The Southernification of the Pandemic in Italy: Images of the South, Fears of Contamination, and the First Wave of COVID-19 in Italy

Introduction

After the first surge of Covid-19 in China and East Asia, at the end of February 2020, cases and deaths related to the infection of the SARS-CoV-2 virus started to occur in Italy, which was the first, among European countries, to experience dramatic rises in daily deaths and contagions. Characterised by a very severe lockdown, Italy's first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic lasted until May/June 2020. According to Balasco et al. (2021, p. 1), “a total of 240,331 cases (confirmed infections) and 34,892 deaths from pneumonia were registered as of Jun 28, 2020, identifiable as the end of the first wave of the Italian outbreak”. An important aspect that distinguished this first wave from the successive waves of infection in Italy was the sheer imbalance, in terms of deaths and contagion, between the Northern and Southern regions of the country. Southern regions experienced a minimal number of infections and deaths, while the North of Italy emerged as one of the global epicentres of the pandemic (Sebastiani et al., 2020). Incidentally, according to these authors, it was most probably thanks to “government measures” that “the Covid-19 epidemic in central and southern regions [did not] rise to the high levels that were already occurring in the North” (202, p. 343). Other explanations for the lower death toll in the South of Italy include the health benefits of higher forestation in the region (Roviello & Roviello, 2021). On the other hand, the higher atmospheric pollution in the North has been listed as “an additional co-factor of the high level of lethality recorded in that area” (Conticini et al., 2020, p. 1).

Enlisted above are plausible explanations offered by some of the scientific literature to make sense of the glaring imbalance between the North and the South of Italy in terms of deaths and contagions during the country's first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Crucially, in the national debate, these explanations were counterpointed by all sorts of ludicrous discussions and analyses of the situation, connected with the perception of a sort of underlying injustice behind the fact that the South had been somewhat “spared” from the sufferings undergone by the North.

As will become clear as the present chapter unfolds, what is referred to as “national debate” is largely (but not exclusively) represented by news items, press releases, and informative talk shows, among others. As argued by Van Dijk, “most of our social and political knowledge and beliefs about the world derive from the dozens of news reports we read or see daily. There is probably no other discursive practice, besides everyday conversation, that is engaged in so frequently and by so many people as news in the press and on television” (Van Dijk, 1991, p. 110). Van Dijk (1991) continues to show how reproducing negative images of specific social groups can engender and eventually become part of this shared social and political knowledge. In Italy, before it became clear that the contagions and deaths would remain very limited in the South, a series of narratives that associated the spread of the infection with some sort of Southern scapegoat started to appear, not only in the news but also conveyed by social media posts, talk shows and even football banners. All these different manifestations contribute to reproducing crystallised images of Southern Italy, which derive from a North-South dialogue, constantly characterised by “the imbalance between the two parties involved” (Gribaudi, 1997, p. 83).

This paper identifies four different types of discursive stratagems aimed at systematising the various South-blaming enunciations that populated the Italian national debate between February and June 2020. These stratagems are somewhat ordinated chronologically, in a way to unsystematically reflect a sort of sequence of different collective sentiments that followed each other as the events unfolded. First came a paradoxical handing over of the label of infector to Southern subjects; afterwards came a series of bizarre, if racially charged, explanations for the difference in contagions/death rates between North and South; this was, in turn, constantly associated with a sort of “waiting”, in the deliberate hope that the pandemic “finally” came to hit the South, too; finally, the delusion of this perverse yearning led to significant complaints against a Government that was formed by an allegedly high ratio of Southern-born ministers, and that was held responsible for an alleged pro-Southern bias.