Ritorno al futuro Regno delle Due Sicilie

In February 2017 a number of politicians of southern Italian constituencies, belonging in the main to the Five Star Movement (Movimento 5 Stelle, M5S), put forward a motion in their regional councils and parliamentary seats for the “Institution of a memorial day for the victims of Italian unification.” This was the first time in Italian history that a divisive evocation of Italy’s past, split between the North and the South, emerged at an institutional level and in the public sphere. The pre-unification Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was invoked in the political arena as a representation of the true history and lost identity of the Mezzogiorno, which was supposedly brutally crushed in 1860 by the “conquest” and “genocide” of the southern people. This essay focuses on the political, cultural and social processes, filtered through the pervasive forces of mediatisation, that have helped to popularise the counter-history of Italian unification and have created symbolic resources for the construction of the postmemory of the “genocide of the southerners”.