Southern Question

After the Unification of Italy

Political situation

In February 1861, the representatives of the unified regions met in Turin for the first time, and a month later, by the grace of God and the will of the nation, they conferred the title of King of Italy on Victor Emmanuel. How he would govern, however, remained to be seen.

The king and court had been excommunicated because of the invasion of the eastern part of the Papal States, and Catholics were forbidden to participate in political life. Most rulers did not know the south at all, having never traveled further south than Naples or having spent long years in exile as opponents of the Bourbons. They were convinced that the wealth of the south had remained untapped because of past mismanagement, and that only the unification of Italy would unlock its hidden riches. They were unaware of the poverty of the countryside and the state of the infrastructure, and this led them, among other things, to impose taxes that exceeded what the territory could pay. Moreover, voting was by census, so southern deputies were more likely to represent the demands of the landowners than those of the people.

Cavour's death on 6 June ushered in a series of weak governments, many of which lasted less than a year. There were many problems to solve: eight systems of law, economics, money and even weights and measures had to be unified. This, combined with the irredentism towards the Triveneto, which was still Austrian, and towards Rome and Lazio, which were occupied by a French garrison, created a dangerous temptation to test the forces of the new state in a war against the foreigners. Italian was spoken by an educated minority of the population, and the plebiscites that had sanctioned the unification had been conducted in a highly questionable manner, both in form and in the interference of the authorities that were supposed to supervise them, creating a false sense of consensus far superior to the real one, when many southerners would rather have expressed a need for greater autonomy.

Instances in favor of administrative decentralization, represented by Minister Minghetti were hastily abandoned. On October 3 the decree that had extended Piedmontese legislation to the South on January 2 was converted into law, continuing what had been done with Lombardy by the Rattazzi Decree-Law of 1859. The administrative organisations, even the glorious ones, of the pre-unitary states were uncritically erased by promoting a progressive "Piedmontization" of public administration.

The first measures of the new government were aimed at recovering the capital needed to unify the country and provide it with the infrastructure it so desperately needed. Compulsory military service was introduced and new taxes were introduced, most notably in 1868, when the price of bread rose, which hit the poorer sections of the population.

Decisive work was also done to abolish feudal privileges, including the wholesale sale of large tracts of state and church land. The intention was to increase agricultural productivity by distributing land, but in fact this land went into the hands of landlords who had the capital to buy and maintain it. An irreplaceable resource was thus wasted, with little revenue for the state and the immobilisation of capital that could have produced more wealth if invested in improving the land or in industry. The peasants also suffered because they could no longer use the common land that had previously been available to the various villages.

Positive measures were also taken, such as the construction of public works and a new impetus to the development of the railway network, but the effects were slow to be felt.

The various laws that sought to establish free and compulsory education, however minimal, proved difficult to implement, especially in the south. In fact, the burden of maintaining primary schools fell on the municipalities, with the result that many southern administrations were unable to meet the necessary costs. It was not until after the Second World War that the use of Italian, as a complement to the various dialects, was witnessed in mass education and on television.

It was not until the Giolitti era that the central government showed a first and tentative interest in the south. Although it did not reduce poverty or emigration, at the beginning of the twentieth century it provided the south with public administrations similar to those in the north, which led to the recruitment of a number of civil servants. It was also thanks to the central government that in 1911 the state took over primary education, which had previously been the prerogative of the municipalities.

The deterioration in living conditions and the disillusionment with the expectations created by the unification led to a series of popular uprisings in Naples and in the countryside and to the phenomenon known in history as brigandage, to which the new state responded by sending in soldiers and adopting a dirigiste and authoritarian administrative model, in which local autonomies were subject to the strict control of the central government.

Vittorio Bachelet spoke of "a certain colonising attitude of the unified administration in some regions", but this so-called "colonising" attitude was never found in the other annexed territories, not even in those of central Italy, which had little in common with Piedmontese culture, being territories far from Piedmont and bordering on the south. In fact, Piedmontese expansionism itself was aimed first and foremost at a state comprising the regions of northern Italy, not at a national state on the scale of the new Italy; a confederation of states was strongly advocated at the time, both in the north and in the south. The annexation of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was the result of an extraordinary series of favourable political events.

Brigandage

Brigandage was an endemic phenomenon in the pre-unification South, as Francesco Saverio Nitti explains in his book Heroes and Brigands (1899 edition) p. 9.:

"In every part of Europe there have been bandits and delinquents who, in times of war and misfortune, have dominated the country and set themselves apart from the law [...] but there has been only one country in Europe where brigandage has existed, it can be said, from time immemorial [...] a country where brigandage for many centuries has been like a river of blood and hate [...] a country in which for centuries the monarchy has been based on brigandage, which has become like a historical agent: this country is the south of Italy."

The new government failed to meet the expectations of both republicans and some moderates, who had also favored unity but hoped for a new agrarian order and adequate political space in the running of the country. Many southern workers had hoped that the new regime would guarantee some form of agrarian reform, but their expectations were dashed.

According to Tommaso Pedio, the rapid political transformation achieved in the South caused resentment and discontent everywhere, not only from the people and the old Bourbon class, but also from the bourgeoisie and liberals, who demanded to maintain privileges and lucrative positions from the new government. The bourgeoisie class, loyal to the Bourbon crown before 1860, supported the united cause only upon Garibaldi's landing in Sicily. The new Italian state thus decided to privilege the liberals, for fear of antagonizing them, and to use their leading exponents against the aspirations of the radical bangs, neglecting the needs of the working classes, for whom, according to Pedio, the recognition and listing of state lands would have sufficed.

The state property issue was not resolved, for Pedio, not only because of the carelessness of the royal government but also because of the opposition of the liberal class, as it would have risked losing the support of the wealthy landowners, whose interests would have been damaged. The lower classes, the only unheard voice, oppressed by hunger, upset by rising taxes and prices on primary goods, and forced into compulsory conscription, began to revolt, developing a deep resentment toward the new regime and especially toward the social strata that took advantage of political events by managing to obtain posts, jobs and new earnings.

Bands of brigands formed (many of them from Garibaldi's time in Naples), joined not only by desperate workers but also by former Bourbon soldiers, former Garibaldians, and common bandits. The government of the Two Sicilies in exile seized the opportunity to attempt a reaction to regain the throne, appealing to the people's desperation and resentment of the new order. The desperate people listened to the words of the old regime, were swayed by its proposals, and, hoping for benefits, supported the cause of a Bourbon restoration.

Many clashes had already taken place in various parts of the south since the late 1860s, especially around the Bourbon citadel of Civitella del Tronto, which had been taken over by former Bourbon general Luigi Mezzacapo in 1861. In April, a popular uprising broke out in Basilicata. Throughout the summer, bands of brigands, composed largely of peasants and former Bourbon soldiers, engaged in extremely violent forms of guerrilla warfare in many inland provinces, attacking and repeatedly defeating the forces of the new Kingdom of Italy. The Bourbon flag was raised again in many southern towns. To combat brigands and insurgents, the government passed the Pica Law and responded by ordering summary executions, even of civilians, and the burning of entire villages. The Lieutenant Governor of Naples, Gustavo Ponza di San Martino, who had been trying to bring about peace in the preceding months, was replaced by General Enrico Cialdini, who was given full powers by the central government to deal with the situation and suppress the revolt.

The phenomenon took on, according to some scholars, the connotations of a real civil war, which forced the Italian state to employ about 120,000 soldiers to suppress the rebellion in the southern provinces. It was fought with ferocity on both sides, with the civilian population, as always, bearing the brunt: a situation that repeated itself throughout the duration of the civil war was the looting of a town by rebel groups, followed by the intervention of the army in search of collaborators, which systematically involved a second looting, the destruction of buildings set on fire, summary executions and often the dispersal of the survivors.

President Giorgio Napolitano recalled on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy that "brigandage was eradicated in southern Italy, even if the vital need to defeat this danger of legitimist reaction and national disintegration was paid for by the price of sometimes violent repression in response to the ferocity of brigandage and, in the long run, by the price of a tendency towards foreignness and hostility to the State that would become even more entrenched in the south".

On the other hand, there remained the great problem of the legitimist brigandage, which was practically non-existent in the central-northern part of the Italian peninsula, which, like the south, was annexed by force of arms, a fact that Massimo d'Azeglio had already noted in 1861 and which posited the existence of a cultural gap with the Italian state.

[...] I know nothing about suffrage, I know that on this side of the Tronto battalions are not necessary and that on the other side they are necessary.

— (Massimo d'Azeglio, Scritti e discorsi politici, Firenze 1939, III, pp. 399-400)

Beginning of southern emigration

The great southern emigration began only a few decades after the unification of Italy, where in the first half of the 19th century it had already affected several areas in the north, particularly Piedmont, Comacchio and Veneto. The historical reasons for the first southern emigration in the second half of the 19th century are to be found in widespread literature both in the crisis of the countryside and grain, and in the situation of economic impoverishment affecting the South in the aftermath of unification, when industrial investments were concentrated in the Northwest, as well as in other factors. In this regard, the theory of southern emigration linked to the concentration of industrial investment in the Northwest does not explain how emigration to central Italy has historically been much lower than that of the South and how the NEC (Northeast-Center) has been able to progressively grow from an economic-industrial point of view, approaching the Northwest and surpassing it in some cases.

Southern emigration is a phenomenon that follows different historical waves of departures and different geographical destinations in different periods. It is a phenomenon that does not stop in the statistics, even in the current period, when emigration is characterized by a significant flow of geographical displacement of graduates and professionals from the South, which can be qualified as intellectual emigration, beyond the normal flows of labor mobility, which further impoverishes the social and cultural substrate of the southern regions.

The Sonnino-Franchetti inquiry and the discovery of the southern question

In 1875, following the deterioration of public order in the southern regions and in Sicily, the government proposed to Parliament the adoption of exceptional measures for public security. During the debate in the Chamber, and while controversies raged in the country, it was decided to make the adoption of the measures conditional on the completion of a study of the economic and social conditions of Sicily, which was entrusted to a group of parliamentarians (from the right and the left) and magistrates and carried out between 1875 and 1876. The results were published and then reprinted several times, even together with the preparatory acts, but were underestimated by public opinion and the political class of the time.

In 1877, university professors and members of the historical Right, Leopoldo Franchetti and Sidney Sonnino, partly in response to the "official" inquiry, published their inquiry in Sicily with which they for the first time drew public attention to the harshness of living conditions in some southern regions and the exploitation of Sicilian child labor in the sulphur mines.

The colonial venture and the trade war with France

The emergence of Italy as a unitary state had prompted the pursuit of an aggressive foreign policy on the European chessboard rather than concentrating on resolving internal contradictions. The aftermath of the Third War of Independence, friction over the annexation of the Papal States, and conflicting interests in Tunisia led Italy to move away from its traditional ally France and closer to Germany and Austria in the Triple Alliance.

Already between 1877 and 1887 (Depretis governments) Italy had passed new protectionist tariff laws to protect its weak industry.

These laws penalized agricultural exports from the south, favored industrial production concentrated in the north, and created the conditions for the corrupt mixing of politics and economics. According to Giustino Fortunato, these measures determined the final collapse of southern interests in the face of those of northern Italy. In the same vein, Luigi Einaudi pointed out how the "strong tariff barrier" of the post-unification period ensured northern industries "a monopoly of the southern market, with the consequence of impoverishing agriculture".

World War I

With the First World War, the relative development of the North, based on industry, was favored by the war orders, while in the South, the conscription of young men to arms left the fields neglected, depriving their families of all sustenance, since, in the absence of men at the front, Southern women were not accustomed to working the land like peasant women in the North and Center, In fact, in the South, the arable land was often far from the homes, which were located in the villages, and even if they had wanted to, Southern women would not have been able to do the housework and work the land at the same time, which was possible in Northern and Central Italy, where the peasants lived in farmhouses just a few meters from the land to be cultivated. At the end of the war, it was the northern entrepreneurial bourgeoisie that benefited from the expansion of markets and from war reparations, in this case partly because the damage of the First World War had been done mainly in the central and eastern part of the country bordering Austria.

The Fascist period

The Fascist state was interested in broadening its consensus through economic growth that would support its expansionist policy. To this end, it promoted a series of public works through various bodies such as the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI) and the Italian Securities Institution (IMI) to equip the most impoverished territories in the South with infrastructure. Two ports (Naples and Taranto) were improved, a number of roads, railways and canals were built, the construction of a large aqueduct (that of the Tavoliere delle Puglie) was undertaken, and, above all, an ambitious plan for integral reclamation was devised. However, these were investments that met local needs only to a small extent, with a modest impact on employment and distributed according to criteria aimed at producing or consolidating consensus toward the regime on the part of the populations concerned and, at the same time, not harming the interests of the classes, notably landowners and petty-bourgeoisie, that constituted the hard core of Fascism in the South. This was particularly evident in the implementation of the massive land reclamation plan, where the conflicting interests of the peasants, who demanded a transfer of the reclaimed land to them, and the old landowners, fearful of being expropriated, could not be harmonized. Attempts were made in vain to limit the influence of the latter, and so "[...] reclamation in the South came to a halt at the stage of public works, while all the turmoil that misery and permanent imbalances had caused was channeled in those years into the myth of empire."

The policies implemented in the Fascist era to increase productivity in the primary sector were also unsuccessful: in particular, the agrarian policy pursued by Mussolini deeply damaged certain areas of the South. In fact, production focused mainly on wheat (battle for wheat) at the expense of more specialized and profitable crops that were widespread in the more fertile and developed southern areas. As for industry, it experienced during the "black twenty-year period" a long period of stagnation in the South, which is also noticeable in terms of employment. In fact, those employed in the secondary sector in the South constituted 20 percent of the national total in 1911, and almost thirty years later this percentage had not changed significantly. In 1938, industrial workers had dropped to 17.1 percent, but, taking into account the lower demographic weight of the South and the Islands compared to the other two economic macro-areas of the country at that date, the ratio of these workers to those working in the rest of Italy had remained practically unchanged (in the same time frame, the population of the South had dropped from about 38 percent to about 35.5 percent of the total population of the country).

In the late 1930s, Fascism gave a new impetus to its economic efforts in the south and in Sicily, but this was an initiative aimed at increasing the meager consensus the regime enjoyed in the south and at popularizing in the south the world war that would soon engulf Italy.

Fascist Italy, as a totalitarian state, resorted to means outside the rule of law (torture, special laws) to fight all forms of organized crime in the south. Famous was the appointment of Cesare Mori, later called the "Iron Prefect" for his harsh methods, as Prefect of Palermo with extraordinary powers over the entire island. Despite its excellent results, the Mafia was not completely eradicated, so much so that it allied itself with the Anglo-Americans during the Second World War and had contacts with some members of Fascism itself (see Alfredo Cucco and the Tresca case).

World War II

In World War II, the disparities were political as well as economic. In 1943, as the Allies prepared to land in Sicily to invade Italy, they found an ally in the Mafia through families operating in the United States, who offered to provide strategic intelligence and moral legitimacy to the invaders in exchange for civilian control of southern Italy. The Allied command agreed, and so the territories they gradually conquered came under the control of the various Mafia clans, which took advantage of this phase to consolidate their power, including militarily. The collapse of the state repressive apparatus was followed by the return of the issue of banditry, especially in Sicily, where some of its exponents joined political independence movements demanding the independence of the island.

The provisional government decided not to repress the movement, which had no social content or demands, but rather to bribe it. Large portions of the Marshall Plan were diverted to areas in turmoil, and the protest was deprived of the active interest of the population. Gang leaders were paid to lay down their arms, and through complex political maneuvers, some of the remaining gangs were persuaded and paid to carry out attacks against the civilian population, which ended up isolating the armed groups. At the same time, a denigrating press campaign was unleashed against the insurgents. To make matters worse, the new republican constitution granted Sicily a degree of autonomy, depriving the last rebels of any political legitimacy. The few remaining bands were identified and eliminated to the indifference of the population. However, as had happened eighty years earlier, the Mafia distanced itself from the armed groups and went back into hiding, integrating itself into the population. An integral part of this strategy is the cooperation of ordinary people, especially through omertà, or obstructing law enforcement by hiding or withholding sensitive information.

The First Republic

After the war, the Mafia gained enormous power in some important regions of southern Italy, first in Sicily and then in Calabria and Campania. The southern question was discussed at length in the Constituent Assembly and, precisely to emphasize the national and constitutional dimension of the problem, it was provided in article 119 of the Constitution that "in order to provide for specific purposes, and in particular to strengthen the south and the islands, the State shall allocate by law to the various regions special contributions". This reference was later removed by Constitutional Revision Act No. 3/2001.

At various times, the Italian government allocated funds to the development of the south, even creating a financial institution called the Cassa del Mezzogiorno to manage the flows. The Mafia, for its part, invested its illegal proceeds in legitimate activities. However, such movements ended up diverting public funds, or laundering the proceeds of crime, rather than financing productive enterprises. Too often, public investments were misused and were used by large public and private groups in the North to set up industrial plants in areas poorly served by infrastructure, with administrative headquarters often far from the production facilities, but nevertheless taking advantage of the large amounts of public capital allocated there.

Many northern industrial groups were encouraged by public subsidies to establish themselves in the South, but such decisions proved to be uneconomical in some respects, as many of these industrial experiments soon failed when the public subsidies ended. For their part, the large companies that joined these projects and the political parties that promoted them took advantage of the uncomfortable environment in which they operated by resorting to patronage practices in hiring, without ever emphasizing productivity or the value added by business activities.

These pernicious practices, called "welfarism", led to a profound change in the laws of the market and to the abortion of any possible economic development of the most depressed areas of the country. Italian private capital avoided the south unless it was encouraged by the allocation of substantial public funds, considering that any investment in a productive sector not subsidized by the state was doomed to failure. Although the situation today is very different, patronage attitudes still persist in southern politics, and all too often large public contracts in the South are awarded to the usual large industrial groups.

As for the development of the private economy of the South, in the years of the so-called "economic boom," until the mid-1970s, there was intense and steady economic growth in the South, which finally succeeded (after almost a century) in reversing the trends of the southern economy and bringing it closer to the levels of the North. This turnaround came to an abrupt halt in the early 1970s, after the oil crisis, and from then on the dualism between north and south returned. In recent years, however, since 2000, the data collected tell us that slowly the southern economy is narrowing the gap again. When the government found itself taking legislative action or negotiating international agreements in the economic sphere, attention was directed, again, to northern industries. For example, in the 1940s and 1950s, when Italian emigrants, mainly from the south, began to arrive en masse in the coal mines of Belgium, the Italian government requested and received from the Belgian government one ton of coal per year for each emigrant worker; this supply did not benefit the regions of origin of the emigrant miners, but was destined for factories located mainly in the northern areas of the country.

In the 1960s and 1970s the industrialized areas experienced a period of economic development, centered on the export of finished goods, called the "Italian" miracle. The phenomenon attracted labor from the South, and also affected it for a few decades, but the disparity in the two living standards became evident and widely discussed. In reaction, emigrants sent remittances to their families who remained in the South, and the state finally devoted significant resources to the development of essential services, but these resources were unable to be reinvested in productive circles, and only served to raise, albeit slightly, the living standards of the families of southern emigrants.

Beginning in the 1980s, the judiciary sought a new mission and focused on organized crime. Social developments such as individualism and the spectacularization of public life contributed to conditions in which the system of power used by the ruling class began to show cracks. Various laws strengthened the fight against corruption and crime: one that confirmed the separation of the judiciary from the executive, another that established reduced sentences and other benefits for defendants who cooperated with ongoing investigations, and finally one that made membership in a mafia association a more serious crime than simple criminal association. All of this allowed some progress to be made in the 1980s in the fight against the Mafia.

The contemporary South

During this period, a partial consolidation of the public debt accumulated by previous administrations was undertaken, accompanied by a reduction and rationalization of public spending.

The European Union partially accompanies this process by financing entrepreneurial projects of a social, ecological or cultural nature, but these initiatives are not of such a nature as to create self-financing mechanisms, and the benefits derived are very small. In this respect, Abruzzo, unlike all the other regions of the South, has been excluded from the so-called Objective 1, which has now expired.

As a result of the abolition of the Cassa del Mezzogiorno, the South currently benefits from Invitalia - Agenzia nazionale per l'attrazione degli investimenti e lo sviluppo d'impresa S.p.A. and sometimes from tax breaks for hiring young people, through rebates, bonuses and deductions to encourage employment in companies located in southern Italy. The Svimez and Formez institutes also exist to follow issues related to the South of Italy.

In absolute terms, the economic situation of the south has undoubtedly improved over the past sixty years; in relative terms, however, the gap with the north has drastically increased since the 1970s.

Studies from the January 2020 Eurispes report show how, from 2000 to 2007, the eight southern regions occupy the lowest places in the ranking by distribution of public spending. On the other hand, all the northern Italian regions have been showered by the State with an amount of annual expenditure significantly higher than the national average. If, from the total public expenditure, one considers the share that the South should have received each year as a percentage of its population, it emerges that, in total, from 2000 to 2017, the corresponding sum subtracted from it amounts to more than 840 billion euros net (on average, about 46.7 billion euros per year).

Even today, various structural problems continue to hamper the region's chances for economic progress: The lack of infrastructure, the presence of a banking system that is not very attentive to the needs of the territory (the old large southern banks have been gradually incorporated into large northern groups since the 1990s, such as the Banco di Napoli), the delays of an often plethoric public administration, the emigration of many young people who cannot find work because of the limited economic growth, and above all the infiltration of the organized underworld into the political and economic life of the south, a factor that is the main brake on the economic growth of the south.

Studies

Sociocultural aspects

The question of the South is not limited to the difference in economic development between the North and the South, as the gap also extends to many socio-cultural aspects, as measured by Istat data, which represent the most diverse social issues and behaviors on the peninsula.

Giustino Fortunato noted that in addition to the economic field, "there was also a profound diversity between customs, traditions, the intellectual and moral world". Even the writer Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, in his novel The Leopard, describes the different Sicilian and southern cultural attitudes towards the changes brought about by the unification of Italy.

The historiographical debate

The southern question has been the subject of multiple studies over time, with non-convergent conclusions, and is still a source of heated debate among historians, economists and politicians.

In recent years economic researches have pointed to the emergence of the southern question in the final part of the 19th century. However, even Marxist Antonio Gramsci, although critical of the Italian state, attributed the existence of the gap, as early as 1860, mainly due to the many centuries of different history of the north of the peninsula compared to the south, defined as two "antithetical" sections, which came together after 1,000 years, as Gramsci himself points out in his work "The Southern Question - The South and the War 1, p. 5).

On the other hand, the abundant literature of the period immediately following the Expedition of the Thousand shows a fierce opposition to the methods used by the Kingdom of Savoy to manage the annexation of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and even the burgeoning emergence of Southern music shows how alive was already in 1868 a fierce satire against the newly formed Kingdom. Examples are the songs Palummella zompa e vola, a nostalgic song for the lost freedom of the southern kingdom, or the carnival song Italiella.

The revisionist thesis, which would see the South as hostile to the Savoyards after Unification, does not explain the fact that, during the Monarchy-Republic referendum of 1946, it was the South that voted overwhelmingly in favor of the Savoy monarchy, while the North voted for the Republic; moreover, from 1946 to 1972 the monarchist parties, later merged into the Italian Democratic Party of Monarchist Unity (PDIUM), still gained support especially in the South and in Naples, where, on the occasion of the 1946 referendum, several Neapolitan citizens died in Via Medina, during the clashes in defense of the Savoy monarchy, events known as the Via Medina massacre.

However, three main historiographical approaches can be distinguished, which trace in broad strokes broader ideological and political debates:

• Classical historiography, so called because it was originated earlier, proposed the South as a sign of an atypical or delayed evolution, where other conditions would have allowed the region to successfully fit into a dynamic of growth and integration. In this context, the emphasis is placed on the thesis that the North-South divide pre-dates unification and was mainly caused by the different histories of the two territories, beginning with the fall of the Roman Empire, a difference that became more pronounced after 1300.
• Modern historiography, so called because it has been proposed since Gramsci and Salvemini, sees the persistence of misery as an essential component of capitalism, which is based on the dualities of exploiters and exploited, development and underdevelopment, also on a geographical basis.
• The deterministic interpretation, which sees demography (through racist theses) or the geography of the South as the often insurmountable cause of the poverty in which the South finds itself.

Many intellectuals - including those already mentioned, such as Gramsci and Giustino Fortunato - publicly acknowledged the existence of a real southern question, but also claimed that it was due to the unequal treatment between northern Italy and southern Italy, the latter being exploited to an unimaginable extent, to the point that a large part of its children emigrated, leaving their homeland to seek their fortune abroad.

Revisionist historiography supports the thesis of the exploitation of the South to the advantage of the North, in particular the fact that, the so-called "Turin-Milan-Genoa" industrial triangle would have developed economically by taking resources away from the South, without, however, explaining how the provinces of Northeastern and Central Italy, while not receiving aid, have developed economically over time close to and, in several cases, even greater than some of the industrial areas of the aforementioned "Turin-Milan-Genoa" industrial triangle, as shown by the Unioncamere and ISTAT data.

In particular, revisionist historiography does not explain the economic development of the regions belonging to the former Papal States, an absolute theocratic anti-liberal monarchy and thus a profoundly different state from the Kingdom of Sardinia, where after 1860 there were no episodes of brigandage or anti-Savoyard revolts, with the former papal populations soon adapting to the new and profoundly different norms of the unified Italian state, growing slowly but progressively until reaching in the last decades of the twentieth century, an economic-productive development close to several northern provinces of the Po Valley and in some cases, even greater, as shown by the Istat and Unioncamere data.

The topic "The Southern Question," introduced in the epigraph with a famous statement by the southern historian and politician Giustino Fortunato, can also be historically understood by quoting the famous phrase of the Turin politician and patriot Massimo d'Azeglio:

"[...] I know nothing about suffrage, I know that on this side of the Tronto battalions are not necessary and that on the other side they are necessary."

— (Massimo d'Azeglio, Scritti e discorsi politici, Firenze 1939, III, pp. 399-400)

Historical research

According to Nitti's reconstructions, the kingdom's substantial wealth, in addition to contributing preponderantly to the formation of the national treasury, was destined mainly to the rehabilitation of the finances of northern regions compromised by the disproportionate public expenditure incurred by the Kingdom of Sardinia in those years, that is, to the development of the provinces of the so-called "industrial triangle."

The Piedmontese public debt grew in the decade prior to 1860 by 565 percent, producing as an effect an increase in taxes (23 new taxes were introduced in the Sardinian states in the 1850s), the sale of state property (such as the Sampierdarena steel plant) and the need to take out large loans, thus putting the fortunes of the Savoy state back into the hands of a few large bankers (such as the Rothschilds). On the contrary, in the Bourbon state, as reported by Giacomo Savarese (Minister and Councillor of State in 1848), the public debt corresponded to 16.57 percent of GDP and there were only 5 taxes through which the public rents in those years increased from 16 million to 30 million ducats "as a result of the growth of the general wealth."

According to the journalist, writer and essayist Paolo Mieli, from the work by Vittorio Daniele and Paolo Malanima, Il divario Nord-Sud in Italia 1861-2011 (Rubbettino), it can be seen that in the years of unification the territories of the Kingdom of the Bourbons had economic conditions quite similar to those of the northern areas and that the GDP per capita of the south was even higher, albeit slightly, than that of northern Italy.

In the years following the unification, however, major public works were carried out in the south, including the improvement of the already poor southern road network and, in particular, the construction of a railway network, which before 1860 was limited to about 100 km around Naples. The total cost of these works was very high, as shown in history of rail transport in Italy.

Recent research has shown that before the Unification there were no substantial economic differences between the South and the North in terms of per capita product and industrialization, although there were, however, serious critical issues in the social indicators of the South (education, life expectancy, poverty), due to the general backwardness of the southern territory and the rest of rural Italy. Other authors have been critical of the thesis that there were no substantial economic differences between the North and the South at the time of unification.
According to other studies at the time of unification, the difference in per capita income was estimated to be 15-20% greater in the north than in the south, a figure derived not only from an analysis of the number of people employed, but also of the size and competitive capacity of industrial establishments. Other studies estimate the difference in per capita income to be 25% greater in the northwest than in the south.

However, the actual economic gap began to deepen in the last years of the 19th century, widening from that time onward to create the current dualism between the North-Center and the South, as was highlighted at that very time by southern politicians and scholars such as Sidney Sonnino, Giustino Fortunato, Gaetano Salvemini, Guido Dorso, Francesco Saverio Nitti and Antonio Gramsci. The economic hardships and disappointed hopes of the southern proletariat in the years following the unification of Italy were at the origin of the armed struggle that inflamed the countryside of the former Bourbon kingdom, referred to as the "brigandage struggle." Poverty also led to the formation of a massive migratory flow, absent in pre-unification times. The economic decline of the south also became perceptible because of the different proportions that the migratory flow assumed between the various parts of the country: if in the period 1876-1900, out of a total of 5,257,911 expatriates, most of the emigrants abroad were inhabitants of the central-northern regions (70.8 percent left from the central-north and 29.2 percent from the central-south), in the period 1900-1915, out of a total of 8,769,785 exiles, the trend reversed and the migratory supremacy passed to the southern regions, with a reduction in northern emigrants and a growth in those from the south (52.7 percent left from the center-north and 47.3 percent from the center-south): in particular, out of less than nine million emigrants, almost three million came from Campania, Calabria and Sicily.

Although Giustino Fortunato was highly critical of Bourbon policies and an ardent supporter of national unity, he argued that the greatest damage inflicted on the economy of the South after the unification of Italy was caused by the protectionist policy adopted by the Italian state in 1877 and 1887, which he said resulted in "the fatal sacrifice of the interests of the south" and "the exclusive patronage of those of the north," as it crystallized the economic monopoly of the north on the Italian market. Supporting this thesis are the studies conducted by Italian agricultural historian Emilio Sereni, who identified the origin of the current southern question in the economic contrast between north and south that came about as a result of the unification of Italian markets in the years immediately following the military conquest of the realm, stating: "The South became, for the new Kingdom of Italy, one of those Nebenlander (dependent territories), of which Marx speaks in regard to Ireland vis-à-vis England, where industrial capitalist development was abruptly crushed for the profit of the dominant country." Gradually, the manufactures and factories of the South declined: local industry succumbed under the combined blows of foreign industry and especially northern industry, which, due to protectionist policies, was put by the governments of the time in the optimal conditions to be able to gain a monopoly on the national market. The south was thus set on a process of agrarization, and the mass of labor that workers and peasant populations employed in other times in industry-related work remained unused, causing not only an industrial but also an agrarian marasmus. While in the countryside the discontent of the peasant masses took the path of legitimist claim, in the industrial centers of the old kingdom, the emergence of socialist and anarchist nuclei occurred in those years (the first Italian sections to join the International were established in Naples and Castellammare a few months after the organization's birth in London) to which workers and young intellectuals of bourgeois backgrounds (such as Carlo Cafiero, Emilio Covelli, Francesco Saverio Merlino, Errico Malatesta and Antonio Labriola) joined. This process occurred gradually during the first decades of the Kingdom of Italy's existence, and by 1880 Italian industry was already largely concentrated in the industrial triangle. The southern question emerged during the process of forming and settling the national market. It, with its original vices, acquired increasing acuity in the course of the capitalist development of the Italian economy, becoming complicated by new social and political factors.
The theory of the development of the North to the detriment of the South, in particular the fact that, the so-called "Turin-Milan-Genoa" industrial triangle would have developed economically by taking resources away from the South, does not explain how the provinces in the Northeast and Central Italy, even without receiving aid, developed over time economically close to and, in several cases, even higher than some of the industrial areas in the aforementioned "Turin-Milan-Genoa" industrial triangle as shown by the Unioncamere and ISTAT data.
Classical historiography supports the thesis that the North-South divide existed before unification and was caused mainly by the different histories of the two territories since the fall of the Roman Empire, a difference that would have widened by 1300.

The infrastructure and industrial gap in 1860-61 was as follows:

• Road network: in 1860 the road network in the North-Center was estimated at about 75500 km compared to 14700 km in the South and islands, for a corresponding density of 626 km per 1000 km² in the North-Center compared to only 108 km in the South.
• Iron and steel industry: in 1860 the entire Italian iron and steel industry produced 18,500 tons of iron works, of which 17,000 were produced in the North and only 1,500 in the South.
• The railway network: in 1861 out of the 2,500 km of existing railways, 869 were in Piedmont, 756 in Lombardy-Veneto, 361 in Tuscany, while in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies only 184 km were in operation around Naples, with the rest of the South totally devoid of railway tracks.

The existence of the north-south economic-productive gap prior to 1860 is also attested by other authors: Carlo Afan de Rivera, an important official in the Bourbon administration, with his "Considerations on the means to restore the proper value to the gifts that nature has largely bestowed on the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies," describes the situation of agriculture in the pre-unification South and the great economic backwardness at the beginning with which the South of Italy found itself at the time of unification.

The Marxist Antonio Gramsci, while critical of the Savoy governments, also attributed the emergence of the Southern Question mainly to the many centuries of different history of southern Italy, compared to the history of northern Italy, as laid out in his work "The Southern Question."

"The new Italy found the two parts of the peninsula, the south and the north, reunited after more than a thousand years in completely opposite conditions.

The Lombard invasion had finally broken the unity created by Rome, and in the north the communes had given history one particular impulse, while in the south the Swabian, Anjou, Spanish and Bourbon domination had given it another.
On the one hand, the tradition of a certain autonomy had created a bourgeoisie that was bold and full of initiative, and there was an economic organisation similar to that of the other states of Europe, conducive to the further development of capitalism and industry.
In the other, the paternalist administrations of Spain and the Bourbons had created nothing: the bourgeoisie did not exist, agriculture was primitive and not even sufficient to satisfy the local market; there were no roads, no ports, no exploitation of the few waters that the region possessed due to its peculiar geological conformation.

The unification brought the two parts of the peninsula into close contact."

The American political scientist Edward C. Banfield (1916–1999), in his book The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (1958), argued that the backwardness of the South was due to what he called "amoral familism", a type of society based on an extreme conception of family ties, to the detriment of the ability to associate and the collective interest.

U.S. political scientist Robert D. Putnam proposes theses similar to those of Edward C. Banfield in his book The Civic Tradition in the Italian Regions, arguing how the lack of civic sense produces negative effects towards the development and efficiency of institutions and therefore how regions with little civic sense are more backward, even economically, than regions with more civic sense.

Scholars of the phenomenon

Various scholars and politicians have addressed the Southern Question, looking for the causes of the South's problems. The following are the most prominent:

• Giuseppe Massari (1821–1884) and Stefano Castagnola (1825–1891) were two Italian deputies who headed a parliamentary commission of inquiry into brigandage between 1862 and 1863. Although their work was partial and purely descriptive, it showed how misery played a key role in the birth of the revolt.
• Pasquale Villari (1827–1917) was among the first to raise the issue of the southern question. He drew attention to the crisis in the south and, in particular, to the weakness of the institutions of the new Italian state in the southern regions. He criticised the workings of the newly unified state because, in order to achieve a balanced budget, it imposed unfair taxation on the popular class, which was one of the main causes of the agrarian proletarian insurrection. Villari believed that the southern question could be healed by bringing the government closer to the southern plebs.
• Stefano Jacini Sr. (1827–1891), longtime minister of public works, was interested in the need to build infrastructure and create a class of small landowners.
• Stefano Jacini Jr. (1886–1952), his grandson, noted two generations later that the situation had not changed, and took up the same views.
• Leopoldo Franchetti (1847–1917), Sidney Sonnino (1847–1922) and Enea Cavalieri (1848–1929) produced a famous and well-documented study of the southern question in 1876, highlighting the links between the persistence of illiteracy and latifundia, the absence of a local bourgeoisie, corruption and the mafia, the need for agrarian reform and the slow development of port, rail and road infrastructure.
• Giustino Fortunato (1848–1932), a conservative politician, carried out several studies on the subject, the most famous of which was published in 1879, in which he outlined the physical and geographical disadvantages of the south, the problems of land ownership and the role of conquest in the emergence of brigandage. He was decidedly hostile to any form of federalism, and although he defended the need to redistribute land and fund essential services such as schools and hospitals, he has been seen by some commentators as pessimistic because of his distrust of the southerners' ability to overcome the economic and historical constraints of the south by their own efforts. He expected the north to help the south, but in time became disillusioned by the inability of the northern ruling classes (and more generally of the new Italy) to resolve the southern question.
• Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), a historicist philosopher, reviewed the vicissitudes of the South from the Unification to the twentieth century from a historiographical point of view, stressing the impartiality of the sources. His thought differed in part from that of his friend Giustino Fortunato with regard to the importance of natural conditions in the problems of the South. In fact, he considered the ethico-political events that had led to this situation to be fundamental. Both considered the ability of the political and economic classes, national and local, to address and resolve the problem as fundamental. His Storia del Regno di Napoli (History of the Kingdom of Naples), published in 1923, remains the essential point of reference for subsequent historiography, for students and critics alike.
• Francesco Saverio Nitti (1868–1953), a minister on several occasions, devoted much time to studying the southern economy. Contrary to the majority of Meridionalists, who saw a South oppressed by the Bourbon regime, he believed that the South was not in an extremely serious situation before the Unification. He criticised the conservative economic model of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which, in his opinion, prevented the South from following the modern age but guaranteed a mediocre prosperity that was lost after the Unification, and praised its administrative and financial arrangements. Nitti analysed the timid industrial development, emigration and urged the creation of an early welfare state. After the Second World War, he also proposed a vast programme of public works, irrigation and reforestation and, like others before him, reiterated the urgency of agrarian reform.
• Gaetano Salvemini (1873–1957), a socialist historian and politician, focused his analysis on the disadvantages that the south had inherited from history, sharply criticising the centralised administration of the country and pointing to the need for an alliance between northern workers and southern peasants. However, the systematic exploitation of the south by northern capital and the adoption of a state legislation particularly punitive towards the south had been made possible, according to Salvemini, by the complicity of the southern landowners and their allies, the local petty bourgeoisie. The latter, vulgar and idle, aroused the contempt of Salvemini, who, on the other hand, had a deep respect for the sober, hard-working and dignified southern peasants. As late as 1952, Salvemini stressed the serious responsibility that the southern petty bourgeoisie had borne and continues to bear for the failure to develop the south, but "[...] the southern bourgeoisie prefers to remain ignorant of this responsibility. They find it convenient to blame the north. Well, we southerners must always point out this responsibility. We must prevent the southerners from forgetting themselves in order to do nothing but rail against the northerners".
• Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), a renowned Marxist thinker, read the backwardness of the South through the prism of class struggle. He studied the mechanisms at work in the peasant revolts of the late 19th century to the 1920s, explained how the working class had been divided from the agricultural labourers by the protectionist measures adopted under fascism, and how the state had artificially invented a middle class in the south through public employment. He hoped for the political maturation of the peasantry, abandoning revolt as an end in itself in favour of a vindictive and proactive stance, and for a more radical turn by the urban proletarians to include the countryside in their struggles. The Marxist Antonio Gramsci attributed the emergence of the Southern Question mainly to the centuries-old difference in the history of southern Italy compared to northern Italy, as Gramsci himself points out in his work "The Southern Question - The South and the War" (1, p. 5), pointing to the existence of a profound socio-economic difference between the north-central and southern parts of the Italian peninsula as early as 1860, and also highlighting the serious shortcomings of the previous Spanish and Bourbon administrations.
• Guido Dorso (1892–1947) was an intellectual who defended the dignity of southern culture and denounced the wrongs committed by the North, especially by the political parties. He made exhaustive studies on the evolution of the economy of the South from unification until the 1930s and defended the need for the emergence of a local ruling class.
• Rosario Romeo (1924–1987), historian and politician, opposed revolutionary theories and highlighted the differences that existed between Sicily and the rest of the south before and after the Risorgimento. He attributed the problems of the South to cultural traits characterised by individualism and a lack of civic spirit, rather than to historical or structural causes.
• Paolo Sylos Labini (1920–2005), professor and economist, argued that the lack of civic and cultural development was at the root of the economic divide. He saw corruption and crime as endemic to southern society and welfare as the main obstacle to development.
• Edward C. Banfield (1916–1999) American political scientist who argued that the backwardness of the South was due to so-called amoral familism, a type of society based on an extreme conception of family ties that was detrimental to the ability to associate and the collective interest, explained in his 1958 book The Moral Basis of a Backward Society.
• Luciano Cafagna (1926–2012), an economic historian, outlined some of the reasons why the thesis of northern Italy's economic development at the expense of southern Italy is unfounded.