Doctor Feltri,
I state that I am southern and I know that she loves them therefore I ask her: why do they excel in illegality? Without bothering America and Capone. Let’s refer to current or not very dated events. Some time ago there was the case of “terrace sentiment”. Owner a Neapolitan. Then the case of the Ultrà, Calabrian leaders. Now the “knees”, an Apulian. Why? Are people who love risk, don’t estimate others much, don’t give much importance to life, or does not believe in the efficiency of the established authority?
Leonardo Chiarelli
Dear Leonardo,
There is nothing anthropological that distinguishes the citizen born and raised in the north from that born and raised in the South. They are the same, but it is true that the environment in which you are bred, influences you, despite you, model you, affect your training, on your way of looking at things and living life, therefore also determines your behavior with others and within society. There is in the southerners, not that it is a generalized character, but certainly predominant, the tendency to “arrange”, this because of the difficulties they have always encountered, over the centuries of the centuries. Moreover, it is not an “easy” territory, the state has often been perceived as absent or even as an intruder, or an enemy, unable to dose between inefficiencies and abandonment and excessive control and claim. Hence also the birth of organized crime, also exported elsewhere, in the USA, for example, as you underline, as an effective model to survive, to assert themselves in an adverse and foreign land. The South is also an area that has been plundered, dominated, invaded by people who came from outside, who arrived in those paradises and imposed their absolute power on helpless community, who have not been able to defend themselves and rebel. All this lived, that is, this story, inevitably remains in the DNA of the southern people, a proud, proud, dignified people, but also skilled to fuck others to stay afloat, to make themselves clever so as not to be fooled, to count on itself going forward as it can, in the best possible way. This ability, which in life can be a virtue, a strength, in its negative and exasperated verse is transformed and also turns into a crime, deviance, overpowering of others, violence, tendency to live above the law or in the contempt of the law of a state that is not recognized as a father but as a master to whose authority we want to escape and who intend to deny. ATTENTION: we speak of traits and not of peculiarity that constitute the equipment of man or southern woman. The experiences of a civilization can transform themselves into quality or in defects. And in the citizens of the South we see one and others. Nobody is as generous as they, a need to give, to love, to welcome, to share that moves me and in love. On the other hand, there is the closure, the suspicion, the shrewdness that becomes clever. Making a whole grass of a bundle seems unfair to me and above all cruel. The southerners who have distinguished themselves by merit, moral qualities, skills, contribution given to the company, are superior in number to those who have distinguished themselves in crime. So generalizing I appear to be a cruelty that the southerners do not deserve. And I myself, having spent part of my childhood in Molise, I consider myself a little terrone.
Towards my people I can only feel respect and tenderness, although it was accused of having it on with them over the years of being even racist, antimeridionalist, and of discriminating the South. Many cracks have been pronounced on me, but this here, dear Leonardo, is the largest.