Southern Question
In the 140 years since the northern and southern Italy was unified, the relationship between the two regions is under stress and tension, which is often termed as the Southern Question. It has modeled Italy’s political, economical, and cultural life in the last century. The pop up of Umberto Bossi’s separatist Northern League in the 1990s has paved way to a new urgent need to this question, giving a real large number of voters with a political channel through which to vent their unhappiness with the unified state formed from Italy’s many regions during 1860. In fact the ‘Southern Question’ has been the burning topic in Italian political scenario for more than a century. The traditional making of the Southern question, is if we can see, still has a continuing and important role to play in today’s context for historical evolution of Italy (Moe, 2009).
What is interesting is that anyhow, studies dealing with Europe’s internal fragmentation, and of the world more widely, primarily referring to a division between east and west. The split between north and south, which formed the European imagination in the 18th and 19th centuries, has instead received notably less attention. Thus, while a huge number of studies have contributed to the understanding of the importance of the Orient or “East” in modern European culture, our historical comprehension of the south is vague, as is our knowledge of the methods the groups of north, south, west, and east have interlinked and evolved in the modern era.
This study is trying to put light the functioning of imaginative geography in a southern mode with a focus on Italy. Italy was a very important figure for the south in the 18th and 19th centuries. But what makes Italy a particularly rich site for such an exploration is the way in which north and south have been shaped inside Italy itself. North and south have been modeling terms in Italian culture ever since the up rise of nationalism during the 1850s. A dialogue with the differences among north and south has shaped independent areas of Italian culture till the present day, reflected most importantly, perhaps, in the conventional political thought and social analysis termed as Meridionalism. As Piero Bevilacqua puts in, the “‘Southern Question’ is definitely a Italian specialty” (“Vecchio e nuovo” 251).
The 1990s were a specially rich and important decade for the study and analysis of the Southern Question in the Italian studies. The end of 1980s saw a number of historians, many linked with the journal Meridiana, start to question the dualistic model of an Italy separated between north and south. They definitely challenged the traditional portrayal of the Mezzogiorno as a unified group thought of as independent and backward.
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