How many Italian Souths are there? Can they all be reduced to the well-worn clichés deployed, for the most part, by anti-southern northerners? Our project in this seminar is to read through some of the best-known current scholarship on ‘the southern question’, and beyond it, to some of the most nuanced and challenging original writing on the subject, including de Martino (Sud e Magia, La terra del rimorso) and C. Levi (Cristo si è fermato a Eboli). Along the way we will sample works by Franchetti and Sonnino, as well as key arguments from the social sciences that have simultaneously explained the South’s ‘difference’ and reinforced some of the stereotypes that beleaguer it still. We will also consider how theorizations of ‘the Mediterranean’ can fruitfully be brought into the southern Italian context. Ability to read in Italian is useful but not absolutely necessary.