We have chosen to translate into English our review of Antonino De Francesco’s La palla al piede. Una storia del pregiudizio antimeridionale (Feltrinelli, Milan 2012), originally published in italian in "Quaderni eretici | Cahiers hérétiques", 3 (2015). The review is now more than ten years old, and the book itself, published thirteen years ago, has already been largely forgotten, a fact that is in itself significant when considering this type of historiographical production, which often bursts onto the scene with great fanfare only to fade rapidly from scholarly memory. This English version includes minor modifications and adaptations, as well as a brief final reflection on the book’s impact more than a decade after its release.
This translation therefore serves a double purpose. On the one hand, the theme itself—anti-Southern prejudice, its reiteration across centuries, its ideological and political uses—remains of undoubted relevance for understanding Italian history and identity. On the other hand, it offers an occasion to reflect more broadly on certain historiographical tendencies that reach far beyond the Italian case.
De Francesco’s work, while meritorious in its erudition and narrative construction, epitomizes a style of scholarship inclined toward intellectualized and often self-indulgent frameworks, not always firmly anchored in archival sources. Its reliance on literary and cultural representations, newspapers, theatre, and cinema, with limited attention to institutional documentation, mirrors a broader trend in contemporary historiography: the preference for striking titles, conceptual generalizations, and promotional impact, sometimes at the expense of empirical depth and long-term durability. It is precisely this aspect, the initial prominence followed by a rapid descent into semi-oblivion, that makes the book, and our review of it, worthy of revisiting.
De Francesco himself, former Professor of Modern History at the University of Milan and a scholar with an established career, has contributed significantly to debates on the Risorgimento and national identity. Yet his trajectory, emblematic of certain “intellectualist” currents in Italian historiography, offers a useful case for international readers, who may wish to assess both the strengths and the limits of this approach. By making this review accessible in English, we hope to broaden the conversation and invite a more critical engagement with the ways historians build narratives of prejudice, identity, and national divisions, and to reflect on why some works, despite initial acclaim, so quickly fade from the collective scholarly horizon.
Anti-Southern Prejudice from the 18th Century to the Present
The theme is not new, and the sources are limited: primarily the most influential newspapers, literature, theater, and cinema. Still, the structure is well built and the nine chapters integrate with one another. The various (though not many) phases of anti-Southern prejudice from the late 18th century to today are well contextualized in political events that serve as background. De Francesco moves between cultural history and political history, avoiding the paths of anthropology, sociology, or historical psychology. A more extensive comparative treatment with other historical or geographical contexts would certainly have made the work more interesting and stimulating.
One impression the book gives is that anti-Southernism always shows itself as the same beast: the same crude arguments, the same racist tones, dressed up for political usefulness in each era. It appears primarily as a construction from above, which is partly true. But that assumption prevents the author from delving more effectively into the historical roots of misunderstandings between “Southerners” and “Northerners,” the distrusts and tensions between the two Italies. Indeed, hostility has often been mutual, though Southerners have suffered much more, driven by necessity to move from their regions and forced to interact with Northerners under conditions of displacement and weakness as migrants.Furthermore — and this is often forgotten — Italy in the 19th and 20th centuries did not live only the North vs. South dichotomy, given the presence of Central Italy with its own identity, neither fully Northern nor Southern. Sardinia has always been a world apart. Not to mention that “Southerners” are not homogenous, nor are “Northerners.” Just as a Venetian differs greatly from a Milanese or a Torinese, a Neapolitan, a Sicilian, a Calabrian are not the same. So it seems simplistic to draw a rigid divide between Italians of the North and those of the South without regard for internal differentiation. De Francesco (who is Calabrian on his father’s side) focuses mainly on Neapolitans and Sicilians (with occasional mentions of Calabrians), constructing the Southern identity, the target of Northern and foreign critics, largely on those two examples. As Fulvio De Giorgi has noted in his review published in Il Mestiere di Storico (V/2, 2013, p. 208), this choice is “drastic and not without consequences for the meaning, the forms and articulations of the overall reconstruction,” and “prevents chiaroscuro and the study of important variants” (the review is available online at: https://recensio.net/r/4f8530dda2744f1098b0061e971f1047).
In this reconstruction, anti-Southern prejudice is born in the late 18th century, and the experiences of foreign visitors stopping in Naples and Palermo during the Grand Tour are crucial. Yet divisions and discord among “Italians” reach further back: as is well known, distrust across the Peninsula is a constant of its medieval and modern history. On the other hand, internal differentiations are relativized by the fact that abroad there has long existed (and still does) anti-Italian prejudice that does not distinguish much among Italians of the South, North, Center, or Islands. Indeed, Italians are often lumped together with other Southern European or Mediterranean peoples in their negative portrayals (this is well understood by those who live abroad as Italians).
Hence, a more comparative approach, along with a deeper view of today’s globalized world, would have been very useful for De Francesco, perhaps more useful than retracing the “usual” footsteps of Vincenzo Cuoco and Pasquale Villari.
Some limitations of the work emerge, attributable in part to the fact that the author was constrained to compress three centuries of complex history into a 250-page volume, ambitious though its aim to innovate. That said, overall this is a useful, interesting, and stimulating contribution for future studies—studies one hopes will surpass more vigorously the old, tired, and much worn tradition of what Marco Vitale has critically defined as meridionalismo piagnone (“complaining Southernism”). In a thought-provoking comment published in the Quotidiano di Sicilia (16 May 2014), Vitale urged: “No to complaining Southernism, but criticism in order to improve” (available online at: http://www.qds.it/16200-no-al-meridionalismo-piagnone-ma-criticare-per-migliorare.htm). This perspective, in fact, points to the need for research able to contextualize the past more effectively, while at the same time fostering a more forward-looking spirit for the country’s future.
What, then, remains of De Francesco's La palla al piede more than a decade after its publication? Very little in terms of lasting impact. The book has not reshaped the field, nor has it generated a strong line of research; instead, it lingers as an example of how quickly such works can fade once the initial polemical energy is spent. And in this sense, it speaks volumes—not so much about anti-Southern prejudice itself, which deserves and will continue to deserve serious investigation, but about a recurrent tendency in Italian historiography, particularly visible among early modern historians: the production of brilliant, intellectualized, often self-referential books whose allure lies more in their conceptual packaging than in their empirical solidity. These volumes, greeted at first with enthusiasm, frequently dissolve into near-oblivion within a decade, leaving behind the impression of a scholarship more concerned with rhetorical performance than with building durable foundations for historical knowledge.
(Daniele Santarelli)
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