Southern Italy - Definition and Overview

Southern Italy (often referred to in Italian as the Mezzogiorno) encompasses six of the country's 20 autonomous regions:

• Basilicata
• Campania
• Calabria
• Molise
• Puglia
• Sicily (although Sicily is classified by the official Italian census organization, ISTAT, as "Insular Italy" along with Sardinia).

Geographically, Southern Italy is much drier and hotter than the rest of Italy, and historically, has been exposed to significantly different influences than the rest of the peninsula, and in particular, to Greek settlement and Arab invasions. These factors and others have left their mark on today's Mezzogiorno: population density, for example, is much less compared to the North, with at the same time a higher proportion of large towns to small villages; wealth and education levels are not as high; and the day-to-day culture of the inhabitants is much more Mediterranean, clan-oriented, rural, and Catholic than that of the more industrialized North.

Some Northern Italians have thus come to speak of a "Mezzogiorno problem", viewed as an inherent and incurable climate of poverty and corruption and a sink-hole of government funds; such sentiments have fueled the rise of the Lega Nord movement seeking to accomplish a secession from Italy of the Northern regions, the so‑called Padania.