ABSTRACT
While the mythology of a beautiful but culturally backward southern Italy holds less power today than it did in earlier times, the intensity of stereotypes that represent southern Italians as overly emotional, violence-prone and lazy is still evident to a visitor in contemporary Italy. From at least the late Middle Ages forward, as Naples’ economic and political fortunes became increasingly bound up with the policies of the powerful monarchies that claimed sovereignty over it, and as the machinations of its own evidently anarchic and self-interested nobility took their toll, prominent images of the city likewise became more alarmist. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought a dramatic influx of immigrants into the city. Individuals and families migrated from the southern Italian countryside, bringing with them a host of social problems not unfamiliar to other burgeoning early modern cities and towns, but apparently magnified in the minds of observers because the social problems that they observed in Naples took place in such an apparently idyllic climate.
