Terroni e Polentoni: "Italian Southerners" & "Polenta-Eating Italians from the North"

Conference with Pino Aprile & Lorenzo Dal Boca. Authors of Terroni and Polentoni.

The book Terroni. All That Has Been Done To Ensure That The Italians of The South Became "Southerners" written by Pino Aprile is a well-documented, courageous description of what the Italians did to themselves and why 150 years after the Unification of Italy, the differences between the North and the South are even more accentuated. This inequality has left an indelible mark. Those of us who believe that this was due to a purely geographical factor must now reconsider this notion, along with those who hold the incorrect belief that the South of Italy is the poorer and more backward part of our country. What were the real factors that created this diversity? With what awareness did they perpetrate their own ideals in order to gain more profit? Who rendered a part of our society so submissive and often fearful? This is a work that analyzes the sociopolitical changes of a nation, and that is not afraid to unveil all of those uncomfortable truths that even the history books have so often refused to print.

Polentoni. How And Why The North Was Betrayed "Italy today is paying the price for the accepted terms of payment in the hasty construction of the unified state. The result was a nation put together hurriedly and with an imposed institutional framework that it borrowed from France, which had to its credit however, centuries worth of historical background as a unified state." Lorenzo Del Boca makes his contribution to the copious amount of literature which flood the shelves of our book stores on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Unity of Italy. After Indietro Savoia! and Maledetti Savoia, which are the foundation of his personal historical reconstruction of the Risorgimento, the journalist has released Polentoni in which he concentrates his research on that part of Italy that - according to him - benefited the least from the Unification: the North.

Moderated by Anthony Julian Tamburri, Ph.D., Dean, John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY