That historical fracture that separates the two Italys has never healed. The North is alive, rich and getting fat. The South, however, is growing more slowly. Down here, poverty becomes solid matter amidst the social earthquakes that are rapidly revealing new miseries. First Covid and now the energy and labor crises have reconfigured the social peripheries of the South. Every day the number of people crushed by hardship is growing, which is no longer anonymous because it is becoming a mass phenomenon. Unemployment in the South is something more than an emergency. And in Calabria it becomes an incurable disease that is quickly devouring entire parts of society.
Without work
Traditional statistical reports continue to superimpose blurry images of this land of ours that is inexorably rolling towards the abyss. The INPS has certified the new steps forward in unemployment in the region which from 14.6% in 2022 (in Italy it was 8.1%) rose to 15.9% in 2023 (while the national average fell to 7.7%). The official jobless in Calabria in 2023 are 102 thousand, a figure that is calculated in the population aged between 15 and 74 years. And the lack of employment is causing the boundaries of poverty to expand. The faces and biographies of the last are no longer exclusively the traditional ones because, alongside the chronically miserable, those who live on the streets, new and unsuspected social profiles have sunk into poverty.
Black EU shirt
The confirmation comes from the seal of statistics. Eurostat recently warned Italy: Calabria is the EU region where almost one in two families lives with the nightmare of poverty and exclusion. Exactly, 48.6% of Calabrians are at risk. A figure that refers to 2023. The same study also sets the European average at around 21%. The decline is confirmed by the numbers: in 2022 the risk of poverty and exclusion here was “only” 40%. But it is the whole South that is dragging on. Behind Calabria there are the “usual” regions: Campania with 44.4%, Sicily with 41.4% and Sardinia with 32.9%. Italy, on the other hand, extends from Rome upwards with the autonomous Province of Bolzano (5.1%) and Emilia Romagna (7.4%) leading the lands of well-being. A gap that risks widening with the arrival of differentiated autonomy.
Families
Istat, just in recent days, updated the survival limit in reference to the number of family members. The difficulties increase as the number of children increases. Each descendant raises the poverty threshold. And in the South, the income limit of a family in which there are three or more minor children, the incidence of relative poverty actually went from 39.3% in 2022 to 50.5% in 2023. Disadvantages that end to inevitably influence life which transforms into a journey through the dunes of inequalities. Differences that expand pockets of poverty. And, often, a job is not enough to keep afloat because incomes also divide North and South. In recent weeks, the CGIA had lined up the Italian regions for salaries. The queen is Lombardy with a gross annual income which on average is worth 28,354 euros per year. Last, Calabria with half: 14,960 euros per year. And differentiated autonomy has not yet gone to work.