Cont'd. As I said, generally nutrition is very important in terms of IQ, not only the nutrition of the infant but the nutrition of the mother during the entire period of gestation. Modern Southern Italy and Sicily cannot be used for this kind of analysis. The condition of southern Italian and Sicilian farmers and laborers for hundreds of years, really from the 1200-1300s perhaps, can best be compared to modern day areas of Africa or perhaps India. It was none too good even into the post war period, and was abysmal during the war. None of the bounty that was produced was for them to consume. It was co-opted by confiscatory practices imposed by their overlords, many of whom were indeed of foreign extraction.
This was true to some extent in northern Italy as well, in the areas where large landholding estates were the norm, such as in the Po Valley, where malnutrition reigned, resulting in extraordinary levels of pellagra and tuberculosis. However, this was balanced by the numbers of people in other areas who either had their own small landholdings, or had decent tenant/farmer contracts with the landowners, or were already part of the artisan and middle classes. The appalling conditions paved the way for the strong agrarian reform movements and the later growth of the socialist and communist parties.
I agree with Sile as to the source of the problem. We're talking here about the systematic plunder of the land and the people of the south over hundreds and hundreds of years by foreign overlords and what can only be called collaborators. Everything of any value whatsoever was confiscated, and absolutely nothing was put back into the land or to introduce more crafts or, God forbid, industry. Every effort was made to keep the people illiterate so that "foreign" ideas would not "infect" them.
Whoever recently amended the article on Southern Italy for WIKI knows his stuff. I couldn't summarize it any better.
"
Denis Mack Smith, British historian, describes the radical difference between the Northern and the newly annexed Southern Italy in 1860, for these two halves were on quite different levels of civilization, pointing out that the Bourbon in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies were staunch supporters of a feudal system and that they had feared the traffic of ideas and had tried to keep their subjects insulated from the agricultural and industrial revolutions of northern Europe.[21]The above-mentioned study by Denis Mack Smith is confirmed by the Italian historian and left wing politician Antonio Gramsci in his book "The Southern Question", by which the author emphasizes the "absolutely antithetical conditions" of Northern and Southern Italy at the time of the Italian Unification in 1861, when South and North united themselves again after more than one thousand years.
Gramsci remarks that, in the North of Italy, the historical period of the Communes had given special boost to history and in Northern Italy existed an economic organization similar to that of the other states of Europe, propitious to further development of capitalism and industry, whereas in Southern Italy history had been different and the fatherly Bourbon administrations produced nothing of value; the bourgeois class did not exist, agriculture was primitive and insufficient to satisfy the local market, there were no roads, no ports, the few waters that the region had were not exploited, due to its special geographical feature.[22]
"Life conditions of the people of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies are illustrated also by Raffaele De Cesare,[23] who reports the lack of interest from the king of Naples Ferdinand II to do useful works to change the neglected conditions of public hygiene, particularly in the provinces where scarsity of sewer systems and often water shortage were known issues. [24]
"The problem of Brigandage is explained in the book "Heroes and Brigands" by the southern Italian historian and politician Francesco Saverio Nitti outlining that Brigandage was endemic in Southern Italy, where for centuries monarchy based itself on Brigandage, that had become like a historical agent.[25] Unlike Southern Italy, Brigandage was generally little in the other annexed states of northern and central Italy like: Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia, Duchy of Parma, Duchy of Modena, Grand Duchy of Tuscany, Papal States, because the situation of Southern Italy was very different, owing to the previous centuries of history.
According to the southern Italian historian Giustino Fortunato,[26] and Italian institutional sources [27] the problems of Southern Italy existed before the Italian Unification, in this regard Giustino Fortunato underlines that the Bourbon were not the only ones responsible for southern problems, that had ancient and deep origins also in previous centuries of poverty and isolation, caused by foreign dominations and governments."
In literature the period of 1860 is described by the Sicilian writer Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa in his famous novel The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) set in Sicily during the years of the Italian unification, in a famous final scene prince Salina, when invited to join the senate of unified Italy, answers to an important Piedmontese officer " … the Sicilian will never want to change, because the Sicilian feels perfect …", by which and by other words the author underlines the problem for the Sicilians to change their old life style while remaining in their island. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Italy#Early_modern_history
I'm not saying that any of this would necessarily affect children born in the last 20 or 30 years in terms of nutrition, but it does explain the past, and cultural attitudes toward education, for example.
As far as I'm concerned the last rulers of Sicily, for example, to actually be good stewards of the land were the Moors, with the possible exception of the Normans and Frederick II. Certainly, once the Spanish Bourbons took control it was all over, which is why the fact that so many southern Italians are nostalgic for them boggles my mind.