The construction of the mafioso social capital and the Sack of Palermo (2023)

One should not forget the Kingdom of Two Sicilies was quite wealthy and advanced at the time of the Italian Reunification, but crumbled shortly afterwards.

There was a big wealth transfer South to North. Nonetheless, it's still a lovely place.

Sicily was great when it was governed by the Normands but that didn't last for a long time.

I live now in Switzerland and I am studying its history. It seems one of the reason of Switzerland prosperity and order was they never got a prince or a king but cities were autonomously governing themselves.

The north is sophisticated, cosmopolitan, industrialized, and has tons of arable farmland and just generally money running through it. Culturally it's more French / white European.

The south has very little arable land, it is rocky and hilly. It does not lend itself well to large-scale agriculture. It was largely ruled in a feudal system for a very very long time, which then collapsed into the peasant families each being given land ownership of plots too small to sustain a family.

It has also been a target of conquering by Greeks, Ottoman Turks, and many many many more cultures due to its critical location for shipping lanes - so it's been sort "ran over" too many times to count.

The fact that the real power structure has turned over so many times has led to lots of very very localized, unofficial power structures that represent sort of local "fiefdoms" which exist outside of the modern governmental structures. Subsequently, it has built its own mythology of being "unconquerable" or "ungovernable" and not really a part of "Italy" - where "Italy" is seen as an outside power which builds into the mythology that helps the mafioso gain and retain control.

Edit: for very enjoyable (and highly regarded) novel that gets at the mafioso / Southern mythology about this, I highly recommend Black Souls.

It's like saying "oh, the local feudal Lord helps us fight bandits!" - yeah, but he can also cut you down in the street without due process, doesn't care about your opinion, and might enforce ius primae noctis, without any recourse.

Railway stations with no rails going in.

that's a big part of TFA, here's an excerpt:

The Sack of Palermo did not happen because a criminal organization imposed it from the outside though the use of violence. It was, rather, a chosen, planned and enacted project involving most of the Palermo elite of professionals, entrepreneurs and politicians, cheered on by a new middle class looking to climb the social ladder, and accepted by the underclasses in need of jobs and housing.

Cheap affordable housing from a government is absolutely not the same as cheap affordable housing from a criminal organisation.

Yes, the mafia built housing, but it’s not the kind of social housing we might hope for—it’s mostly slum-like. Of course, the city of Palermo is also EXTREMELY densely populated—I read something like the fourth-most densely populated city in Europe in a magazine once, but can’t source that now, so take it with a grain of salt.

Nota bene: I’m not Italian myself; my wife’s family has their roots in Sicily.

[1] https://www.marememoriaviva.it/ (website only (?) in Italian)