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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 35.1 (2004) 134-135



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The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question. By Nelson Moe (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002) 349 pp. $50.00

"How and when did southern Italy become 'the south,' a place and people imagined to be different from and inferior to the rest of the country?" (1). This question lies at the heart of Moe's captivating study of visual and textual representations of southern Italy in the nineteenth century. He traces the origins of southern "difference" to the representations of foreign writers who traveled to Italy from the mid-eighteenth century onward. "For many," Moe comments, "Italy was the Southern country par excellence" (13). The writings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Madame Anne-Louise-Germaine de Staƫl embody what Moe calls a "contrastive structure," in which the glory of Italy's past was compared to its decadent present, its natural beauty compared to its human failings, and its "backwardness" contrasted to the modern societies of northern Europe. Yet at the same time, this spectacle of backwardness and human failure could "delight, entertain, regenerate" (16). Foreign denunciations of Italy's decadence could become a celebration of the "picturesque" (17). Over time, as Moe shows, this same contrastive structure, and this same mixture of delight and disgust, began to infiltrate Italy's own representations of its "lower," southern half.

For Risorgimento writers like Carlo Cattaneo and Vincenzo Gioberti, "the south [was] clearly 'other'" (109). Its backwardness, poverty, and "rudeness" made it, for Cattaneo, both "the spectacular opposite" of his native Lombardy and "a bourgeois nightmare" (109, 108). But southern rudeness was, in turn, embraced by Giacomo Leopardi, who in his 1837 poem "La ginestra" celebrated the "natural, earthy, volcanic south" (120), and its inherent challenge to the "vain and fatuous" bourgeois nineteenth century (121).

During the 1850s, such stereotypes began to inform political debate and, in particular, the fiery denunciations of bad Bourbon government made by foreign and Italian liberals alike. Giuseppe Massari, a southern exile in Piedmont, wrote that the struggle against the Bourbons was a "great battle between civilisation and barbarism, knowledge versus ignorance, virtue versus vice, innocence versus iniquity," thus confirming, Moe notes, "the role hyperbole often plays in defining an image of the south" (133). After Italian unification, Italy's new leaders used images of disease and medical treatment to justify the use of force to subdue its southern provinces.

By the 1870s,the contours of the "Southern Question" were firmly established. Pasquale Villari and Leopoldo Franchetti depicted the south as a peculiar and exceptional place, which was "a threat to the political and moral integrity of the nation" (224). The novels and short stories of Giovanni Verga contained "a powerfully antipicturesque vision of Sicily" as a place of hardship, unhappiness, and death that served as "a powerful emblem of the failings of national unification" (275, 194). Yet, during the same years, the image of the "picturesque" south had commercial [End Page 134] appeal as well. In the pages of the weekly magazine Illustrazione Italiana, the south was "a traditional, picturesque world on the brink of destruction ... less significant for its participation in modernity than for its separateness from it" (223). It was a dramatic and largely rural landscape peopled by evil landowners, barefoot peasants, and simple fishermen.

The View from Vesuvius is part of a broader range of studies that has revised Italy's Southern Question by challenging its assumptions, questioning its findings, and deconstructing its stereotypes. The View from Vesuvius is also one of the most successful of these studies. Moe uses a wide range of texts, from travel writing to novels and political studies, investigating the emergence and development of the Southern Question across a long time-span. This approach allows him to capture the complexities and distinctions of "southernism." His analysis shifts perspective from foreigners to northern Italians and to southerners, suggesting that the image of the south is the product of a discursive interaction between all three rather than an imposition on...

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