Northern Italy is richer than Southern Italy in modern times. I visited Southern Italy recently and I was told the Kingdom of Two Sicilies ruled by the Spanish Bourbon dynasty was and advanced and prosperous state.
I know that Southern Italy was not politically advanced in terms of democracy; like some of the other republics in the north. I was told that Southern Italy had advanced banking, railroads and was wealthier than many regions in the north of the Italian peninsula.
I heard that the rise of the mafia was not simply a criminal organization but an anti-state movement. It was a reactionary movement against the unification of the country which was a project based in Piedmont by the Savoy dynasty. Is this accurate?
This narrative was completely different from what I was told when I was young. The historical picture I had of pre-unification Italy was that of Florence, ruled by Medici family and the wealth of the Renaissance period(I assumed this was the case in neighboring northern Italian regions). I was under the impression that the north was always richer and more advanced.
Apparently this is a big debate in Italy. I'm not really sure what is historically accurate about the wealth of northern/southern Italy pre-unification. Can anyone enlighten me on the subject?
The economic gap between Northern and Southern Italy is pretty apparent in most scholarship on Italian economic history. Although some historians have qualified the divide as more complex than a north/south disparity, few economic historians would characterize Southern Italy as more advanced and prosperous than the North. Most of the economic indices in 1861 demonstrated a preexisting divide between the North and South. The Southern poverty rate ran at 52 percent compared to 37 percent in the Center and North. Even though Italian life expectancy was quite low by contemporaneous European standards (about thirty years), the South's life expectancy in 1871 was two years and two months shorter than the their other counterparts. Similarly, adult literacy rates were much lower (13 percent versus 39 percent) than the rest of the country. Southern industrial development prior to unification also lagged behind the rest of the country. There were very few railways and little investment in infrastructure like hydroelectric power. Such industries that were in the South lacked room for growth.
There is however a grain of truth to the notion that the South was better off before unification. The gap between North and South yawned ever wider in the decades after unification. This was partly the fault of the Northern-dominated central state. Liberal Italy tended to avoid the developmental projects that would have alleviated this gap. However, one of the main causes of the South's economic malaise was the global drop in grain prices and the rise of trade protectionism in European states like Germany. This meant that the cornerstone of the South's economy, agriculture, became increasingly uncompetitive both within Italy and on a European level. Thus the main export of the South became its own population, feeding the global Italian diaspora.
The very persistence of the "North-South" gap has become a perennial bone of contention in Italian politics. Thus for many Southerners, counteracting the notion of an eternally backwards South has become a focus of regional pride. This revisionism sometimes can be taken too far. The post-1815 Bourbon Kingdom of Naples was just as resolutely committed to Reaction and anti-republicanism as its Savoyard counterparts. This contributed to a harsh social policy and a knee-jerk support for landowners that led to the genesis of secret societies which were the forerunners of the Mafia among the peasantry.
Sources
A’hearn, Brian. "Institutions, externalities, and economic growth in southern Italy: evidence from the cotton textile industry, 1861‐1914." The Economic History Review 51, no. 4 (1998): 734-762.
Toniolo, Gianni. The Oxford Handbook of the Italian Economy Since Unification. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Zamagni, Vera. The Economic History of Italy, 1860-1990. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was certainly at the forefront, in some respects: for example, one of the first manifactures (the china factory at Capodimonte) and the first railway system in the Peninsula were built there. The problem is - they didn't go much further. Moreover, these few advances were counterbalanced by cons such as:
An archaic, staunchly reactionary, inept government plagued by inefficiency and corruption which was headed by a demi-absolute monarch from a foreign dinasty, who was neither loved nor feared by its people;
Plenty of localistic issues, seeing that the Kingdom itself was sort of an artificial creation conceived as as result of the Congress of Vienna: the old Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily were united in 1816, and Naples itself became the new capital. The move - as well as the lack of a Constitution - angered many Sicilians, who often revolted against the central government and wasted no time in siding with the garibaldini in 1860;
A large and relatively modern military (whose fleet was on par, if not superior, to that of Sardinia) with a terrible officer corps, whose members were chosen not because of their merits but thanks to their ascendancy and/or the good offices of their relatives. Moreover, both the soldiers and the officers themselves had little allegiance to the Crown - many were just in for the money (see above).
A bigoted, penniless nobility who owned much of the land but acted as absentee landlords;
An almost non-existent middle class, coupled with the lack of an healthy entrepreneurial spirit;
Crime was rife well before unification. The barons themselves had armed bands at their disposal which were assigned with the task of protecting their properties or suppress any of the peasants' claims for more land (these bands would later evolve to what we know today as the Mafia). It is true, however, that the wife of the now-exilied King Francis funded some of these bands (and the briganti) in order to sow dissent within the new Kingdom, and hopefully start a popular revolt which would have brought her back on the throne. Maria Sofia also sided with the Austrians against the now-united Italy during WW1.
Widespread poverty, low literacy, health concerns (both Southern and Central Italy were rife with malaria while Naples itself was dirty, overcrowded, had no sewage system and was prone to epidemics).