitti, Il Mezzogiorno, 283.
65. Villari, Il Sud, 406.
66. Nitti, Il Mezzogiorno, 196.
67. Villari, Il Sud, 414.
68. Ibid., 416.
69. Enzo Tagliacozzo, Voci di realismo politico dopo il 1870 (Bari: Laterza, 1907), 21.
70. Villari, Il Sud, 174.
190
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
84.
85.
86.
NOTES
Bodio, “Della protezione,” 639.
Ibid.
Villari, “L’opinione pubblica,” 502.
Ibid.
Nitti, Scritti, I, 402.
Some did oppose these misconceptions, arguing instead that the host countries appreciated and recognized the courteousness of the Sicilians abroad.
“[T]hey came, they saw, they remained conquered, not only by the admirable
natural beauty, not only by the sincere exquisite courtesy of the inhabitants,
but by the sense of severe and yet cordial dignity that coils from the behavior
and words of this population; from the evident and persuasive signs of a great
life that here unwinds in its most elevated and efficacious forms . . . Sicily was
finally recognized and esteemed in Italy, outside of Sicily just as admired and
loved.” “L’esportazione della Italianità. La Dante Alighieri a Palermo,” Nuova
Antologia, vol. CXX serie IV, November 1, 1905, 148.
The inferiority of Italians was depicted by Enrico Corradini in The Distant
Homeland, a novel that followed the adventures of Buondelmonti and his voyage to America. He illustrated the disgust of first class passengers who “looked
down from the bridge onto the world’s refuse [second class Italian passengers]
that moved below on deck.” Corradini draws upon the positivist “racial” discourse that pervaded Italy. He described the different ethnicities and regionalisms of the Italians to make clear the characteristics that defined each group;
however, he uses only two identities—of a Sicilian woman and a Neapolitan
man—to prove the barbarity of the travelers to America. He wrote, “Under
that very railing a woman lunged upon a young girl and bit into her arm covering her with her mass of unruly hair . . . Mrs. Axerio and Mr. Porrèna leaned
down to hear what was happening, and the woman, reaching upward with her
arms, neck, and with her torso up against them, screamed in Sicilian: ‘She’s my
child! She’s my child!’” He continued, “A Spaniard had accused a Neapolitan of
having robbed him; a fight had started, they were near the galleys, the
Neapolitan had gone inside, had grabbed a knife and struck a blow.” Enrico
Corradini, La patria lontana (Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1910), 14–19.
Nitti, Il Mezzogiorno, 231.
Ibid., 249. He also commented, “The clothing of women is still, generally,
severe, before and after marriage. For some time, emigration has exercised a
sinister influence on this argument, as many young women, abandoned for too
long by husbands, . . . (fortunately the case is rare) [are] abandoned . . . to
help themselves. Public prostitution is rare, and the young women fallen in sin,
want to leave.” Ibid., 246.
Villari, “L’opinione pubblica,” 501.
Nitti, Scritti, I, 375.
Ibid.
Nitti, Il Mezzogiorno, 248–249.
For more information, ibid., 321.
Ibid., 316–317.
Ibid., 250.
NOTES
191
87. Fortunato, Antologia, 117.
88. Nitti, Il Mezzogiorno, 250. Nitti explained that “The comfortable fact is that
the people do not show any resistance to education: in fact, they invoke it. It
is the americani who want it above all. Many times in the interrogations of
peasants we have heard: give us good schools! Many americani peasants,
because they lack faith in public schools, send their children to ‘particular
lessons.’ The peasants help each other often, as well as they can: but the conditions of the school remain generally terrible.” Ibid., 279.
89. Ibid., 250.
90. Arias, La Questione, 495.
91. For more information, please see Nitti, Il Mezzogiorno, 339.
92. Ibid., 340.
93. “L’esportazione della Italianità,” 151.
94. Nitti, Scritti, I, 388–389.
95. Ibid.
96. See also Verdicchio, Bound by Distance.
97. See Gian Antonio Stella and Emilio Franzina, “Brutta gente. Il razzismo antiitaliano,” in Storia dell’emigrazione, 283–311.
98. Nitti, Il Mezzogiorno, 323.
99. Ibid.
100. See the very interesting works that compare the southern question in Italy
with the problems of the integration of the American South. Noting the similarities of disparate groups within one nation, the disparity between economic systems and the perceived cultural inferiority of the south, these
scholars see parallels between the nature of nation building in both countries.
Don H. Doyle, Nations Divided: America, Italy and the Southern Question
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002); Susanna Delfino, “The Idea of
Southern Economic Backwardness. A Comparative View of the United States
and Italy,” in Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie (eds.), Global Perspectives
on Industrial Transformation in the American South (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 2005), 105–130.
101. Pasquale Villari, Scritti sulla questione sociale in Italia (Florence: Sansoni,
1902), 184.
102. See Patrizia Salvetti, Corda e sapone (Rome: Donzelli, 2003), XXII;
Ferdinando Fasce, “Gente di mezzo. Gli Italiani e «gli altri»,” in Storia dell’emigrazione, 235–243.
103. Quoted in Villari, “L’opinione pubblica,” 508.
104. Ibid.
105. See Salvetti, Corda e sapone.
106. Quoted in ibid., XXXIII.
107. Ibid, 36.
108. Villari, “L’opinione pubblica”, 510.
109. Ibid., 512–513.
110. Ibid., 511.
111. Ibid.
112. Ibid.
192
NOTES
113. For a more detailed account of the comparisons between Italian and Chinese
immigrants, see Salvetti, Corda e Sapone, 39, where she discusses several articles that appeared in American newspapers drawing commonalities between
the two groups. Besides neither being considered part of the white race, both
the Chinese and the Italians were perceived as performing the same types of
work and endured the same kinds of indenturedness. She specifically cites an
article in the Seattle Press Times in which the Italians and the Chinese are
accused of living in separate residences from those of the whites. See also
Donna Gabaccia, “The ‘Yellow Peril’ and the ‘Chinese of Europe’: Global
Perspectives on Race and Labor, 1815–1930,” in Jan and Leo Lucassen (eds.),
Migrations, Migration History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives (New York:
Berg and International Institute for Social History, 1997), 128–151.
114. Barone, “La espansione coloniale,” 281.
115. Ibid.
116. Ibid., 277.
117. Villari, Le lettere meridionali, 240.
118. Bodio, “Della protezione,” 644.
119. Nitti wrote, “Those who emigrate from the northern countries are, in general,
the strongest workers, those who go to create a new country. It is difficult that
they return; the English or the German tend to settle in the countries where
they go. The indigenous population, with whom they find ethnic and linguistic nuclei so close, absorbs them immediately. The northern emigrant takes
his family to the countries where he goes, or goes to create a new one.” Nitti,
Il Mezzogiorno, 324.
120. Ibid., 326.
121. Nitti, Scritti, I, 394.
122. Nitti wrote, “Now what are the races that compete in the field? The northern
races send to Argentina a very scarce emigration: the Germans send just 1,000
a year and the other nations much less. The three countries that give the
greatest number of emigrants are Italy, first of all, and then after a great distance, Spain, and after an even greater distance, France. But France, sterile of
men and rich in capital . . . is not a competitor; it has not given, neither can it
give, more than 3,000 emigrants per year. Spain, which has a very scarce density of population, cannot send to Argentina more than 10,000–12,000 emigrants per year. Italy instead, which has sent about 100,000 [emigrants] in a
few years, can always send 40,000–50,000. And Italians, fertile in their own
homeland, are very fertile outside. In a little time, they will represent half the
population. Is it in the near future that Italians will make up more than half?”
Ibid., 398.
123. Ibid., 327.
124. Ibid., 328.
125. Ibid., 322.
126. Barone, “La espansione coloniale,” 282.
127. Nitti, Scritti, I, 398.
128. Ibid., 403.
129. Chimirri, La Calabria, 22–23.
NOTES
130.
131.
132.
133.
134.
135.
136.
137.
138.
139.
140.
141.
142.
143.
144.
145.
193
Fortunato, Antologia, 174.
Ibid.
Nitti, Scritti, I, 181.
Mark I. Choate has written an interesting essay on what economist Luigi
Einaudi terms “ethnographic colonialism” in South America. In it, he reveals
the plans of Francesco Crispi and other politicians plans to create a new type
of imperialism and colonial expansion that would be based on the mass emigratory and settlement patterns of Italians in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Mark I. Choate, “From territorial to ethnographic
colonies and back again: the politics of Italian expansion, 1890–1912,”
Modern Italy 8 (2003): 65–75.
Girolamo Boccardo, “L’emigrazione e le colonie,” Nuova Antologia, vol. XXVII,
November, 1874, 646. On December 10, 1910, Mario Viana wrote, “All of
these active actions of the nation are called imperialism.” Paolo Arcari,
La coscienza nazionale in Italia (Milan: Libreria Editrice Milanese, 1911), 256.
Enrico Barone wrote,“The Argentinian census of 1805 reported that Italian owners are 1/6 of the total number of owners . . . and one should note that the census
lists the many sons of Italians among the Argentinian owners . . . The names
themselves of the main places remind [one] of Italy and indicate the origins of
those prosperous colonies: Vittorio Emanuele II, Umberto I, Garibaldi, Cavour,
Regina Margherita, Nuova Milano, Nuova Torino, Nuova Napoli, Nuova Roma,
Ausonia, Italia, Piemonte, Lombardia.” Barone, “La espansione coloniale,” 284.
Ibid., 281.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 295.
Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini, Vecchio e Nuovo Nazionalismo
(Milan: Studio Editoriale Lombardo, 1914), 86.
On May 7, 1883, Sidney Sonnino wrote, “I rejoice for our country, for the
future of the Italian lineage and name that our population has in itself that
strength of expansion which even though still smaller than that of the
Germanic and Anglo-Saxon races is still enough to provide us with the means
to extend our action and civilization over far regions. I recognize in our emigration a very powerful instrument of colonization that is completely lacking
in our neighbor, France, despite its immense riches and its numerous armies
and its powerful troops.” G. Rabizzani and F. Rubbiani (eds.), Sonnino (Milan:
Casa Editrice Risorgimento, 1920), 106.
Nitti, Scritti, I, 450–451.
Ibid.
Barone, “La espansione coloniale,” 279. Enrico Barone elaborated: “Under the
political aspect, this expansion of the Italian race abroad means that we will
not be suffocated in the next century by the English, Germans, Spanish, and
Russians whose numbers grow continuously and will soon exceed in enormous proportion the number of inhabitants of the countries that have
remained closed in their ancient borders.” Ibid.
194
NOTES
146. Nitti explained that “the name of the common father, who elevated the vulgar
to dignity [and Italian] to the first among the literary languages of the
time, the name of Dante is for us the symbol and the destination.” Nitti,
Il Mezzogiorno, 330.
147. Arcari, La coscienza nazionale, 214.
148. Bonghi wrote on the duties of the Dante: “This Italianness [is not] the same
in the various places in which it manifests itself and lives; the Dante Alighieri
Society does not excite nor help this Italianness to take a different form from
its [natural one], but the Dante wants to preserve this Italianness and augment its vigor and number.” Bonghi, “Per la società,” 602–603.
149. Boccardo, “L’emigrazione,” 631.
150. Bodio, “Della protezione,” 640.
151. Salvadori, Il Mito del buongoverno, 108.
152. Rabizzani and Rubbiani, Sonnino, 120.
153. Ibid.
154. Ibid.
155. Nitti, Scritti, I, 432.
156. Nitti, Il Mezzogiorno, 329.
157. Nitti, Scritti, I, 431–432.
158. Arias, La Questione, 471.
159. For more information, see “L’esportazione della Italianità,” 151.
160. Bodio, “Della protezione,” 638.
161. Arias, La Questione, 470. He continued, “When . . . therefore the Italian law
welcomes the principle of dual citizenship, it would remain always in doubt if
the American states (the system should have merit especially for Argentina)
would consent to welcome it, and if it should multiply the number of their
citizens, welcoming without a doubt the Italian emigrants who would remain
always Italian citizens . . .” Ibid.
162. Ibid., 473–474.
163. Villari, “L’opinione pubblica,” 506.
164. Emigrants should be able to adapt themselves to the American political system easily because of the similarities between the American and Italian systems and “for the hate that the Italian people have always had for slavery.”
Ibid. Villari reported that “A teacher at a New York school, John T. Buchanan,
does not believe possible the assimilation of adults, but is optimistic regarding what could be done with children, Eliot Norton believes the assimilation
of Italians to be possible in . . . the agricultural zones, and McLaughlin does
not see the tendency of Italian to repatriate as an obstacle to their
Americanization because that tendency is diminishing and because the
majority of Italians who have been a bit more cultured in America finish by
losing every desire to resettle in Italy and gradually get used to American life.”
Ibid., 511–512.
165. Nitti, Il Mezzogiorno, 325.
166. Ibid., 336–337.
167. Ibid.
168. Boccardo, “L’emigrazione e le colonie,” 644.
NOTES
195
169. Rather than battle against foreigners and prejudice, Italians needed to recognize the “endless treasure of wealth [that] exists outside our [own] cities that
waits in vain for arms and capital, to take away from our cheeks the blush of
embarrassment, which is tinged by the stare of the foreigner, that passing by
says: Here are the effect of the dolce far niente of the Italians!” Ibid., 645.
170. Rabizzani and Rubbiani, Sonnino, 113.
171. While the Parliament initiated active discussions on the methods and
means of colonizing Eritrea, the facts seemed to suggest that in order to render
the African enterprise successful, the State needed to provide “not less than
four thousand lire for every family composed of five or seven people,
including children, for the construction of a hut, agricultural tools, seeds,
and provisions . . . without counting the expenses of viability, the wells to
dig for potable water, the measurement of lands, the sanitary service that
should be provided by the Government. One speaks of colonizing Sardinia
or populating the Agro Romano. Finally, but also for these enterprises are
required large anticipations of capital, without counting the obstacles that
oppose it for reasons of the imperfection of the cadastres. The reasons for
promiscuity, servitude, communion of existing good in Sardinia, very complicated, render very uncertain the conditions of he who makes acquisitions
of real estate property on the island.” Bodio, “Della protezione,” 630–631.
172. Nitti, Scritti, I, 113.
173. Nitti writes, “Next to the true and healthy emigration that is the spontaneous
one, a provoked emigration unwinds. Some governments . . . as before they
got in supplies of slaves on the western coast of Africa, now they get their supplies of servile arms in Europe, and in the poorest states . . . I know of slave
companies which in Italy earn large amounts of money and make real, written contracts with Brazilian politicians and companies, promising to provide
thousands of peasants to Brazil.” Ibid., 386.
174. This theme was apparent in Enrico Corradini’s 1910 novel, La patria lontana.
Buondelmonti, the protagonist of the novel, leaves to study the colonies in
Brazil as he has been ostracized in Italy because of his imperialist/nationalist
writings. He believed strongly that the lands upon which Italian emigrants
labored “nationalistically speaking, should become Italian.” He also noted
with some disgust the fact that Italians did the work of slaves in Brazil.
Corradini described, “And Buondelmonti looked at the men of his fatherland
who labored in this foreign land among the slaves of Africa. Then suddenly
one of the Negroes raised his voice and began gesticulating in front of one of
the Italians. They argued and the Negro was about to strike the Italian. ‘What
a race!’ yelled Pietro, and pushed by his remorse to do more than necessary
for a countryman he flung himself on the Negro, pushing him down. But he
was so strong that he quickly stood up and threw a punch.” Interestingly,
despite what Buondelmonti perceived as Italian superiority, physiognomy
still played a role and the smaller, weaker Italian man was soon defeated by
the bigger, physically superior African. Quoted in Verdicchio, Bound by
Distance, 42.
175. Villari, “L’opinione pubblica americana,” 513.
196
176.
177.
178.
179.
180.
181.
182.
183.
184.
185.
186.
187.
NOTES
Villari, “L’opinione pubblica americana,” 514.
Ibid.
“L’esportazione della Italianità,” 149.
Papini and Prezzolini, Vecchio e nuovo, 31.
Fortunato, Antologia, 120.
Ibid.
Francesco Perrone, Il Problema del Mezzogiorno (Naples: Luigi Pierro, 1913),
311.
Gaetano Salvemini, Scritti di politica estera (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1963), 21.
Fortunato, Antologia, 122
Ibid.
Bodio, “Della protezione,” 628.
Giorgio Bocca, Gli Italiani sono razzisti? (Milan: Garzanti, 1988), 17.
Conclusion
1. Cited in Pasquale Verdicchio, Bound by Distance: Rethinking Nationalism
through the Italian Diaspora (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press,
1997), xii–xiii.
2. Antonio Golini and Flavia Amato, “Uno sguardo a un secolo e mezzo di emigrazione italiana,” in Piero Bevilacqua, Andreina De Clementi, and Emilio
Franzina (eds.), Storia dell’emigrazione italiana. Partenze (Rome: Donzelli,
2001) For more information on Italian immigration to the Americas, see the
detailed treatment of Donna Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2000).
3. See Gianfranco Petrillo, “The Two Waves: Milan as a City of Immigration,
1955–1995,” in Robert Lumley and John Foot (eds.), Italian Cityscapes.
Culture and Urban Change in Contemporary Italy (Exeter: University of Exeter
Press, 2004), 31–45, 33.
4. Guido Bolaffi, I confini del patto: il governo dell’immigrazione in Italia (Turin:
Einaudi, 2001), 4.
5. Ottavia Schmidt di Friedberg, “Marocchini in Italia, Quale Avvenire?” in Ezio
Gianotti, Giulia Micciche, and Roberta Ribero (eds.), Migrazioni nel
Mediterraneo: Scambi, Convivenze e contaminazioni tra Italia e NordAfrica
(Turin: L’Harmattan Italia, 2002), 107.
6. For more information on the most recent immigration flows to Italy, please
see Giovanni Mottura (ed.), L’Arcipelago immigrazione (Rome: Ediesse, 1992).
7. In Italy, the data from December 31, 1999 shows that 40% of the immigrants
lived in only six cities: Rome, Milan, Turin, Naples, Brescia, and Vicenza.
Bolaffi, I confini del patto, 16.
8. For more information, see Armando Montanari and Antonio Cortese, “Third
World Immigrants in Italy,” in Russell King (ed.), Mass Migration in Europe:
the Legacy and the Future (London: Belhaven Press, 1993), 286.
9. Schmidt di Friedberg, “Marocchini,” 109.
NOTES
197
10. Montanari and Cortese, “Third World Immigrants,” 286. On immigration
from Tunisia, see Francesca Giordano, “Sicilia e Tunisia: Tracce di un Lungo
Incontro,” Migrazioni nel Mediterraneo, 49–79.
11. The estimates differ precisely because these immigrants are undocumented
and often kept so by different criminal organizations. For different interpretations, see Francesco Calvanese and Enrico Pugliese,“Emigration and immigration in Italy: Recent Trends,” Labour 2 (1998): 52–78; Giuseppe Monticelli, “Gli
immigrati in Italia,” Affari Sociali Internazionali 20 (1992): 33–52.
12. Petrillo, “The Two Waves,” 33.
13. Ibid.
14. For an interesting discussion, see Bolaffi, I confini del patto.
15. Ibid., 41.
16. See ibid., 9–10
17. Ibid.
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Index
Abba, Giuseppe Cesare, 21
Abyssinia, 69, 81, 94–95, 98, 102,
106–8, 110
Africa, colonization of
anti-Africanists and, 106–9
comparisons to Risorgimento, 106–9
imperialist rhetoric and, 92–99
meridionalism and, 85–92
racialization of, 99–106
and rhetoric of national survival,
83–85
viewed as threat to Italy, 96–99
See also colonization; imperialism
Africans, southern Italians compared
to, 4, 12–13, 15–16, 21–22, 103,
157–58, 174–75
agriculture, 33, 92, 116, 118, 125, 131,
144, 152–53
financial impact of colonization on,
95–98
Alfieri, Giuseppe, 89–90
Alimena, Bernardo, 75
Alleanza Nazionale, 1
Amari, Emerico, 20
annexation of south, 19, 40, 43,
79–80, 98
anti-Africa movement, 9, 79, 81, 94,
103, 110–11
Corriere della Serra on, 91–92
southern question and, 96–99
See also colonization; imperialism
Arabs, southern Italians compared to,
22, 77, 107–108, 148, 183
Argentina, 117, 138–39, 141–42,
152, 188, 192
Arias, Gino, 42, 142
Assab, 79, 98
assimilation, 16, 40, 57, 66, 88, 136,
138, 153
Italian emigrants and, 120, 124–26
unassimilability, 134
Averroè, 50
Balbo, Cesare, 13
Barbagallo, Francesco, 167
Barone, Enrico, 137–39, 141, 193
on emigration, 119–20, 134–35
on South American emigration, 138
Bell, Charles, 50
Beltrame, Giovanni, 105
Bixio, Nino, 21, 158
Boccardo, Girolamo, 138, 144
Bodio, Luigi, 125, 142
on emigration, 116, 146
Bonghi, Ruggiero, 107, 140, 194
Borromeo, Count Carlo, 15
Bourbon government, 11–12, 13, 158
criticism of, 14
Bricchetti, Robecchi, 100–2, 105, 182
on racial superiority of Italian
colonized, 101–2
brigandage, 17, 27, 30–31, 37, 43,
61–62, 99, 107, 122, 128–30
Caizzi, Bruno, 158–59
Camera of Deputies, opening of, 20
camorra, 27, 30, 37–38, 43, 61–62,
74, 122
Carletti, Cav. T., 125
Castellini, Gualtiero, 82
216
INDEX
Cattaneo, Carlo, 40
Cavour, Camillo, 18, 157–58, 159
Cerchiari, G. Luigi, 51
Chandler, William A., 120
Chimirri, Bruno, 40, 137
on emigration, 117–18
Chineses, Italian immigrants
compared to, 134–35, 192
Choate, Mark I., 193
Ciccotti, Ettore, 43, 71
Cimballi, Eduardo, 80, 108, 177–78
citizenship, 1, 115, 146, 151, 153–54
dual, 141–43, 194
Coen, Gustavo, 99, 184
Colajanni, Napoleone, 39–40, 43, 48,
72–74, 86–87, 107, 149, 166, 176
study of crime rate and emigration,
121–22
Collegno, Donna Ghita, 15
Colletti, Francesco, 126–27
colonization, 7, 9, 18, 22, 39, 80, 82
comparisons to Risorgimento,
106–9
emigration and, 113, 125–26, 139
internal, 144–47
meridionalist language and, 93, 95
moralizing of, 100–1
nationalism and, 84, 86–88, 90
physiognomy and, 101–2, 105
as threat to Italy’s welfare, 96–99
See also anti-Africa movement;
imperialism
Corradini, Enrico, 81, 92, 183,
190, 195
Corte, C., 106
Costa, Andrea, 97
comparison of colonization to
Risorgimento, 106, 108
criminal anthropology, 39, 47–49, 51,
59–60, 64, 67, 69, 72, 75, 77, 79,
82, 132, 149
criminality
and emigration, 121–23, 129–30
and southern Italy, 60–63
Crispi, Francesco, 43–44, 149
emigration and, 116
D’Azeglio, Massimo, 4, 19
Dante Alighieri Society, 9, 140, 194
Darwin, Charles, 48, 50, 66, 76,
102, 131
De Bella, A., 53
de Gennaro, Giovanni, 55, 72
De Marco, Antonio de Viti, 33, 93
DeSanctis, Francesco, 18
diaspora, 2, 5, 187
See also colonization; emigration
Dickie, John, 3, 6, 155
on southern question, 161–62
Diotallevi, Giovanni, 178
Dumas, Alexander, 20
education, 9, 18, 41, 48, 52, 54,
58, 65, 72, 85, 119, 123,
128, 134
emigrants and, 130
Einaudi, Luigi, 138, 193
emigration, 6, 9, 69, 76, 166
arguments against, 144–47
dual citizenship and, 141–43
as form of empire, 138–41
imperialism and, 84–85, 97–98,
100, 109–12
improvement of transportation
and, 123
Italian emigrants as “undesirable,”
120–24
to Italy, current, 149–52
Italy’s focus on citizens abroad,
118–20
laws on, 188
and military service, 118–19
physiognomy and, 131–36
to South America, 136–38
southern question and, 115–18,
124–31
to United States, 113, 115, 120–24
viewed as disease, 127
See also assimilation; immigration
Eritrea, 8, 79–82, 87, 94–96, 99–100,
102, 139–40, 145–46, 150, 195
Ethiopia, 8, 79, 94, 103, 138, 150,
153, 184
INDEX
ethnocentrism
definition of, 3
effect on relations between north
and south, 3–4
families, effects of emigration
on, 129
Farini, Luigi Carlo, 15, 19
Fascism, 6
Ferri, Enrico, 54, 56, 63, 150
physiognomy and, 104
Fortunato, Giustino, 13, 22, 36–38, 90,
95–96, 126, 150
on benefits of emigration, 145–46
on imperialism, 81, 90, 95–96
physiognomy and, 53
on South American emigration, 137
on Unification, 34, 36, 165
Forza Italia, 1
Franchetti, Leopoldo, 20, 26, 95, 149
examination of Sicily’s social
dilemmas, 32–33, 164
on imperialism, 93
on southern question, 32–33
Garabaldini, 16
Garabaldini, 19, 21, 111, 166–67
Garofalo, Raffaele, 54, 170, 176
Gazzetta del Popolo, 17
Germany
criticism of Italy, 29
imperialism and, 95, 100
race and perception of, 49, 73, 83,
86, 136
Ghisleri, Arcangelo, 40, 75, 107,
150, 178
Giarrizzo, Giuseppe, 26
Gramsci, Antonio, 22, 26, 150
illiteracy, 8, 49, 54, 64, 75, 98, 110, 115,
121, 128, 130, 136, 147, 150
immigration, to Italy, 151–54
effects on southern question, 152–53
imperialism, 4–9, 12, 26, 42, 48, 52, 77,
79–83, 111–13
arguments in favor of, 99–101
217
emigration and, 136–41, 144–45,
147–50
and Italian nationalism, 83–92
movement against, 106–9
as national duty, 99–101
and racialization of colonized,
101–6
viewed as continuation of Roman
Empire, 82, 85, 100
See also anti-Africa movement;
colonization
Islam, 50, 183–84
L’Italia Barbara Contemporanea
(Niceforo), 64, 70
Jacini, Stefano, 178
King Ferdinand, 11–12
Kingdom of Two Sicilies,
12–13, 25
La Farina’s description of, 14
negative depictions of, 12–13
La Farina, Giuseppe, 14, 157
La Penna, Francesco, 59, 167
language
as dividing factor between north
and south, 5
emigration and, 119–20, 140
Patriarca on, 156
See also Dante Alighieri Society
Lantiggia, Giovanni, 111
Latinism, 54
Lavater, Johann Kaspar, 50
Lega Nord, 1
Leo, Heinrich, 13
Leopardi, Giacomo, 13
Lettere meridionali (P. Villari), 7–8, 26,
43, 162
Libya, 8, 80, 97–98, 101, 110,
145–46, 150
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 121, 189
Lombroso, Cesare, 8, 47–51, 54, 62–63,
72, 74, 82, 150
Loria, Achille, 71, 108
Lupo, Salvatore, 22, 40
218
INDEX
Mack Smith, Denis, 168
mafia, 2, 27, 30–31, 37–38, 43, 61–62,
74, 121–22, 151
Magno, Alberto, 50
Manetta, Filippo, 103
Mantegazza, Paolo, 49–50, 173
Marselli, Niccola, 35
Martini, Ferdinando, 87, 103
Massari, Giuseppe, 12, 15
Mazzini, Giuseppe, 18, 21, 36
meridionalism, 2–3, 5–9, 13, 43–44
current, 151, 153–54
depiction of Northerners as
conquerors, 39–42
emigration and, 114–15, 120, 122,
124–27, 129–30, 147–48
imperialism and, 80–83, 85, 87,
89–90, 92, 94, 99, 103–4, 109
Pasquale Villari and, 26–27, 32
physiognomy and, 49, 54–56, 58, 60,
65, 67–68
southern question and, 32–33, 40
and weaknesses of Mezzogiorno,
36–39
writers influencing movement,
22–23
Mezzogiorno
compared to Africans, 4, 12–13,
15–16, 21–22
physiognomy and, 7, 53–55, 57
pre-Unification constructs of, 12–16
travelers’ negative accounts of,
12–13
Unification process, 16–19
viewed as “illness,” 19–21, 127
viewed as “parasites,” 38–39
as racial group, 52–70
Villari on, 26–32
Michels, Roberto, 84, 86, 95
on colonialism, 106, 108
Milanese International Society for
Peace, 106
military service, emigrants and,
118–19
Miss Italy, controversy surrounding
(1996), 151
Moe, Nelson, 3, 6, 159
on Lettere meridionali, 162
on racism, 155–56
Mosso, Angelo, 104
on emigration, 116
Mozzillo, Attanasio, 16
Myers, Carlton, 151
Naples, 103, 117, 143, 166
criminality and, 36–38, 61–62
internal colonization and, 41
Neapolitan Enlightenment, 11
negative depictions of, 13–14
pathologicization of south and, 19–21
pre-Unification, 11–16
primitivity of, 65–68
southern question and, 16–19,
27, 30
nationalism, 1–2, 5, 7, 12, 25
current, 150–51, 153
emigration and, 113, 115, 119–20,
130–31
imperialism and, 79–91, 99–100,
109–10
physiognomy and, 49, 51–52
race and, 58, 60, 64, 66, 76–77
Niceforo, Alfredo, 8, 47, 62, 72, 150,
169–70
comparisons of crime in Italy vs.
U.S., 172
comparisons of southerners to other
races, 174–75
and primitivity of southern race,
63–70, 172–73, 174
Nievo, Ippolito, 19
Nigra, Costantino, 18
Nitti, Saverio, 22, 41, 143, 150, 174, 192
on crime, 36–38
on economic problems of south,
33–36
on emigration, 113, 116–17, 119,
120–21, 123, 125, 127–31,
187, 195
on imperialism, 84
on South American emigration,
136–37
INDEX
Northern Italy
perceived as conquerors, 39–42
perceived superiority of, 17
organized crime, 17, 30–31, 43, 61–62,
99, 107, 122, 128–30
as consequence of social issues in
south, 27
as problem plaguing south, 36–38
See also camorra; mafia
Orientalism, 5–6
othering, 4, 6, 45
Pantaleoni, Diomede, 17, 19, 160
Paoli, Renato, 87–88
on imperialism, 100–1, 103–4
Papa, Dario, 110
Papini, Giovanni, 145
Paternostro, Francesco, 59
Patriarca, Silvana, 4, 5, 156, 162
Penne, G.B., 87, 94–95, 99–100,
104, 185
Perrone, Francesco, 55–57, 146, 170
on imperialism, 93
Petrusewicz, Marta, 157
phrenology, 8, 47, 50–51, 75, 169
physiognomy, 2, 6–9, 45, 47, 149–50
and criminal anthropology, 49–52,
60–61
and emigration, 115, 131–36, 147
imperialism and, 77, 86–87, 89, 94,
101–2, 109
race and, 59–60, 70–72, 75
and southern question, 53–55, 57
Pianavia Vivaldi, Rosalia, 102
Piedmontese control, 15–20, 40–42, 58,
63–64, 80
Il Piemonte, 21
Pigorini, Luigi, 169
Pilo, Mario, 58
Placanica, Augusto, 162
positivist anthropology
criminality and, 47–50, 72
emigration and, 131–32
meridionalism and, 60, 150
race and, 54–56, 67–69, 76–77
219
rejection of, 72–74
See also Villari, Pasquale
Prezzolini, Giuseppe, 145
Puglia, Ferdinando, 176–77
La Questione Meridionale (Renda), 70
race
anti-Africanists and, 106–9
and inferiority of Italian colonized,
102–6
and superiority of Italian colonized,
101–2
theories on, 70–75
racial prejudice, 3–4, 58–70
emigration and, 131–36
Rattazzi, Urbano, 19
La Razza Maledetta (Colajanni), 107
Renda, Antonio, 70, 171, 175
Ricasoli, Bettino, 21
Riccardi, Ferdinando, 15
Risorgimento movement, 4, 7–8, 12,
25, 28, 40, 43, 91, 106, 126, 151
Roman Empire, Italy’s view as heir to,
82, 85, 100
Rood, Henry, 121
Rossi, Pasquale, 171–72
Ruiz, D., 171, 176
Russomando, Paola, 1
Said, Edward, 5
Salandra, Antonio, 163
Salvemini, Gaetano, 22, 42, 71, 178
on imperialism, 97
on racial categories, 179
Schneider, Jane, 5, 162
self-Othering, 4
Sergi, Giuseppe, 51–57, 69, 72, 76, 86,
101, 150, 169
on criminality, 172
studies of race, 170–71
Sicily
Bourbon government and, 158
Colajanni on, 72–74
Crispi and, 44
emigration and, 144–45
220
INDEX
Sicily—continued
Fasci and, 80, 177
Franchetti on, 32–34
Ghiradelli on, 172
Imperialism and, 87, 93, 98–101
mafia and, 27, 30–32, 37, 62
Niceforo on, 68–70, 173
perception of emigrants from, 125,
128, 190
prejudice toward, 2, 21, 153, 161
Unification and, 18–21, 39–40
See also Kingdom of the Two Sicilies
Sighele, Scipio, 37–38, 60–61, 71, 77,
94, 103
on imperialism, 84, 90–91
slavery, 73, 93, 100, 108
as detriment to American South, 28,
88, 132–33
Social Darwinism, 48, 76
socialists, 42, 49, 80, 97
reaction to colonialism, 108–9
Solaroli, Paolo, 18
Somalia, 79, 100–2, 146, 153
Sonnino, Sidney, 20, 22, 26, 93, 95, 116,
141, 144, 193
on colonial expansion, 84
examination of Sicily’s social
dilemmas, 164
South America, Italian presence in,
136–39
Southern Italy
See Mezzogiorno
southern question, 3–7, 11–12, 22–23,
147–50, 157
compared to American South, 191
contemporary issues, 151–54
and emigration, 115–20, 124–31,
138–39
and hierarchy of north vs. south,
39–42
imperialism and, 79, 82–83, 85–86,
90, 92–99
meridionalists and development of,
32–36
origins of, 16
pathologicization of, 20, 45, 47
racial anthropology and, 52, 54, 59,
67–68, 75
Villari and, 26–32
St. Jorioz, A. Bianco di, 16
stereotypes
Colajanni and rejection of, 72
and emigration discourse, 128, 149
as factors in contemporary issues,
151–53
of Italian immigrants in U.S.,
121–23, 126, 128–29
imperialism and, 93–94, 102
Latinism and, 54
as obstacle to Unification, 14,
58, 90
social scientists and reinforcement
of, 60, 65, 68
of south, 11–12, 14, 32, 40, 43–44,
75, 131, 168
Storia degli Stati Italiani dalla caduta
dell’Impero Romano fino all’anno
1840, 13
Tagliacozzo, Enzo, 38, 127
Taroni, Clodaco, 86–88, 111, 180, 186
Tripoli, 97, 106, 108, 146
Truly, Jeff, 133
Tunisia, 95, 118, 125, 145, 152
Turati, Filippo, 48, 72
Turiello, Pasquale, 37–38, 163, 165
on colonialism, 85
Unification, 22–23, 25–26, 43–44,
76, 103
battle for, 16–17
criminality and, 60–63
imperialism and, 80, 84, 85–89
internal colonization and, 40–41
meridionalists and, 32–36
military violence and, 159–60
Niceforo and, 63–70
physiognomy and, 52–58
prejudice toward south as obstacle
to, 14–15, 26–36
INDEX
pre-Unification constructions of the
Mezzogiorno, 12–16
process for achieving, 16–19
representations of the south as
“sick” and, 19–21
southern question and, 26–36
United States
citizenship and, 142–45
Italian criticism of racism in, 88,
132–33
Italian immigrants and, 120–22,
125–36, 152
L’uomo delinquente (Lombroso), 47
Vassallo, E., 183
Ventura, Pietro, 93
Vercesi, Ernesto, 81
221
Verdicchio, Pasquale, 187, 189
Villamarini, Marquis, 15
Villari, Luigi, 134, 189
on emigration, 127–28
on Italian emigrants’ criminality,
121–22
on Italian immigrants in U.S.,
143, 145
Villari, Pasquale, 7, 14, 22, 37, 43, 133,
135, 160
concerns about criminality in south,
30–31
on dual citizenship, 142
and genesis of southern question,
26–32
Vimercati, Ottaviano, 22
von Herder, Johann Gottfried, 13