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To understand this map, you must remember that there is a long ridge of mountains (geologically unstable) that runs up the centre of the boot & veers off toward France at the top. The big yellow bit at the cuff is the Po Valley, where most of the agriculture happens... https://twitter.com/LiguresAmbrones/status/1329183966218379264
The big population centres are at the top where there's lots of flat, and along the edges. The Middle Bit is the Appenines, where there was once a deep and ancient agricultural society where people were absolutely linked to the land they lived off. Norcia is right in the ...
heart of this culture. The wolves barely survived the purges of the mid-20th century, but started coming back as the human population of the mountain regions were drained away by economic manipulation that started after unification (cf. Risorgimento) during which...
successive governments (that we would now describe as technocrats) did everything they could to make life in these ancient communities impossible. As the human population dropped, the wolf population grew. Ten years or so ago I visited a monastery in the mountains of...
Molise, a mountain region just south of Rome. The nuns told me they used to keep sheep, but the wolves were becoming so aggressive they were taking sheep in the middle of the day and there was no way to keep their animals safe. I was told never to take a walk after dark.
Italy's fertility rate has been below replacement/maintenance for 40 years - 2 generations. We are starting to see the actual population decline now. 2 more generations and it will be in full reverse, with the inverted age pyramid problem becoming critical.
Governments of the artificially united "Italian State" since the 1870s have done everything they can think of to depopulate the native territories of the regional cultures, force as many people as possible into urban centres, eradicate the cultural memory (cf: dialect)...
They started by gerrymandering agricultural prices to force small family businesses to fail. This caused a general exodus in the late 19th century from the mountain regions, and the consequent diluting of those unique cultures by mixing them into the urban soup...
All of this history is generally known by Italians but hasn't been put by many into a coherent narrative to understand what's happening now. But if you pull the camera back you can start to see a picture resolving of a consistent ideologically driven work that has gone on...
in this country since the rise of the secularist ideologues (cf: Garibaldi), the 19th c. revolutions, the suppression of the Church, esp. the monasteries, that created cultural, social and economic cohesion for centuries, and allowed a stable culture not merely to survive...
the long centuries of nearly constant aristocratic warfare, but to flourish and blossom to the point where Italy became the source of some of the greatest cultural achievements mankind has known. People wonder how Italy went from inventing absolutely everything - medicine...
commerce, navigation, art, technology of all sorts - to being a 3rd tier basket-case nation barely able to build a road.
Well, it was done to them deliberately. It's worth looking into.
Well, it was done to them deliberately. It's worth looking into.
