ABSTRACT
The intellectual nostalgia for a southern authenticity and the disappearing peasant world was combined with a contempt expressed toward that very world. The photographs examined in this chapter are subtended by this basic tension, which opposed a yearning for the simplicity and utopian purity of a preindustrial, precapitalist way of life, while rejecting and condemning it for its poverty, ignorance, and seeming lack of sophistication. The image of a strong South was necessary for Fascist propaganda in particular after the Allied invasion, which began on the central southern coast of Sicily. Photographers who went South were often automatically branded Communist on the sole basis of their interest in the South. The South became a locus for humanist thought, acquiring a new significance regarding the North-South divide and Italianita, at a time when Italians were reckoning with their nation’s shattered, self-doubting, post-Fascist state.
