The puzzling south

Italians have been fascinated and puzzled by the south for a long time. Northerners do not consider their education completed until they take the grand tour of the south. The early investigators of the 1860s and 1870s, like Leopoldo Franchetti and Sidney Sonnino, have been followed by cohorts of scholars, graduate students, and politically committed individuals. The south has the unique fascination of being geographically so close to the north, yet psychologically so distant and almost as mysterious as are primitive cultures. The best profile of the south, however, emerges not from the writings of scholars, but from those of fiction writers. In the nineteenth century, the Sicilian Giovanni Verga captured the imagination of Italians with his accounts of Sicilian life in I Malavoglia (1881) and Mastro Don Gesualdo (1889). In this century, Corrado Alvaro, a native of Calabria, scrutinized the soul of his region in a series of short stories. Tommaso di Lampedusa's II Gattopardo revealed the secrets of Sicilian high society more intimately than hundreds of scholarly publications. But it was Carlo Levi, an outsider confined for years in a small town of Basilicata by the fascist regime, who wrote, in my opinion, the most insightful book on the south.