The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question (review)

In recent years the Italian south has been at the center of a series of studies which have revolutionized traditional historiographies. The south has been revisited as a concept and as a historical formation, using approaches often informed by Edward Said's Orientalism but also by fresh methodological tools, no longer trapped within the paradigms of backwardness and regionalism. Within this new set of studies, the south's formation has been repositioned within the contexts of Italian nationalism, "orientalism in one country" (a term used by Jane Schneider with regard to the Italian south) and Eurocentrism. Scholars have, in addition, reassessed orthodox approaches to southern industrial development, the mafia and agricultural institutions such as the great estates or latifondi. The idea of a static, immovable, backward south has been called into question. The whole concept of a "southern question" as a way of viewing the "south" (however defined) has been rethought. Nelson Moe's contribution to this exciting cross-disciplinary work has been important. A series of his articles have appeared over the years in both Italian and English, some of which are reprinted in this beautifully produced new volume. ¹

Moe's intention, laid out in the introduction, is to explain "How and why . . . southern Italy become 'the south,' a place and people imagined to be different from and inferior to the rest of the country" (1). His methodology is largely that of literary studies—thus Moe takes a series of texts which mention the south, and analyzes them in detail. He is interested above all in representations of the south, and much less in the realities concerning that set of regions. In addition, the book explains how Italy as a whole was seen as a southern country within Europe, by Italians and others, and how modern views of the south took shape in the middle decades of the 19th century "under the combined pressures of western Eurocentrism, nationalism and bourgeoisification" (1).

Through this type of methodology, the book draws from a wide variety of texts, literary, visual and sociological. The range of Moe's study is striking, as it takes in Verga (in great detail), Leopardi, the inquests of Sonnino and Franchetti, travel writings, letters and military reports as well as the photos and illustrations in the popular magazine L'Illustrazione italiana (accompanied by a number of well-produced and useful designs and plates). All of this goes to form what Moe calls an "imaginative geography" of the south whereby the south was identified as different in a number of complicated and interesting ways. This work of textual analysis and deconstruction of texts is impressive and important, and builds a rich picture of the view of the south within a series of cultural products around the crucial period of Italian unification.

However, what appears to be lacking is the next step— that is a real, historical analysis of the effects of these representations on the formation of ideas of the "south" (at both intellectual and "popular" levels). There is no doubt that, in a number of ways, a range of representations characterized the south as backward (and/or as picturesque) and contributed to the formation of a "southern question." But we are left wondering about the real ramifications of these texts. Who read them? How were they received? What was their impact (at the time, and over time)? How important were literary texts at all in a "nation" with huge levels of illiteracy? There is also a "reality gap." Moe deals with the question of how different the south really was (and is) in a brief section in the conclusion (and at other points scattered throughout the book). But there is no systematic attempt to explain the specificities of the south as a different reality. One suspects that the author is more interested in the writers and their texts than the south itself...