Ponderable Quote from “Terroni” by Pino Aprile

“The South has been deprived of its institutions; it has been deprived of its industries, its riches and of its ability to react. It has also been deprived of its people (with an emigration that was induced or forced unlike any other group in Europe). Lastly, through a cultural lobotomy, the South was deprived of its self-awareness; its memory. 

“We no longer know who we were. It happened similarly to the Jews in the Holocaust (the comparison is not exaggerated: hundreds of thousands, or perhaps even a million, Southerners were killed by the Savoy troops; thirteen to twenty million people, according to records, were forced to abandon their land over the course of a century). Many who were able to survive the concentration camps began to wonder whether the evil that was inflicted upon them was perhaps deserved. When the damage becomes intolerable one seeks a cause to blame it on, even if the cause is inexistent or absurd, in order not to lose one’s mind. The historian Ettore Ciccotti spoke of ‘a sort of Italian anti-Semitism’ referring to the treatment of Southern Italians. The Lega, an expression of local comical nationalism, were it not so tragic, is the most sincere example of this." 

[...] 

“It is in this manner that the resistance against the invaders, rapes as well as the loss of wealth, life, identity, and of one’s own country becomes ‘shame.’ It is only now, after a century and a half, the Southern families are beginning to recuperate their pride in their ancestors, who had previously been labeled as brigands by their aggressors (Naturally this phenomenon has also caused the moral redemption of those who effectively were brigands as well. There were other criminals: those mafia members that were enlisted by Garibaldi and the Piedmontese, but they were considered ‘good Italians.’ To be deemed a criminal it does not matter what you do, but for whom).”

* Quoted from Terroni: All That Has Been Done to Ensure That the Italians of the South Became “Southerners” by Pino Aprile, Bordighera Press, 2011, p. 8–9