«REGIONALISATION» OR «REGIONALISM»

THE TERMS OF DEBATE STILL IN PROGRESS

Abstract

Regionalisation has to be intended as «an operation that the government has used (in general) to give organicity and institutional uniformity to the human complex that forms it». Regionalism is the «recognition of areas marked by a homogenity, or better by a particular form of cohesion and order for what concerns, in the first place, the economic structure and the cultural heritage: areas that exist, in many cases, with a clear individuality before a regionalisation». With these explanations, Lucio Gambi agrees that Regionalisation and Regionalism are two terms and key concepts that emerge in a transversal way from the debates that articulate around the problem of “regionality”. A political-cultural debate that has involved the Italian Society after the Unification, in which the geographical culture of the time took part - although in a latent way, at least at the beginning - and a historiographic debate that from Mommsen onwards has intended to privilege the Augustan Regionalist project, both a "centralist" and "centralizing" vision, both an "autonomist" setting of regionalisation. A speech, hence, that hinges on the idea of Augustan Regio, conceived in a different way from the antiquity historians: a thing is to retain that the Regional articulation of Augusto was sustained by a politicaladministrative purpose, another is sustaining that it had to respond exclusively to census-statistical purposes. At the same level, from the Unity until our days, a comparison of ideas has started, also from a geographical point of view, that has contributed to establish, for better or for worse, the actual regionalistic structure of the Country. The target of these notes is to consider the key elements of all debates – historiographical, political and institutional, geographical – on the theme amenable to the “regional issue” of the Italian peninsula.