In 1935, the writer Carlo Levi was arrested by Benito Mussolini’s Fascist police for anti-government activity, condemned to internal exile and packed off to Aliano, a primitive village buried in the remote fastness of the country’s southern half, known colloquially as the Mezzogiorno. For northern Italians, there were few fates worse. In his classic memoir of this experience, Christ Stopped at Eboli, Levi describes a world as distant from Rome as Rome was from the sun. As the villagers told Levi, even Christ stopped at Eboli, a village just north of Aliano. “No one has come to this land except as an enemy, a conqueror or a visitor devoid of understanding…no message, human or divine, has reached this stubborn poverty.”
Published slightly more than 70 years ago, Levi’s account nevertheless serves as a guide to last weekend’s referendum vote in Italy. Commentators have offered an array of reasons for the overwhelming defeat of the proposed changes to the Italian constitution. Some interpret it as a slap at the referendum’s author, Matteo Renzi, the now-former prime minister whose political adroitness was not compensation enough for his personal arrogance. A sharp observer of Italian politics, Alessandro Carrera at the University of Houston, echoes a Jacques Lacan remark to describe Renzi: “There are two kinds of madmen: those who are mad and think they are king, and those who are king and think they are king.” Others see it as a slap at the European Union, which had supported Renzi’s effort to simplify a constitutional machine made deliberately complicated to prevent the rise of another Mussolini. Still others see it as a slap at the winds of globalization and immigration that threaten to erase the nation’s boundaries and identity.
No doubt all these motives played their roles at the voting booth. The victory of the “No” camp, Mario Calabria wrote in La Repubblica, “has many fathers.” But an important source of paternity has mostly been overlooked: the arid and austere Mezzogiorno. When Levi was deported to Aliano, the region was devastated by malaria and cholera, despoiled by clientelism and corruption, and deprived of basic needs such as medical care and infrastructure. Most of the villagers teetered between survival and starvation, while a small elite drained government monies into their private coffers. For the villagers, Levi writes, the State was at best indifferent, at worst inimical to their interests. “Everyone knows,” he was told, “that the fellows in Rome don’t want us to live like human beings. There are hailstorms, landslides, drought and….the State.”
In one of the absurd juxtapositions between the worlds of southern and northern Italy, Levi describes his encounter with a strange monument in the village square—a public toilet that Rome, for mysterious reasons, had delivered to Aliano. A massive and meticulously appointed structure, which had landed “like a meteorite” in a village hundreds of miles from a water and sewer system, the toilet was used only by children, who floated paper boats on the stagnant water in the basins. Levi notes that, on one side of the wall, the manufacturer’s name was inscribed: Renzi & Co.
This is, of course, a coincidence, but it nevertheless underscores the many continuities between the 1930s and today. In a 2015 paper published by the research institution Svimez, there was an unrelievedly grim account of a region that has been called “the Greece of Italy.” If only it were the Greece of Italy, though. Between 2000 and 2013, Svimez notes, the regional economy grew by 13 percent -- a figure dwarfed even by Greece, whose economy grew 24 percent over the same period. The head of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, in a speech devoted to what Italians refer to as “the southern question,” identified the Mezzogiorno as “the largest and most populous backward territory of the Euro zone.”
Statistics underscore how dramatic this backwardness is. The Mezzogiorno’s per-capita gross domestic product is less than half that of northern Italy, while the region’s level of unemployment among the young -- rising to nearly 65 percent among women -- outstrips the already desultory figures from the north. Not surprisingly, more than half of those Italians who fall below the poverty threshold are from the Mezzogiorno, while another quarter report they face “serious financial deprivation.” A recent report from UNICEF revealed that nearly two million children live below the poverty line in Italy -- the highest percentage among EU member states -- with the greatest concentrations of poverty rooted in the south. Of the poorest of the poor -- those for whom basic needs are not met -- 42 percent live in Sicily, 32 percent in Campania and 31 percent are from Basilicata, the same region where Levi encountered children “with the wizened faces of old men, their bodies reduced by starvation almost to skeletons.”
While Levi’s villagers accepted their lot with Stoic apathy, this is not the case for their descendants. The electoral map based on Sunday’s vote strikingly reveals this change in regional mentality: The “yes” vote came mostly from provinces in the traditionally leftist strongholds of Emilia Romagna and Tuscany, as well as urban areas in the northern regions, apart from those areas dominated by the extreme right-wing Northern League. Importantly, as Carrera points out, the autonomous northern regions would have been weakened by the proposed constitutional change. The bottom half of Italy, on the other hand, voted overwhelmingly against the referendum. A popular writer of police thrillers, the Neapolitan Maurizio de Giovanni, had predicted this outcome. The referendum, for his fellow southerners, was not limited to technical matters. “If you ask voters for their position on a constitutional question, they have the right to apply that question to the insidious problems they confront on a daily basis. They expressed,” he continued, “their rejection and dissatisfaction with a social and even existential situation which, in principle, was not the referendum’s subject.”
Having spent a year in Aliono, Levi grasped that the villagers, while illiterate, nevertheless had a firm sense of justice. It was, he wrote, “a spontaneous understanding of what the Government and the State should be, namely the will of the people expressed in terms of law.” In the days leading up to the referendum, as they gazed at the Renzi government, composed of ministers who mostly hailed from the north, the men and women of the Mezzogiorno, now literate but still discriminated against, expressed once again their spontaneous understanding of justice. It remains for Rome to respond.
