No. Southern Italy differs from northern Italy in physical anthropology and genetics, as well as in culture and achievements.
Southern Italians are shorter and darker than northern Italians, with smaller and more dolichocephalic heads.
Genetically, southern Italy is allied with the Eastern Mediterranean and, to some degree, the Middle East, while northern Italy clusters with Central Europe. One study found "Clearly detected in the extant Sicilian gene pool . . . a clue for more recent gene flow of people from northern Africa and the Middle East superimposed on a predominantly Greek contribution."
In The History and Geography of Human Genes, Cavalli-Sforza confirms:
The first synthetic map shows a clear gradient from north to south. One pole of the first axis is in the extreme south, in the eastern part of Sicily and the southern part of Calabria, which are separated by the narrow strairof Messina. The opposite pole includes all the north and center. Between Rome-which is centrally located on the peninsula-and the south, there is a progressive gradient of the PC. This corresponds to the well-known differences in physical type (especially pigmentation and general size) between northern and north-central Italians on one side and southern Italians on the other (Livi 1896-1905). northern Italians are more similar to central Europeans, whereas southern Italians are closer to other Mediterranean people, being darker and smaller. (277-278)
While the "extreme western portion of Sicily" may be more similar to northern Italy (perhaps owing to the Normans), this doesn't change the fact that most of southern Italy is very distinct from northern Italy.
Frequency of P* (xR1a) Y-chromosome (Paleolithic western European ancestry) across Italy. Compare to the other maps on this page.
Source: Di Giacomo et al. in press
Update: Di Giacomo et al. (in press), which looks at the distribution of Y-chromosomes, helps us further understand the genetic differences between the north and south of Italy. The map to the right strikingly illustrates one important point: levels of the Paleolithic western European Y-chromosome haplogroup P* (xR1a) -- formerly known as "HG1" -- decrease greatly as one moves south in Italy. Thus, while northern Italians descend predominantly from autochthonous western Europeans, in the south, the Y-chromosome lineage of the original Italians has been largely displaced by intrusive, Middle Eastern lineages. As the authors say:
The most common Hg among the Italian samples is P* (xR1a). Its overall frequency is more than twice that of the second one. However, its frequency ranges widely (11–76%). The second most common Hg's are DE and J2-(DYS41318), with frequencies varying between 0 and 36%, and 2 and 41%, respectively.
[. . .]
Major peopling events may also leave their signature. Only Hg P* (xR1a) in Italy displays a significant decrease in frequencies, from the north-west to the south-east. Many authors agree in considering this Hg as the signature of the Paleolithic inhabitants of the entire European continent. Wilson et al. (2001) have identified a particular STR haplotype within this Hg as the characteristic shared by Celtic-speaking populations and the Basques by common descent from a relatively homogeneous pre-agricultural gene pool. In this context, the most frequent YCAII and DYS413 STR alleles observed in Hg P* (xR1a) from the GAF and VAL samples are identical to the ones observed in 73% of Basques ( Malaspina et al., 2000). The Hg homogeneity of GAF and VAL may thus represent a remnant of the pre-agricultural gene pool which now extends to some locations in northern Italy. The pattern reported here is compatible with the introduction of other lineages (DE, G, I, J, and R1a) on a P* (xR1a) background in southern Italy ( Underhill et al., 2001).
"Neolithic" lineages DE, J, and G -- which ultimately derive from Near Eastern and North African sources, and which in many cases would have arrived on Italian soil well after the Neolithic -- account for up to 70% of Y-chromosomes in some areas of southern Italy, reversing the picture in northern Italy, where up to 76% of Y-chromosomes are of the indigenous western European variety.
About the only things I can see that northern and southern Italians have in common are: (1) they speak the same langauge (southern Italy finally got around to learning Italian thanks to television); and (2) they have been officially part of the same country for a little over a century:
Italy was not a unified nation until the 1870's. Cavour, Mazzini and Garibaldi set to make a nation out of Italy. The south did not comply and was essentially invaded. During this period and to this day, the south was seen as African, primitive, and in need of civilizing.
Northern and southern Italians don't see themselves as the same.
. . . a scholar from Sicily, bears this out in a gentler way. She is, she said, Sicilian first, and then Italian. She feels that when she arrives in northern Italy she has come from ''a very hot, welcoming and colored place'' to a ''cold, mistrustful and gray one.'' ("What Is a European", NYT)
If southern Italians see northern Italians as "cold", for their part, northern Italians don't seem all that keen on southern Italians. In Looking to Italy 2007: Italy times two, a report from the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), we learn that southern Italy "taken by itself, would have a GDP below that of Greece." Southern Italy is dependent on the more productive North, and the gap between the regions continues to widen. Many "Northerners . . . do not want to co-exist with the South and its reputedly dishonest, slothful, and inferior citizens", and seperatist political parties such as Lega Nord have arisen.
Southern Italy is poorer, more rural, and less literate than northern Italy. "Illiteracy in Sicily reached extremes of 70.89% in the demographic census of 1901, of 56.97% the next decade, as compared to a national average that reached, respectively, 48.49% and 37.43%" (Source).
People have long recognized the distinction between northern and southern Italians. For example, English-speakers have traditionally strongly disfavored southern Italian immigration, while taking a more accepting view towards immigration by northern Italians.
. . . that the greater desirability of the northern Italian is recognized wherever experience has been had with both northern and southern Italians . . . The Governor of one state in the heart of the industrial South . . . writes as follows:--". . . We prefer very greatly the northern Europeans, but could use handsomely to their profit and to the profit of our people, some from northern Italy . . . I am certain that we do not want and we should insist that we do not get, people from the southern parts of Italy . . . "
(Immigration and the South, The Atlantic Monthly, November 1905)
The same attitudes can be found in Australia and throughout the English-speaking world (and, throughout Europe, as well -- even in Italy, many northerners are dismayed at the influx of southerners into the north over the past 50 years).
Again, the distinction between northern and southern Italians is not a recent one; it is a racial division of long standing. According to Wright's (1965) reading of Medieval geographers:
In these authorities we find that the differences between the inhabitants of the northern and southern parts of Italy were fully appreciated in the twelfth century.Wright goes on to quote one of the Medieval authorities as follows:
The Lombards are a keen, skillful, and active people; foresighted in counsel; expert in justice; strong in body and spirit, full of life and handsome to look upon, with slight, supple bodies that give them great power of endurance; economical and always moderate in eating and drinking; masters of their hands and mouths; honorable in every business transaction; mighty in the arts and always striving for the new; lovers of freedom and ready to face death for freedom's sake. These people have never been willing to submit to kings. . . . But what a contrast the people of Apulia in the south present to the Lombards. Dirty, lazy, weak, good-for-nothing idlers that they are. (p. 320)
Notable "Italians" such as Christopher Columbus and Guglielmo Marconi, to whom southern-Italian Americans often look for affirmation, have nothing to do with southern Italy. Columbus was from Genoa (northern Italy), and written accounts tell us that:
The Admiral was a well-built man of more than medium stature, long visaged with cheeks somewhat high, but neither fat nor thin. He had an aquiline nose and his eyes were light in color; his complexion too was light, but kindling to a vivid red. In youth his hair was blond, but when he came to his thirtieth year it all turned white. [i.e., phenotypically, Columbus couldn't have been more distinct from the average southern Italian.] (Source)Marconi "was born on 25 April in Bologna, Italy, second son of a wealthy Italian landowner and an Irish mother." Not only was Marconi not southern Italian, he was half Irish. Marconi "inherited his fair hair, blue eyes, and a large pair of ears from his mother". A comparable pattern can be seen in earlier Italian achievement. According to Guenther:
[T]he Italian Renaissance is seen clearly as a renewed flow of Nordic blood into the life of a people and its soul. Down to the beginning of the fifteenth century we find, indeed, in documents many Italians given as descendants of Lombards, Alamans, and so on (ex Alamannorum genere; legibus vivens Langobardorum). . . . Giotto, Masaccio, Filippo Lippi, Donatello, Signorelli, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Andrea del Sarto, Titian, Dante, Pico della Mirandola, Petrarch, Tasso, Galileo — all are of Nordic blood, and, when they are artists, depict men of the Nordic type. . . . The greatest men of the time are almost without exception from districts that formerly were settled by Germanic tribes; and their Nordic blood can often be shown in the details of their descent.As Charles Murray notes:
. . . Italy's largest city during the Renaissance was Naples, and yet Naples, along with the rest of southern Italy, has almost no dots at all. Why not? A plausible explanation is that for practical purposes Naples and southern Italy were not part of what we think of as Renasissance Italy. (2003: 357)
Above: map showing different levels of accomplishment within Italy (Murray 2003).
Guenther mentions the research of Woltmann:
Woltmann, Die Germanen und die Renaissance in Italien, 1905, out of 200 celebrated Italians found 81·6 per cent. light-eyed, 63 per cent. blond, 24 per cent. brown-haired, 13 per cent. black-haired.
Karl Earlson expands on this point:
. . . we should not neglect the researches of Woltmann (1905). Woltmann studied portrait paintings, busts and written descriptions, to ascertain the physical features of the great men of the Italian Renaissance. He revealed that many of the individuals in question, such as Leonardo da Vinci, Tasso, Galileo, etc., were of Germanic descent, and that they possessed Nordic racial characteristics. The results of his investigations, were as follows: of the 125 men whose eye colour could be discerned, 102 had blue, blue-grey or blue-green eyes; 18 had brown or brown-grey eyes; and 5 had eyes of mixed pigmentation. Of the 108 men whose hair colour could be accurately determined, 68 had blond or red hair; 26 had brown hair; and 14 had black hair. [Woltmann (1905) 143-144.] Woltmann also discovered that most of the noble families who ruled over much of Northern Italy, produced blond individuals throughout their generations. Such families as the d’Este of Ferrara, the Bentivoglia of Bologna and the Sforza of Milan, were all largely blond-haired and blue-eyed. [Woltmann (1905) 42-49.]
Few countries show as great a contrast between regions, in terms of genetics and economic productivity, as that found in Italy between the north and the south. RM attempts to minimize these differences in order to feel better about himself, but the differences remain.
Di Giacomo et al. Clinal patterns of human Y chromosomal diversity in continental Italy and Greece are dominated by drift and founder effects. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. In Press.
Murray, Charles. Human Accomoplishment. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.
Wright, J. K. The Geographical Lore of the Time of
the Crusades: A Study in
the History of Medieval Science and Tradition in
Western Europe. New York:
Dover Publications, 1965.
