The Southern Way of Life - Southern Italy - page 471

paid service jobs that keep Italy's economy afloat. Unfortunately, their vulnerability has
sometimes led to exploitation, with several reported cases of farmhands being paid below-
minimum wages for back-breaking work.
LIFE IN A SOUTHERN TOWN
It's just 4.30am and the first of the town's bars open for farmers and insomniacs. The barman serves his first caffé
of the day. He likes his job, but earns a modest €800 per month.
By 8am the barber's bicycle is outside his shop. He'll stay open until 11am - he's past retirement age but keeps
the shop going. He'd like to talk but he hasn't got time today; he's going to see his son in the north.
At 9am the main road is blocked with cars. Locals are commuting from one end of the town to the other.
Youths with big sunglasses and high-maintenance hair (and that's just the men) pop into the bar for a cappuccino
before heading to the beach.
At 9.15am a car drives slowly around the streets, making its recorded announcement through a rooftop mega-
phone, 'blade sharpening, kitchen gas repairs'. There's a queue at the shop selling mozzarella (the burrata -
cheese made from mozzarella and cream - sells out quickly). In fields outside the town, brightly dressed workers
- all women - are toiling, picking tomatoes.
An Albanian woman hurries on her way to the shops. She's looking after an elderly resident in his museum-
like home. The €500 she earns each month goes further at home, but it's lonely work.
At 11am the church bell tolls in remembrance for a local gentleman. His death is announced, like the others in
town, by black-bordered notices plastered around the town centre.
At 1pm shopkeepers shut for lunch. The main street is deserted. Houses are shuttered. Lunchtime is sacred.
The town begins to stir at 5pm. Shops reopen and nonni (grandfathers) pedal slowly down the main street. The
sun has moved, so they transfer their allegiance to the bar on the opposite side of the street.
As evening settles, dressed-up denizens hit the seafront for their ritual passeggiata (evening stroll), bumping
into friends and relatives, checking out the talent and stopping for gelato. After midnight, the town settles in for
the night… Buona notte .
The North/South Divide
In his film Ricomincio da tre (I'm Starting from Three; 1980), acting great Massimo
Troisi comically tackles the problems faced by southern Italians forced to head north for
work. The reverse scenario is tackled in the more recent comedy Benvenuti al Sud (Wel-
come to the South; 2010), in which a northern Italian postmaster is posted to a small
southern Italian town, bullet-proof vest and prejudices in tow. Slapstick aside, both films
reveal Italy's very real north/south divide. While the north is celebrated for its fashion em-
pires and moneyed metropolises, Italy's south is a PR nightmare of high unemployment,
crumbling infrastructure and Mafia arrests. At a deep semantic level, the word meridi-
onale (southern Italian) continues to conjure a string of unflattering words and images.
From the Industrial Revolution to the 1960s, millions of southern Italians fled to the in-
dustrialised northern cities for factory jobs. As the saying goes, ' Ogni vero Milanese ha