19 Facts About Southern Italy

Southern Italy known as Meridione or Mezzogiorno, is a macroregion of Italy consisting of the southern half of the Italian state.

Southern Italy covers the historical and cultural region that was once politically under the administration of the former Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, and which later shared a common organization into Italy's largest pre-unitarian state, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

Italian National Institute of Statistics employs the term "South Southern Italy" to identify one of the five statistical regions in its reportings without Sicily and Sardinia, which form a distinct statistical region denominated "Insular Southern Italy" .

Southern Italy is generally thought to comprise the administrative regions that correspond to the geopolitical extent of the historical Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, including Abruzzo, Apulia, Basilicata, Calabria, Campania, Molise, and Sicily.

The largest city of Southern Italy is Naples, an originally Greek name that it has historically maintained for millennia.

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The first Greek settlers found Southern Italy inhabited by three major populations: Ausones, Oenotrians and Iapyges .

Consequently, the Lombard and the Byzantine areas became influenced by Eastern monasticism, and much of Southern Italy experienced a slow process of orientalisation in religious life, which accompanied a spread of Eastern churches and monasteries that preserved and transmitted the Greek and Hellenistic tradition .

From 999 to 1139, the Normans occupied all the Lombard and Byzantine possessions in Southern Italy, ending a millennium of imperial Roman rule in Italy, and eventually expelled the Muslims from Sicily.

When Ferrante died in 1494, Charles VIII of France invaded Southern Italy, using the Angevin claim to the throne of Naples, which his father had inherited on the death of King Rene's nephew in 1481, as a pretext, thus beginning the Italian Wars.

Southern Italy gained control of Sicily in 1720, but Austrian rule did not last long.

Southern Italy established a concordat with the Papal States, which previously had a claim to the land.

Unlike Southern Italy, there was little brigandage in the other annexed states of northern and central Italy, like the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia, the Duchy of Parma, the Duchy of Modena, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and the Papal States.

The most prevalent issue in Southern Italy is its inability to attract businesses, and therefore create jobs.

Report published in July 2015 by the Italian organization SVIMEZ shows that Southern Italy has had a negative GDP growth in the last seven years, and that from the year 2000 it has been growing half as much as Greece.

In southern Italy, which contains eight cohesion areas, a public-private partnership known as SMEI Italy serves as a catalyst for private investment and supports economic growth and employment creation.

Regions of Southern Italy were exposed to some different historical influences than the rest of the peninsula, starting most notably with Greek colonisation.

Later, Southern Italy was subjected to rule by the new European nation states, first the Crown of Aragon, then Spain, and then Austria.

Southern Italy has many major tourist attractions, such as the Palace of Caserta, the Amalfi Coast, Pompeii, Sassi di Matera, Trulli di Alberobello and other archaeological sites .

In recent years, Southern Italy has experienced a revival of its traditions and music, such as the Neapolitan song and the Tarantella.