Italy

ECONOMICALLY AS WELL as culturally, Italy is a country sharply divided between north and south. The industrially developed regions of northern Italy enjoy higher living standards, while southern Italy is still predominantly agricultural and industrially underdeveloped. According to the National Italian Institute for Statistics (ISTAT), in 2004, 13.2 percent of the Italian population lived under the poverty line, an increase of over one percent in comparison to the previous year.

Such a line is calculated in relative terms by considering poor those people whose monthly expenditure is equal to or below the national average. The large majority of Italian poor are concentrated in the south. Of the 20.7 million people (36.1 percent of Italians) living in southern Italy, 7.3 million (35.4 percent) are poor, living on less than 521 euros per month. Some 4.6 million of these people (63.3 percent) are extremely poor, living on less than 435 euros per month.

With such an economic profile, if southern Italy were an independent European country, it would be the European country with the highest poverty rate, weighted for national income. The proportion of people at risk of poverty, redistributed based on a value of one as the European Union average, ranges from a minimum of 0.3 in Slovakia and a maximum of 1.4 in Ireland. Italy's average value is 0.6, but is 0.4 in the north, 0.9 in the center, and 2.3 in the south. If we considered the south of Italy as an independent state, it would be the one with the highest poverty risk. Yet in recent years, warnings from national and international institutions that poverty may represent a problem for the whole country have become increasingly frequent.

The south of Italy has historically been less economically and financially developed than the north. The unification of Italy in the second half of the 19th century did not efficiently tackle the social problems left behind by the backward Spanish administration of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The economic structure of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies retained a predominantly feudal basis. In addition, the Italian south was far from the main European markets and poor in raw materials and resources. The historical process of unification in Italy was the result of the alliance between the northern industrial bourgeoisie and southern aristocrats who, to limit the social upheavals of the unification, supported the Piedmontese in exchange for the preservation of their privileges and status.

Neither the totalitarian Fascist regime nor the many democratically elected governments before and after [Page 586]Benito Mussolini could or wanted to find solutions for the sharp north-south divide. Throughout the 20th century, there were difficult periods for the whole country (such as the 1920s and the postwar years after the fall of Italian Fascism), which prompted many Italians to emigrate either to the United States or to more developed European countries.

Poverty can be found even in southern Italian quaint villages such as Cetara, above. The industrially developed regions of northern Italy enjoy higher living standards, while southern Italy is still predominantly agricultural and industrially underdeveloped.

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