GEOGRAPHICAL AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF THE IDENTITY OF SOUTHERN ITALY

Abstract

If it ever really existed, the notion of the South of Italy as a cultural landscape indistinct and primitive in its atavistic and dense backwardness was an imaginary vision of distant lands on the outskirts of Europe. A “paradise populated by devils” where the aforementioned backwardness consisted of violence, individualism, familism, fatalism and so on. Or even worse, a space where atavistic customs and modes of behavior are practiced and pursued with modern instruments. The question would for the most part be one of “passive modernization” (Cafagna, 1994), which with the homologation of consumption has merely recast ancestral modes of behavior which are still present and largely still active.