Garbage piles up in Naples. via
“There are two Italies,” Percy Shelley complained in 1818. One was “the most sublime and lovely contemplation that can be conceived by the imagination of man”: the aesthetic Italy of “the green earth and the transparent sea,” the “mighty ruins” and “aerial mountains.” The other Italy, the actual one, was “degraded, disgusting, and odious.” So were its people, the “Italians of the present day.” The men were “a tribe of stupid and shrivelled slaves,” and the women smelt of garlic. The problem with Italy was the Italians.
In 1958, the American political scientist Edward Banfield named the Italian problem “amoral familism.” In his fieldwork at Chiaromonte, a town in the arch of the Italian boot, Banfield observed that the locals turned every public good to private profit. They enriched themselves and their families at all costs. Rich or poor, they seemed incapable of civic virtue. Their organized activities were mostly criminal. Passing judgment on the “Southern problem,” Banfield entered Chiaromonte into a kind of witness protection program, and called the town “Montegrano.” But the title of his report was withering: The Moral Basis of a Backward Society.
Italy’s political unifiers and modernizers have also identified another pair of “two Italies”: the north and the south, the rich and the poor, the improving and the incorrigible—two rival realities, divided by geography, economy, and morals. The northern Italian economy seems to have floated over the
