Tags
Expat in Puglia, Italian food, Kingdom of the Two Scicillies, Living in Puglia, Mezzogiorno, Naples, Pompeii, Puglia, Sir William Hamilton, Southern Italy
On Sunday we fly back to Bari from Larnaca courtesy of Easyjet via Milan. To get in the mood pasta and sauce was on the menu last night at chez Jones . Who was it said the trouble with Italian food is after five days you are hungry again ?
It is also time to brush up on speaking Italian not one of my strong points
Okay well I’ve mastered that so I’m ready to go. I read the other day that Italians use their hands when they speak more than deaf people do when using sign language.
I subscribe to Google alerts which most days sends me stuff that the search engine finds for Puglia. Two stories yesterday appeared in my in box .
The first was by one of the travel writers for a national UK newspaper who come to Puglia in the off season and stay about 3 days. This guy waxes eloquently about the off the beaten track nature of the place, the elderly women sitting in their doorways making pasta, the urban grit of the major cities and towns which I take to mean the East German apartment blocks and of course Justin Timberlake and his wedding. This guy adds that Prince Harry has been this year as has Pippa la derriere Middleton. If half the Italian males in my local bar knew that they would have been at the airport to see her.
During such a short visit of course the writer is fairly restricted as to who he talks to about the place. In this case it is the chef of the restaurant one of the multitude of Puglian government financed Tourist Boards took him to for dinner.
The chef says to him “Apulians take a deep pride in their history and traditions. Renewed interest in local culture is one of the driving forces behind the increase in regional tourism. For a long time, people were leaving to go to the North and abroad,but now young people want to stay,”
This success story of people especially local young people staying in Puglia is the crux of the second half of his story.
The second story in the Google search e mail was by a financial correspondent for another UK paper based in Rome Nick Squires. He is quoting from a massive report just published by Svimez, the Association for the Industrial Development of the Mezzogiorno. Now the Mezzogiorno is basically Southern Italy rather than just Puglia.
The report doesn’t mince it’s words. There has, it says, been a catastrophic demographic and industrial decline since the recession started in 2009. For the first time since 1918 when Southern Italy like the rest of Europe was ravaged by an influenza epidemic more people are dying than are giving birth to babies.
If the trend continues as it seems to be doing, the South will be short 4 million people by 2050 with many towns and villages completely deserted.
Added to this each year the equivalent of an entire town’s population emigrates from the region seeking jobs either in Italy’s wealthy north or overseas, including Britain, the association said.
Last year, 116,000 decided to pack their bags and look for better opportunities elsewhere.
Investment has collapsed, infrastructure is a shambles and GDP per capita is in free fall. I told you they didn’t mince their words !
Since the recession began to bite in 2008 there has been a seven per cent increase in the number of southern households who are unable to pay the rent or eat meat or fish on a regular basis.
In the same period, 583,000 southerners have lost their jobs. “The alarming report showed that the government has to do more to lift the south out of poverty”, said Maria Carmela Lanzetta, the minister for regional affairs in Rome.
“Funds from the EU need to be put to better use because without the south, Italy as a whole would not be able to climb out of recession”, she said.
Oh good nothing to do with the over valued Euro or the Frau Merkel austerity measures , just the fact that the EU funds are misappropriated then, thank goodness for that.I thought it might be serious.
Talking of the Mezzogiorno did you know that in 1764 one Sir William Hamilton was appointed UK Minister to the court of the Two Sicilies in Naples ( the state mirrored what is known today as the Mezzogiorno). He wandered about places like Pompeii picking up bits of antiquity that the local population seemed uninterested in.
These he took back to Britain whenever he had a bit of home leave and through his sales agent there The Hon. Charles Granville he flogged the stuff to various buyers including the British Museum. It was quite lucrative it seems as he agreed to take on Charles’s mistress who was proving to be very costly. She was 35 years Hamllton’s junior. Her name was Emma Lyon and was into “attitudes” ( posing as various classical Roman personages). She had learnt this working as a scantily dressed “attendant” at the Temple of Health in London which used the newly invented electricity as a health aid. People went to get shocks to cure various ills. No one had thought of using it for lighting yet.
Hamilton installed her in a villa in Naples where she continued to adopt “attitude” poses.
I’ll do the rest of the story tomorrow but let me finish with a piece of music I heard yesterday which puts Queen’s ” who wants to live forever” into a beautifully slow piece of classical music.