One of liberal Italy's first and most influential proponents of demographic colonialism in the Horn of Africa, Leopoldo Franchetti (1847–1917), spent the earlier part of his career traveling Italy's southern regions on horseback, armed with rifles and intent upon, to modify Christopher Miller's phrase, “reaching out to the most unknown part of the [nation-state] and bringing it back as language.” Before beginning his career in parliament in 1882, Franchetti published two proto-sociological inquiries on Italy's southern regions that, along with Pasquale Villari's Lettere meridionali (Southern Letters, 1875), are generally considered to have inaugurated modern Italy's questione meridionale (southern question): Condizioni economiche e amministrative delle provincie napoletane (Economic and Administrative Conditions of the Neapolitan Provinces, 1873–1874), and La Sicilia nel 1876 (Sicily in 1876) (which Franchetti co-wrote with Sidney Sonnino, who would later become Prime Minister). The southern question was arguably the leading question for policymakers after Unification. Villari and Franchetti were two pioneers of what became known as meridionalista (southernist) literature—a proto-sociological genre which depicted southerners as either hapless victims of history plagued by poverty, illiteracy, superstition, and other forms of “backwardness,” or as criminally, culturally, and/or racially resistant to the rationalist progress of liberal-capitalist development. Franchetti's post in the Italian parliament and his engagement with Italy's southern question brought him to Italy's first colony, Eritrea, in 1889 (before it was officially designated as such) to conduct agricultural experiments and to advocate for the relocation of several dozen primarily southern Italian peasant families to expropriated land in the Eritrean highlands. He envisioned that the Italian state might correct the economic and political injustices to which it had been subjecting its own southern peasantry by redirecting the increasing flow of its emigrating masses from oltreoceano (across the ocean) to the promised lands of its oltremare (across the sea).