Also hard to organize when you have to choose between food and keeping the lights on at the end of every month
It's a great motivator to convince people to organize, though
Almost 1/3 of Italians live outside of cities, and those rural communities are very very poor.
The south is poor as shit. Over 20% in regions like Campania and Basilicata.
Unemployment, exploitative work practices, hostility from the north on a "They're lazy poors, why should they get OUR money?" basis, the mob, decaying infrastructure, a heavy brain drain, lack of investment, corruption and more.
Nowadays, Naples is the least fash City in the country and the 5 Star Movement [Anti-Vaxx Cranks turned nationalist liberals turned socdems] is very popular there due to the basic income program they pushed through. Turns out when you're poor and someone actually tries to alleviate that, you're likely to approve.
One of the main reasons why the mob was able to get a foothold in the Southern part of Italy was that the central administration just straight up abandonned most of that part of Italy, and the area was semi-feudal even after WWII. I think there has been some attempts by various italian governments to attempt to fix things, but neoliberalism sort of hampers that, and the EU straight up doesn't want Italy to ever industrialize those areas since that would require subsidies and state intervention, which is :haram:
That's half of the story. The mob was suppressed during Mussolini's time (one of the only good things he did - even if it was so that people loyal to him could take influence instead), and it came back in full force during the immediate post-war era because the Americans allied with criminals half as a "enemy of my enemy" measure and half to suppress the communist resistance movement's influence.
There were plans to alleviate the poverty in the south, such as the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, but all of them were bogged down by corruption and relying on "give free money to the bourgeoise, so that they do all the work", which is hardly an effective development strategy.
I thought that the alliance between Nato and the mob / gladio operations happened mostly in the cities, since thats where all the factories were located, while the more aggricultural parts of the south was more or less spared the worst of the years of lead.
Your point about development also tracks with some of the things I've heard from talking to people there / people who left there in search of other opportunities.
the south was more or less spared the worst of the years of lead
Kinda. You had mafia violence, such as the high profile murders of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino (judges with an anti-organized crime agenda and funnily enough, personal friends, despite one being a communist and the other a fascist), which for example involved blowing up a stretch of highway with explosives. Or the riots in Reggio Calabria in 1971 where Anarchists and Fascists fought against the conservative local government (which received support from the communist party). Sardinia had literal banditry as late as the late 60s.
Italy was kind of a clusterfuck during the Cold War.
Your point about development also tracks with some of the things I’ve heard from talking to people there / people who left there in search of other opportunities.
I grew up in Italy, but admittedly in the North (Emilia-Romagna).
Wait you're italian? I almost always saw you post about Poland, so I figured you originated there. My wife has some family that has spent the last 30 years in Piedmonte, and I kinda go by some of their statements, even if they aren't very politically involved people. So my source is also a northener, who explained some of things that he passively absorbed through either media or just local street knowledge.
:so-true: The freer the market the freer the people!
was going to say, this is likely way worse than it looks because of that difference.
