Rates of Obesity Relatively Low

Europeans have gotten heavier over the last decade, but within that context, Italy has among the lowest rates of overweight and obese people, especially the latter and especially women.

Among the 19 [European Union] Member States for which data are available, the proportion of overweight and obese people in the adult population varied in 2008/09 between 36.9 % and 56.7 % for women and between 51 % and 69.3 % for men.

For both women and men aged 18 years and over, the lowest shares of obesity in 2008/09 were observed in Romania (8.0 % for women and 7.6 % for men), Italy (9.3 % and 11.3 %), Bulgaria (11.3 % and 11.6 %) and France (12.7 % and 11.7 %). The highest proportions of obese women were recorded in the United Kingdom (23.9 %), Malta (21.1 %), Latvia (20.9 %) and Estonia (20.5 % in 2006), and of men in Malta (24.7 %), the United Kingdom (22.1 %), Hungary (21.4 %) and the Czech Republic (18.4 %).

Overweight and Obesity — BMI Statistics. Eurostat — Statistics Explained, 2012.

Italian Beauty: Violante Placido

Actress and singer born in Rome. Her father is an actor-director with roots in Basilicata and Puglia, and her mother (also an actress from Rome) is best known outside of Italy for playing Michael Corleone's Sicilian wife Apollonia in The Godfather.

Resources and Industry in the North

In a recent post I showed how Italian geography favors the North when it comes to farming, trade and industry. The latter is a primary source of wealth in the modern world, and even though Southern Europe's coal reserves are small and of poor quality, Northern Italy has been able to compensate with hydroelectric power because of its geographical features and natural resources.

The objective of this article is to analyse the importance of one of the new energy sources, electricity, since the end of the nineteenth century until 1945, from the point of view of natural resource endowments. Not all countries had good or equivalent endowments of coal, the energy-producing mineral of the nineteenth century, and for this reason not all of them had the same opportunities to use it, given that the transport cost was very high due to its weight in relation to its caloric power. Electricity reduced the dependence on coal resources as it could be produced not only from coal but also from water.

[...]

The accessible coal endowments available...are presented in Table 1, both in the form of total coal reserves and coal reserves per capita in each country. Well endowed in coal were Canada and the US in North America and Germany, the UK, Austria and — in an intermediate position — France in Europe. The Northern European countries Denmark and Sweden and the Southern European countries Italy, Greece and Portugal all had poor coal endowments. Looking at coal quality, Spain and especially Italy lacked good quality coal; as for the cost of extraction, this was particularly high in France and Spain, due to the characteristics of its seams.

[...]

Natural resources also had effects on the type of electricity being produced in these countries when electricity eventually arrived. [...] The situation was worst in Italy because of the scarcity of coal and its low caloric power. As a result, coal had to be imported. For that reason, electricity was generated by hydraulic power, once the problem of long distance transmission was solved by means of the alternating current. The most important hydraulic resources were concentrated in the Alps and the Po Valley, between the Alps and the Apennines in the North of the country. The regions endowed with the most important sources of waterpower were the Piedmont and Lombardy, the Po Valley (Adda, Adige, Ticino, Tevere, etc.), the Venetia region and that of Umbria.

[...]

We have calculated the proportion of hydroelectricity and thermoelectricity in the total electricity production of each country. As shown in Figure 1, at the top of the countries using hydroelectricity were Canada, Italy and Spain. Hydroelectricity accounted for over 80 per cent of their electricity production. At the bottom, using less than 60 per cent, as already commented, were the coal intensive countries, i.e. the UK, the USA, and France, although, France had a lesser proportion of thermoelectricity.

[...]

The degree of electrification advanced substantially from the end of the nineteenth century until WWII, the height of the process being 1925, after WWI, when real electricity prices fell considerably. The behaviour of the relative prices electricity-coal, coupled with the new technical opportunities for electrification in the manufacturing sector where electricity competed with steam, produced important possibilities for economic growth. There was also a relationship between the accumulation of physical capital and electrification process and the increase in labour productivity, manufacturing and income per capita, especially in the countries that were badly endowed with coal deposits, but enjoyed better opportunities for the production of electricity.

Concha Betrán. "Natural Resources, Electrification and Economic Growth from the End of the Nineteenth Century until World War II". Revista de Historia Económica, 2005.

Related: Geography and Industry

Russell Peters' Comedy Routine

I don't know how much of stand-up comedians' material is based on real experiences and how much is just made up, but in this routine Canadian Desi comic Russell Peters claims that he was mistaken for a native when he traveled to Italy. He says a guy approached him on the street and spoke to him in Italian, and then was shocked to find out that he's Indian. Based on this, he invites all "brown people" to go to Italy and be "freaked out" like he was when they're mistaken for Italians. There are several problems with his story that point to it being at least partly untrue, and to him not being very good at interpreting situations.

• Russell Peters is of Anglo-Indian descent, but he still looks very South Asian. I'm not sure I'd even buy him as West Asian, much less Southern European. His brown skin and quasi-Australoid facial features would make for a very tanned and odd-looking Italian who, if anything, would be viewed with suspicion by locals. But the story works for American audiences because it panders to stereotypes they have about the "darkness" of Italians, and I think Peters is well aware of that.
• When you're in a foreign country, being spoken to in the official language of that country instead of your own is totally normal and in itself not evidence of anything. What language did Peters expect the Italian guy in Italy to speak? English? Hindi? Unless you're booking a hotel room or strolling around town in khaki shorts taking pictures of the Colosseum, locals would have no reason to speak to you in any language other than Italian, and even then there's no guarantee.
• South Asians are actually one of the largest immigrant groups in Italy, numbering in the 500,000s (not to mention the ~300,000 Gypsies, who are of Indian descent), so I doubt that any Italian would be shocked to see one, or as unacquainted with their appearance as Peters suggests. It sounds like a scenario made up by someone unfamiliar with Italy's demographics who just assumes that the country is homogenous and has no foreign population, which again plays well with equally clueless American audiences.

Regardless of whether or not that incident really happened the way Peters describes it, any "brown people" following his advice are going to be very disappointed when they're immediately recognized as foreigners in Italy (or possibly mistaken for Gypsies), since only a tiny fraction of South Asians can dream of ever convincingly passing as Italian, and even then only via cosmetic and surgical enhancement.

Here's a little test that should be nearly impossible if Peters is to be believed. Try to spot the South Asian individual in each of these photos of Italians:


Really tough, huh?

Regional Soccer Player Composites

I've been trying out this new morphing software that detects faces automatically and puts the control points in place for you. It has a few kinks but it saves a lot of time, so I made some quick regional versions of the earlier soccer player composites. They still look very similar, but breaking the samples down like this reveals minor differences not only between the North, Center and South but also within each of those areas. Many of the new samples are quite small though, and remember that some surnames may hail from neighboring regions, so these are not perfect representations.

Trentino/Friuli (N = 10)

Veneto (N = 49)

Lombardy (N = 95)

Piedmont (N = 20)

Liguria (N = 9)

Emilia-Romagna (N = 43)

Tuscany (N = 44)

Marche/Umbria (N = 21)

Lazio (N = 44)

Abruzzo (N = 7)

Campania (N = 58)

Puglia (N = 35)

Calabria (N = 19)

Sicily (N = 25)

Sardinia (N = 11)

Software: Abrosoft FaceMixer

Geography and North-South Disparities

Books like Guns, Germs, and Steel and The Botany of Desire, and discoveries like the impact of infectious disease on IQ and climate shifts on the fall of Rome, have shown what a huge role geography and environment play in shaping development and the course of history. Stanford economist Thomas Sowell describes this phenomenon at work in modern Italy, showing how socioeconomic and other disparities between North and South that are often attributed to behavioral or biological factors actually have deep roots in the lay of the land.

Arable land is both scarce and scattered in southern Italy, leading to many isolated settlements — contributing in turn to the linguistic and other cultural differences. Moreover, there are very few long navigable rivers to facilitate trade and communication. Such modern means of travel or communication as broadcasting, railroads, and airlines were of course not yet in existence, or were not yet significant in southern Italy, when the massive immigration to America was taking place. Even in the middle of the twentieth century, however, geographical isolation was still extreme in some southern Italians villages.

[...]

The climate and terrain of southern Italy contributed to its poverty. While the temperatures are relatively mild, rainfall is both low and concentrated in only a few months. The growing season is dry — "drought may endure for six months or more." When the rains finally come, they are torrential, causing erosion. The dryness during the growing season in turn limits the use of fertilizers. The impermeability of much of the hilly soil facilitates rapid water runoff when it does rain, and the deforestation of southern Italy's once heavily wooded areas adds to both erosion and the collection of water in stagnant pools, breeding malaria. Italy has been the most malarial country in Europe, and southern Italy more so than the rest of the country. In addition to the direct suffering and death caused by malaria, disease also exacted an economic toll. Because the most fertile lowlands were also the most malarial, peasants and agricultural workers lived up on hillsides in order to be away from the malaria-bearing mosquitoes at night, when they bite. This in turn meant that much of the day was spent going to and from home and work — often miles apart — instead of actually working.

While much of southern Italy is hilly and mountainous, the highlands are at just the wrong height for agricultural purposes. They are too high and rugged to be good cropland and too low to collect snow, which would melt and give a slow, steady runoff of water during the spring. In addition to lacking these advantages common in some other European countries, Italy also does not have its sod broken up by nature through successive freezes and thaws during the winter. The southern Italian farmer must perform the vital function of breaking up the soil entirely by his own efforts and that of his animals pulling the plow.

Italy's natural deficiencies are both agricultural and industrial. About three quarters of the land area of Italy consists of mountains and hills. Only about half of the land is arable, and most of that is in northern Italy. In the south, the mountains "reach so close to the sea that arable land is limited to mountain villages, high plateaus, or coastal plains" — the latter being generally "very narrow." Italy is also lacking in both the quantity and quality of coal and iron ore needed for producing iron and steel — a mainstay of modern industry.

History has added to the problems created by nature. Southern Italy was long a battleground for contending empires and dynasties, which fought back and forth across the Italian peninsula for centuries, going back at least as far as the Roman Empire. For two centuries during the Middle Ages, invasions were "frequent and almost annual." At various times, southern Italy was conquered by a variety of foreigners, including the Lombards, the Arabs, and the Normans. Massacres, pillage, rape, and enslavement were the common fate of the population.

[...]

Northern Italy has been better treated by both nature and man. The rain falls in the spring and summer, when it is needed for agriculture. It has "several rivers, whose waters are kept at a relatively steady level by melting Alpine snows," and those "provide considerable water and power for agriculture and industry." In addition, northern Italy has "a system of irrigation that has been nowhere excelled and rarely approached" — at least during the era of massive immigration to America. Northern Italian agriculture has been described as "luxuriant under cultivation," yielding "a notable variety of crops." Deforestation and other natural and man-made evils of the south were less prevalent in the north.

Thomas Sowell. Ethnic America: A History. New York: Basic Books, 1981.

Related: Resources and Industry in the North

Hair Dye and Wigs in Ancient Rome

When Nordicists aren't trying to claim Ancient Romans as their own, they say that the Romans dyed their hair blonde, or wore blonde wigs made from Germanic hair, because they envied the physical and moral attributes of "superior" Northern Europeans. But that narcissistic fantasy couldn't be further from the truth. Hair coloring was indeed popular in ancient Roman society (as it also is in modern British society), but its history, functions and significance were much more complicated.

In her reference book Encyclopedia of Hair, Victoria Sherrow explains that blonde hair in Rome was linked with prostitution at first, and obtained from slaves:

In ancient Rome, blond hair was initially considered to be a symbol of a prostitute, and these women were required to bleach their hair blond or wear blond wigs. After slave girls were acquired from Scandinavia and Germany, noblewomen began to wear more wigs made from their hair, and the stigma attached to blond hair diminished. Women also began dying their hair lighter shades using infusions made from saffron flowers. Unfortunately, some dyes and bleaches caused such severe damage to the hair that people resorted to wearing wigs. People also wore false hairpieces to augment their own hair or create special effects.

Popular anthropologist Desmond Morris describes in an amusing passage how blonde hair lost its prostitution stigma, how and why it gained in popularity, and what it represented (hint: not high morals):

Roman prostitutes were carefully organized. They were licensed, taxed, and actually required by law to wear blonde hair. The third wife of the Emperor Claudius, the wild nymphomaniac Messalina, was so excited by the idea of sudden, brutal sex with strangers that she would sneak out at night clad in a whore's wig and prowl the city. So violent was her lovemaking that it is rumoured she frequently dislodged her blonde hairpiece, returning to the royal precincts in all too recognizable condition.

Other Roman ladies of fashion were soon imitating her, and the lawmakers were impotent to stem the trend. Their blonde-wig-whoring law was ruined, but the element of wickedness and abandon by now associated with blondness was to survive down the centuries, repeatedly re-surfacing as an opposing strand in contrast to the image of fair-haired virginal innocence.

Prior to that (and probably long after as well), Romans were much more likely to use dark colored dyes, often to hide gray hair and restore their natural color. Victoria Sherrow explains again:

Hair dyes were popular in ancient Rome, and historians have found more than 100 different recipes that the Romans used for bleaching or dying hair. Early Romans preferred dark hair, and at one time, blond hair was the mark of a prostitute. Light hair became fashionable after Greek culture reached Italy and the Roman legionnaires began bringing back fair-haired slaves from Gaul. Women, and some men, applied bleaching agents to their hair and then exposed it to the sun to achieve a golden or red color. Wealthier people could afford to sprinkle actual gold dust on their hair to create a blond look, as did the ancient Phoenicians. Another way to achieve a lighter shade was to cover the hair with flower pollen and the crushed petals of yellow-colored flowers. When harsh bleaching agents caused hair loss, Roman women resorted to wigs made from the hair of blond slaves.

To color gray hair, the Romans used a mixture made from ashes, boiled walnut shells, and earthworms. Another recipe for dark hair dye combined boiled walnut shells, charred eggs, leeks, leeches, and other ingredients. They also discovered that lead-coated combs dipped in vinegar would leave a dark residue on the hair. The color deepened over time as repeated use of a comb left more lead salts on the hair.

Indeed, according to archaeologist Elizabeth Bartman, Romans also imported black hair from India, while their use of blonde hair had political significance. Unlike the Indian hair, which was acquired through trade, Germanic hair became a symbol of Rome's subjugation of barbarians:

Ample literary sources document women's (as well as men's) use of wigs and hairpieces, and the extensive vocabulary they employ suggests a wide range of options. Capillamentum, corymbium, galerum and τρίχωμα are favorite, but by no means the only, terms attested. Most wigs in antiquity were made of human hair and fashioned with a level of beauty and craftsmanship largely unobtainable today. (In modern times synthetic hair has replaced natural human hair in all but the most expensive wigs.) Although no Roman wigs have survived, evidence from pharaonic Egypt attests to the high quality of ancient hairpieces. The blond hair of Germans and jet black of Indians was preferred for artificial attachments, but it is unclear whether their desirability stemmed from their color or texture. While black Indian hair, documented in a late source, was no doubt obtained through trade, the blond hair of Germans was one of the spoils of war, at least in the early Imperial period. Both Ovid and Martial refer to "captured" hair (captivos crines), making an explicit link between the commodification of hair and Roman power.

Bartman also stresses the artificiality and extravagance of popular hairstyles, which would often combine light and dark shades. This indicates an ornamental function rather than an attempt to look like a natural Northern European blonde — something that would have been looked down on:

Notwithstanding its implications of Roman conquest, a blond braid interwoven into the dark tresses of a Mediterranean crown presumably announced the fictive nature of the coiffure rather emphatically. This unabashed flaunting of artificial locks contrasts with the generally negative image of wig wearing conveyed by many of the literary sources.

...Roman female coiffures bespeak human intervention. When looking at sculptural rendering today, we frame our discussion of cultus largely in terms of the shape and construction of Roman coiffures, but we should recall that artificial color provided by dye, bleach, or powder, and the sheen acquired by gel or pomade, also advertised the hairdressers' effort. By contrast, we today favor the so-called natural look in female hairdressing; whether styled in an Afro or Princess Diana bob, contemporary women's hair professes to be close to its natural state. [...] To the ancients, however, "natural" was a term of opprobrium, suggesting a lack of civilization and social control — a state close to beasts and barbarians. So Paola Virgili and others have appropriately linked the notion of cultus, implying refinement and civilization, to the elaborate coiffures of imperial Roman women.

References

1. Victoria Sherrow. Encyclopedia of Hair: A Cultural History. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006.
2. Desmond Morris. The Naked Woman: A Study of the Female Body. New York: Macmillan, 2007.
3. Elizabeth Bartman. "Hair and the Artifice of Roman Female Adornment". Am J Archaeol, 2001.

Moors Expelled from Sicily and Southern Italy

It's often claimed that Italians south of Rome are mostly descended from Moors who invaded in the Middle Ages. But according to historian Julie Anne Taylor, the large scale presence of Muslims in medieval Italy was restricted to just two southern locations (first Sicily and then the area around Lucera) and in both cases ended with mass expulsions. Her narrative is consistent with the available genetic data, which estimates only low levels (2-4%) of gene flow from Arabs and Berbers into those two locations, and even lower levels (0-1%) in the rest of the country.

When tensions between the Christians and Muslims in Sicily in the first decades of the thirteenth century disrupted life on Frederick II's island, the emperor did what the Christian rulers of Iberia had done in the eleventh century: he removed the Muslims from his kingdom. Instead of expelling them, however, he deported them to Lucera, a town previously inhabited by Christians in Apulia, forty miles or so from the Adriatic Sea in the southern Italian peninsula. The first deportations began in the 1220s and continued for twenty years. By mid-century, Sicily's Muslim population no longer existed. Some had fled to North Africa while the majority had been settled in Lucera and small villages in the same region.

[...]

Rebellions of Muslims in villages around the island prompted Frederick to find ways to rid Sicily of them, but not to the point of depriving himself completely of their talents and uses. He shipped them off to Apulia, forced them to settle in Lucera, and put them to work in the service of the kingdom.

[...]

When Charles I of Anjou took possession of the colony in 1265, life became increasingly difficult for the inhabitants until, in 1300, Charles II decided to liquidate the colony entirely. He had all the Muslims in southern Italy sold into slavery, took the gold from their sale, and confiscated all of their property. Officials took inventory of all the grain and agricultural products stored there before carting them off to feed the Christian populations of southern Italy.

Sally McKee. "Review: Muslims in Medieval Italy: The Colony at Lucera, by Julie Taylor". The American Historical Review, October 2004.

Our estimates of NW African chromosome frequencies were highest in Iberia and Sicily, in accordance with the long-term Arab rule in these two areas. The chromosome frequencies in the two samples were not significantly different from each other (Fisher's exact test P=0.83) but were both significantly different from the peninsular Italy sample (P<0.01). An inspection of Table 1 reveals a non-random distribution of MNA [medieval North African] types in the Italian peninsula, with at least a twofold increase over the Italian average estimate in three geographically close samples across the southern Apennine mountains (East Campania, Northwest Apulia, Lucera). When pooled together, these three Italian samples displayed a local frequency of 4.7%, significantly different from the North and the rest of South Italy (P<0.01), but not from Iberia and Sicily (P=0.12 and P=0.33, respectively). Arab presence is historically recorded in these areas following Frederick II's relocation of Sicilian Arabs.

SAMPLE	% TOTAL ADMIXTURE
Val Badia	0.0
Veneto	0.9
Central Emilia	0.0
Central Tuscany	1.2
Tuscany-Latium border	0.0
Northeast Latium	0.9
Marche	0.7
South Latium	0.0
East Campania	2.4
Northwest Apulia	3.3
Lucera	1.7
West Calabria	0.0
South Apulia	0.7
Sicily	3.8
Colonized locations	2.8
Rest of country	0.4
Whole country	1.1

Capelli et al. "Moors and Saracens in Europe: estimating the medieval North African male legacy in southern Europe". Eur J Hum Genet, 2009.

Related: Mediterranean Sea as Genetic Barrier

Jersey Shore: Before They Were Guidos

Here are some childhood photos of the (fully) Italian cast members of MTV's reality show Jersey Shore when they still looked normal, prior to the harmful effects of steroids, tanning beds, hair gel and hip-hop.

Mike Sorrentino:

Paul DelVecchio:

Sammi Giancola:

Vinny Guadagnino:

Deena Nicole Cortese:

Another Richard Lynn Refutation

They just keep coming. The others can be found here.

As stated at the outset, the aim of this analysis is not to demonstrate that IQ in Southern Italy is the same or higher than that in the North. On the other hand, a simple statistical exercise, based on correlations among variables, such as that by Lynn, is far from conclusive. Recent studies have shown a significant statistical relationship (p-value = 0.008) between the presence of storks in the European continent and the birth rate (Matthews, 2000); an association which seems particularly remarkable in the case of Germany (Höfer et al. 2004). We know how hard it is to explain causality by means of statistical exercises and certainly causal relationships are not captured by simple statistical correlations.

Our previous discussion suggests a different relationship among the variables analyzed by R. Lynn and those collected in the present article. Allowing that school tests are representative of differences in IQ, we have seen that:

• they clearly show how the North-South difference in cognitive ability does not exist at the age of 7. The correlation between regional educational achievement (INVALSI) and regional per capita income becomes positive (0.44) at the age of 10, but is, however, considerably lower than that found through PISA test scores;
• the IQ-average income relationship did not exist in the past, although if it had derived from a genetic difference, it would consequently have done so;
• knowledge of genetic differences in Italy does not support Lynn's opinion that peoples from North Africa and the Near East strongly influenced the genetic structure of the Southern Italian population. Genetically, the influence of the Phoenicians and the Near East populations accounts for a very small fraction, while the predominant genetic influence derives from the long phase of Greek colonization.

The existence of differences in IQ, as revealed by school tests and other tests (supposing that these actually reveal "fundamental" diversities in intelligence), seems much better explained as being socially, economically and historically influenced rather than being genetically determined. Capabilities in problem solving are enhanced by a developing and stimulating environment, according to the so-called "Flynn effect".

In the past, the Southern Italian economy has at times been more advanced than the Northern one; for example during both the Roman antiquity and the high Middle Ages. Perhaps the North and the Centre were more advanced than the South in the late Middle Ages; although nothing certain can be said on the matter. The following decline of the Italian economy as a whole, from the late Middle Ages until the end of the 19th century, probably cancelled the existing economic differences. When per capita GDP diminishes and approaches the level of bare subsistence, differences among regions disappear. In the 19th century, Italy was a relatively backward country both in the North and the South. The statistical material available from the end of the 19th century onwards, does not actually indicate a deep North-South divide, in economic terms. The start of modern growth from then on affected the North much more than the South and economic disparity began to exist between the two parts of the country. In 1891 the North-South difference in per capita GDP was less than 10 percent; it was 20 percent on the eve of World War 1, and 45 per cent after World War 2. In 2010, per capita GDP in the South is about 60 percent that of the North. As ordinarily happens, relative backwardness implies the accumulation of adverse influences. While literacy and years of education grew in the North with respect to the South, infant mortality diminished much more quickly in the North than the South. Institutions, including families and schools, work much better in prosperity than backwardness. Estimates of IQ are likely to be higher where families, municipalities, provinces and regions invest more in education. Remarkable emigration from the South to the North, especially between 1950 and 1975, increased the North-South diversity since emigration, in Italy as elsewhere, is always selective. Since IQ registers education and years of schooling to a greater extent than intelligence, the relative position of the South compared to the North deteriorated in both the cultural environment and the economy more or less contemporaneously.

Daniele and Malanima. "Are people in the South less intelligent than in the North? IQ and the North-South disparity in Italy". Journal of Socio-Economics, 2011.