2 - THE ITALIAN STATES

Summary

Superficially, the peninsula of Italy is a unity, bounded by sea and mountain. A closer look at the map reveals an agglomeration of regions, rather than a geographic whole; its structure is dominated by the Apennine chain and the great contrast between north and south. In the eighteenth century, its diversity was very great. Italy contained societies almost isolated one from another and shaped by climate and topography into startlingly different forms. The rich Po valley had little in common with the semi-desert of the Apulian Capitanata; the Legations were rich while the papal territories west of the Apennines were poor. Potenza is sixty miles from Salerno but has one of the coldest climates in Italy. The lives of Italians varied as much as their landscape and climate; at a time when Arthur Young found the farms around Lodi fat and prosperous, men were living in caves near Otranto. Even language helped to divide the peninsula. Twenty-odd dialects made it uncertain that a man speaking Italian—the speech of Tuscany—would be understood in the countryside. Nor were these differences blurred by eighteenth-century communications. The one good road in the kingdom of Naples led out of it, to Rome. In some parts, the towns were barely linked to one another; they often represented yet other divisions, historical and political, which had broken up the peninsula still more. There were more great cities than in other countries but no metropolis drew the cultural life of Italy to a focus.