Hello,

I am interested to know about small difference in culture between northern, central and southern italy. The difference in people, language, and food.

I have often heard from my milanese friend that there is at times, but rarely, a slight dislike of some northerns to southern italians. I find that sad.

why is that?

Differences in Northern and Southern Italy or the differences in North and Southern U.S. or Cuba, or Mexico or anyother country could be devided into:
*Language differences - accents, expressions, dialects etc. etc.
* Cuisine differences
* Gestures/body language
* Differences in behaving in social/everyday situations (generalisation)
I'm thinking about e.g.: greetings, family/social life, way of scheduling the day (I believe
Southerners are considered a multi-active culture), superstitions, regional traditions, etc. etc.

I lived in Northern Italy for 2 years in Vicenza. Veneto and especially
Trentino Alto Adige capitol Trento have a strong German cultural background.
Piemonte and especially Valle D'Aosta are very strongly influenced by the
French language and culture. In Valle D'Aosta everybody is bilingual
speaking both Italian and French and the Italian they do speak
is highly influenced by the French language.

Funny how the people in Vicenza could be so tolerant of all races
including treating American Blacks better than anybody else but
at the sametime be so critical of people from Southern Italy.

Have been to Cuba two times. They too have a north and southern part and you would be surprised at the differences
in language, food ect. in this relative small island that is only 600 miles long. They have a great rivalry just
like the rivalry there is in the U.S. between the Northerns and Southerns.

Have also lived and traveled a lot in Mexico. Samething down there with so
many differences between northern and southern Mexico. Food, language, music etc. etc.
Have seen Northern Mexicans and Northern Cubans be critical of their Southern counterparts.
Just like Italy and maybe most places in the world.

In the U.S. I remember my aunt from Kansas saying how backwards those people down south in Arkansas and Oklahoma are.
"Them there people down south in Are-can-ssaw sur-ar and Oak-lah-oh-mah sure arah backward! My aunt from southern Kansas has about the same accent as the people from Arkansas!

This past summer when I went to school in Perugia, Umbria one of my teachers mentioned that because Perugia
is in Central Italy they don't have that problem of rivalries between north and southern Italy.

I highly recommend you watch the movie "Ciao Professore" which has this Northern vs Southern Italy theme.(Got this gem of a movie really cheap.)In Italian with English subtitles.

Ciao Professore! is the story of Marco Sperelli (Paolo Villaggio), a northern Italian teacher(from Milano) who gets dumped in the southern Italian town of Corzano because of a bureaucratic screw- up (he was supposed to get an assignment in Corsano). At the De Amicis school, he has been assigned to teach third grade, but when he arrives, he finds the place run by the janitor. Only three of his fifteen students are in class -- the rest are out working on the streets, hustling black market goods and helping their families make ends meet. So, taking matters into his own hands, Sperelli makes a trip through the village to collect his delinquent pupils personally.(Il professore is very critical of Southern Italy.)

The story of a teacher and students learning from one another is a popular thematic mine that directors keep exploring. Just when you think all the ore has been removed, however, someone like Lina Wertmuller comes along and strikes a new vein. Ciao Professore! is a remarkable film, primarily because it possesses a level of honesty that most productions of this sort abandon in favor of mawkishness.

Wertmuller, who learned some of her craft from Fellini (she was his assistant director on 8 1/2), has primarily been known for controversial films. Those used to her normal fare (such as Swept Away and Seven Beauties) will find Ciao Professore! a distinct departure. Instead of focusing on issues like sexuality, revenge, and madness, this movie makes do with a simple message of hope.

The bonding of Sperelli with his students is achieved with care and consideration. There is no single incident that galvanizes the process. Trust comes slowly, especially after the teacher slaps a belligerent young boy. Yet, as they spend more time together, each side discovers a little more about the other, and, through that learning, gains understanding. By the end, it's difficult to decide who has changed more: the professor, his pupils, or their families.

Given the time constraints of keeping this film to a reasonable length, Wertmuller does a marvellous job fleshing out a unique personality for each of the students. This is not a motion picture where the children blend together into a faceless mass, with only one or two standouts. Through a series of short vignettes, the director tells something about the conditions that have shaped their individual lives.

Ciao Professore! is rich in humor, much of which is grounded in the raw language used by the children. Even in the most serious circumstances, Wertmuller never allows this motion picture to become maudlin or melodramatic. A relentlessly upbeat, occasionally-playful atmosphere pervades the film, as typified by the repeated use of the song "What a Wonderful World."

One of the key ingredients to the success of Ciao Professore! is the cast. The adult actors, especially Paolo Villaggio (who played one of Italy's most enduring film characters, Fantozzi, and was in Fellini's last film, The Voice of the Moon), do fine jobs. The most remarkable performances, however, come from the young actors who play the children. With their fresh faces and unforced style, each captures the essence of the character Wertmuller chose for them.

Ciao Professore! premiered to high acclaim on the international film festival circuit (where it was called by its original title, Me, Let's Hope I Make It). The accolades are well-deserved. This is a rare movie-going experience -- an artistic film that's both unpretentious and optimistic.

The major regional division in Italy is between the prosperous, industrialized North Italy and the poor, rural South Italy and the islands of Sardinia and Sicily. The origins of the problem of these regional differences goes back centuries but the differences were increased as a result of policy choices made at the time of the unification of Italy in the 1860's.

The North dominated the politics and economy of the new Italy and the industrializing north wanted protection from competition from outside Italy. A system of high tariffs was imposed. There was a high tariff imposed upon imported wheat, one of the products of the South. The northern promoters of the tariff undoubtably felt that their tariffs were protecting the economy of the South as well as that of the North. The higher wheat prices did benefit the farms of the South, but those farms had also been producing products that were sold in France. If France could not sell its products in Italy then France could not buy the crops of the farmers of the South in Italy. Thus the already difficult problem of the South was made more severe by the economic policies promoted by the North. Luzzatto says, the living conditions in the South became unberarable only after 1887 when the high tariff policy was imposed.

The consequence was a migration out of the South. The migration often took place in stages; first a migration from the rural areas of the South to the urban areas of the South, then a migration from the urban areas of the South to the urban areas of the North or to the Americas. The migration from other areas of Italy was primarily (70%) to other areas Europe. Despite the net loss of population in the South, it remained poor compared to the North.

After World War II there was political agreement that something needed to be done to promote economic development in the South but a reluctance to do anything that might constrain business growth in the North. There was land reform and the distribution of confiscated lands but this was not carried out on the basis of economic criteria. As a result often the parcels distributed were too small to make economically viable farms.

An agency, called "Cassa," was created in 1950 to carried out special public works projects over a ten year period in the Mezzogiorno, an area that included all of the South and some parts of central Italy. The special programs of Cassa were allocated $1.6 billion in grants and loans. A similar program with lower funding ($0.33 billion) was created for depressed areas of central and northern Italy.

Cassa was allowed to provide funding to lending agencies were financing small and medium-sized industrial enterprises in the southern Italy and Sicily and Sardinia.

By the late 1950's it was generally clear that the measures directed to helping the South were not effective and new plan, called the Vanoni Plan, was proposed. The Vanoni Plan called for an allocation of 60 percent of of new investment by public and semipublic enterprises to the Mezzogiorno. In addition the Plan called for the investment in infrastructure to promoted industrial development and tourism it also called for the funding of vocational school to train the labor force of the Mezzogiorno.

The national economic plans, which started in late 1960's, called for active promotion of the development of the South by the Italian Government. Cassa received funding of $2.8 billion for the 1965-1970 period. All public agencies were to allocate 40 percent of their investment in the South and 30 percent of their contracts for goods and services were to go enterprises in the South. Despite this resolve the problems of the South continued.

Efforts continued in subsequent national economic plans to redress the problems of the South. But again there was disappointment with the results.

In the north of Italy the climate is cooler than the south of Italy which has a lot more flat land.
The north, with cities like Milan, has a lot more money than the south. in Venice a cappuccino
costs 6,50 euros while in Calabria (the south) it costs 0,50 euros.

Northern regions have "discovered" olive oil quite recently (probably in the 60s of last century),
before that there was massive use of butter in the North and olive oil in the South. The same goes
for other food differences that are now less evident than in the past.
Hot pepper and oregano are typical of the South, like spicy sausages...

Apart from standard Italian, regional variations and "dialects", a number of truly separate languages do exist. In the north, the province of South Tyrol (Südtirol in German, Alto Adige in Italian) is almost entirely German-speaking; the area was awarded to Italy following the First World War and her defeat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Pockets of German speakers also persist in other north-eastern Italian regions - a remnant of the old Austrian influence on this area of Italy. In total some 300,000 or so Italians speak German as their first language and indeed identify themselves as ethnic Austrians. Some 120,000 or so people live in the Aosta Valley region, where a dialect of Franco-Provençal is spoken that is similar to patois dialects spoken in France. About 1,400 people living in two isolated towns in Foggia speak another dialect of Franco-Provençal. About 80,000 Slovene-speakers live in the north-eastern region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia near the border with Slovenia. Some 40,000 Ladin-speakers (Ladin is a Rhaetian language spoken in the Dolomite mountains) also live in the Trentino-South Tyrol region and in the Veneto region. A very large community of some 700,000 people in Friuli speak Friulian - another Rhaetian language. In the Molise region of central-south Italy some 4,000 people (the Molise Croats) speak Serbo-Croatian - these are the descendants of a group of people who migrated from the Balkans in the Middle Ages. Scattered across Southern Italy are a number of some 30,000 Greek-speakers - considered to be the last surviving traces of the region's Greek heritage (Ancient Greek colonists reached Southern Italy and Sicily about 1500 BC), they speak a Greek dialect, Griko. Some 15,000 Catalan speakers reside around the area of Alghero in the north-west corner of Sardinia - believed to be the result of a migration of a large group of Catalans from Barcelona in ages past. Around 100,000 (the Arbëreshë) in Southern Italy and in central Sicily speak Albanian - the result of past migrations. Finally, the largest group of non-Italian speakers (some 1.6 million people) are those who speak Sardinian - a romance language whose written roots belong to the 2 millenniums BC and which evolved quite independently from Italian.

I found a cappuccino for 1,0 euro in Venice, up near the Jewish Ghetto in a little place that does their own roasting. I'll be there in 4 days. As someone who has a small roasting business themselves I can tell you that they are excellent!
James

Hi Patrick.
The difference in italian people from north to south are mainly conneceted to weather.
The north is cold, cluody and foggy so people are quite cold and not so simpatethic.
The south is hot and sunny so people are more simpatethic, noisy and smiling.
The italians are in general warm and welcoming, not at first time you meet them in the north, at once in the south.

Ciao , the most important difference is that in south of Italy people are more hot, wellcoming....in north people are more cold .
The same in weather,
i live in Rome and for its colors, i would never excange my city with MiLano.

Ciao