Castello di Laurenzana, Basilicata

This image: Pipito93, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Laurenzana_e_il_suo_Castello.jpeg

The South is a different country. Projecting deep into the Mediterranean, this region problematizes the notion of what it means to be Italian: North vs South remains a contentious cultural fault line to this day.

It’s certainly true that the regions of Italy’s south, from Naples down to the extremities of Apulia and Calabria - known collectively as the Mezzogiorno - have had a very colourful history. Once a part of Magna Graecia, they were the last areas to become part of Rome’s unified peninsula. In the subsequent two millennia, their governance and cultural evolution have a very different flavour to those of northern Italy.  

Sicily is a whole different proposition again. A melting pot of cultures since most ancient times, it has gone from being one of the Mediterranean’s first agricultural paradises to the political plaything of would-be tyrants seeking domination of the seas. It has witnessed entire eras of abundance as well as long periods of poverty and depopulation. Its history has often been entwined with that of Italy’s south, and yet it is also a culture apart.

Join us for an epic story in which we will meet Greeks and Romans, Byzantines and Arabs, Normans and Angevins, Bourbons and Bonapartists – all the way up to the glorious Risorgimento, which so many Italians still seem to regret.

RJW F2416 Online course (via Zoom)

10 weeks, Wednesday 24 April - Wednesday 3 July (incl., with half-term break on 29 May)

£110 (individual registration); £198 (for two people sharing one screen).