134 | LUCY RIALL The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question. By Nel- son Moe (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002) 349 pp. $50.00 “How and when did southern Italy become ‘the south,’ a place and peo- ple imagined to be different from and inferior to the rest of the coun- try?” (1). This question lies at the heart of Moe’s captivating study of vi- sual and textual representations of southern Italy in the nineteenth century. He traces the origins of southern “difference” to the representa- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/35/1/134/1704569/002219504323091397.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 tions of foreign writers who traveled to Italy from the mid-eighteenth century onward. “For many,” Moe comments, “Italy was the Southern country par excellence” (13). The writings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Madame Anne-Louise- Germaine de Staël embody what Moe calls a “contrastive structure,” in which the glory of Italy’s past was compared to its decadent present, its natural beauty compared to its human failings, and its “backwardness” contrasted to the modern societies of northern Europe. Yet at the same time, this spectacle of backwardness and human failure could “delight, entertain, regenerate” (16). Foreign denunciations of Italy’s decadence could become a celebration of the “picturesque” (17). Over time, as Moe shows, this same contrastive structure, and this same mixture of de- light and disgust, began to inªltrate Italy’s own representations of its “lower,” southern half. For Risorgimento writers like Carlo Cattaneo and Vincenzo Gioberti, “the south [was] clearly ‘other’” (109). Its backwardness, pov- erty, and “rudeness” made it, for Cattaneo, both “the spectacular oppo- site” of his native Lombardy and “a bourgeois nightmare” (109, 108). But southern rudeness was, in turn, embraced by Giacomo Leopardi, who in his 1837 poem “La ginestra” celebrated the “natural, earthy, vol- canic south” (120), and its inherent challenge to the “vain and fatuous” bourgeois nineteenth century (121). During the 1850s, such stereotypes began to inform political debate and, in particular, the ªery denunciations of bad Bourbon government made by foreign and Italian liberals alike. Giuseppe Massari, a southern exile in Piedmont, wrote that the struggle against the Bourbons was a “great battle between civilisation and barbarism, knowledge versus igno- rance, virtue versus vice, innocence versus iniquity,” thus conªrming, Moe notes, “the role hyperbole often plays in deªning an image of the south” (133). After Italian uniªcation, Italy’s new leaders used images of disease and medical treatment to justify the use of force to subdue its southern provinces. By the 1870s,the contours of the “Southern Question” were ªrmly established. Pasquale Villari and Leopoldo Franchetti depicted the south as a peculiar and exceptional place, which was “a threat to the political and moral integrity of the nation” (224). The novels and short stories of Giovanni Verga contained “a powerfully antipicturesque vision of Sicily” as a place of hardship, unhappiness, and death that served as “a powerful emblem of the failings of national uniªcation” (275, 194). Yet, during the same years, the image of the “picturesque” south had com- REVIEWS | 135 mercial appeal as well. In the pages of the weekly magazine Illustrazione Italiana, the south was “a traditional, picturesque world on the brink of destruction . less signiªcant for its participation in modernity than for its separateness from it” (223). It was a dramatic and largely rural land- scape peopled by evil landowners, barefoot peasants, and simple ªshermen. The View from Vesuvius is part of a broader range of studies that has revised Italy’s Southern Question by challenging its assumptions, ques- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/35/1/134/1704569/002219504323091397.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 tioning its ªndings, and deconstructing its stereotypes. The View from Ve- suvius is also one of the most successful of these studies. Moe uses a wide range of texts, from travel writing to novels and political studies, investi- gating the emergence and development of the Southern Question across a long time-span. This approach allows him to capture the complexities and distinctions of “southernism.” His analysis shifts perspective from foreigners to northern Italians and to southerners, suggesting that the image of the south is the product of a discursive interaction between all three rather than an imposition on the south by the north. He shows that the different representations of the south, from the condemnatory “bourgeois nightmare” to the more appreciative “traditional pictur- esque,” rely on powerful images drawn from geography. They were not simply a function of the rhetorical needs of nationalism but also the result of a new, bourgeois “conception of human society and civiliza- tion” (86). Most noteworthy of all, Moe maintains that although “texts ‘make’ the south” (251), the south also makes texts. Even though the image of the south as a place apart and inferior may be the product of cultural imagining and political investment, the reality of southern “difference” can make “special claims on the Italian and European imagination” (251). Thus, The View from Vesuvius successfully deconstructs southern stereotypes without relying on a crude or stereotypical view of the Southern Question itself. Lucy Riall Birkbeck College, London Ordinary Prussians: Brandenburg Junkers and Villagers, 1500–1840. By Wil- liam W. Hagen (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2002) 679 pp. $100.00 Conventionally, the Elbe River marks the boundary between freedom and oppression in early modern Central Europe. There, the postfeudal land tenure of old-regime France and western Germany is often thought to have shaded perceptibly into something like Russian serfdom or Pol- ish robotage. In “East Elbian Prussia,” the homeland of the Junker no- bility, peasants rendered unpaid menial service to their lord, needed his mediation to obtain justice (even against the lordship itself ), and even had to secure his formal permission to marry or to emigrate. Prussia’s leadership in Germany’s nineteenth-century uniªcation meant that its.