Race and the Nation in Liberal Italy, 1861-1911: Meridionalism, Empire, and Diaspora (Italian & Italian American Studies)

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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™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS 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


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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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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


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


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.


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

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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”

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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

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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


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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

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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


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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

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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


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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,

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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


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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

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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


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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

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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,


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“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

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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


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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

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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


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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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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


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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.


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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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

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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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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


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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

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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


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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.

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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


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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

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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


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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

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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


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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

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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.


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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


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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


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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


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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.


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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


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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


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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,


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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.


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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


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

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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


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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


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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


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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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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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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


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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


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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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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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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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“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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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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,

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10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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,

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6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

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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.

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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.

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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

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