NORTH VS SOUTH OF ITALY | Is it really that different? | Kaija Love

BEFORE YOU GO…

♡ SUBSCRIBE for new videos every week
♡ LIKE this video if you enjoyed it
♡ INSTAGRAM @kaijalove
♡ CONTACT: kaija.love@hotmail.com

Hi everyone welcome and welcome back to my channel my name is kaya and as you guys know I make videos about usually specifically Milan but today I wanted to make a video that’s about the differences between the north and the south of Italy because I spent time in

Both parts of Italy and from what I’ve heard from the Italians that I’ve met and the kind of lifestyle that the north leads versus what the South leads and just little differences that I noticed I wanted to make a video because I guess I had a lot of preconceived ideas before I

Went to Italy about Italy and I wasn’t really I guess aware of a specific differences I guess I went in with an idea because I did a couple of subjects in university before I went to Italy kind of about the north and south divide and what that kind of means what that

Kind of looks like in a practical sense but I didn’t really know you know the nitty gritty the kind of everyday life kind of differences so I wanted to talk about today because I found that when I was learning about them I found them to be quite interesting and I think a lot

Of you guys will feel the same way I hope so if you clicked on this video so let’s just get straight into the things I’ve come up with 10 well I mean I haven’t come up with them but I have curated 10 different things that I found

To be differences and yeah let’s just get straight into the video so the first thing that I want to talk about is punctuality now I guess your way to the stereotype of Italians in general always being late and not really having any concept of time and not really placing

Any importance on time or you know being on time getting at a place on time etc but I noticed there was a significant difference between the north and the south of Italy in terms of punctuality so if you guys have never been to Italy before the north of Italy is dominated

By industrial style work whereas the south is more dominated by agricultural based work in the north I would say Milan specifically does more of a a bit of a Russian bash like hustle and bustle mentality and you get that kind of feeling when you’re in the

City like people are moving fast and you can tell that people you know have places to be at certain times and the thought of stopping on the street to speak with someone you know for a long period of time that isn’t just like over coffee in the morning I guess isn’t seen

As rude but it just seems as if it may be an inconvenience to someone else’s gay is like slowing their morning down or whatever through small talk or like talking for too long if you run into someone you know on the street rather than just you know a passing hello or

You know how are you it seems more of an inconvenience to their day and people might even avoid you know doing small talk I’m in the mornings like in the work mornings as it may even be considered rude or inconvenient and you know like putting like slowing down

Their morning and getting in the way of the things that they need to do places they need to be etc etc whereas in the south this mentality is completely different you often hear Italians say things like you know even if you’re you know even if you’re on the way to a job interview

They’ll still make time to talk to their friends in the street if they run into them and you know they’ll give people that time of day not to say the northerners don’t give people time of day that’s not really an accurate representation and that’s obviously a

Bit of a stereotype but in general what I found was that in the staff things are a lot more relaxed and slow paced and especially in terms of like dinner meetings and like bookings and things like that if you want someone to be there on time tell them the time is like

Half an hour or an hour before to make sure that everyone turns up on time otherwise you’ll find that a lot of the time in the south in particular but this is kind of I guess an Italian mentalities like being on time doesn’t necessarily doesn’t necessarily mean

Being there on the dot it’s like it could be 15 minutes late it could be 20 minutes late half an hour late that’s kind of normal in Italian culture I remember my first instance with this was at my phaser appointment for at the Italian consulate in Sydney before I

Even went Italy and I remember I was there at my appointment like 15 minutes early or something it was like quarter to nine my appointment was at nine o’clock and no one was in the office yet and I remember this guy one of them Italian guys that worked there he walked

In like got off the elevator and I was already standing in the lobby kind of like waiting for my appointment and he said to me do you know that we don’t open until nine o’clock and I said yeah I’m just here with early you know I I’m

Usually come a bit early for my appointments you never know that kind of thing like I didn’t want to take any risks with my phaser appointment so I was there you know 10 minutes early 10-15 minutes early and just this year like shock on his face that I was there

That little bit early just indicated to me that you know it’s not really a part of their culture to be really early for things or you know be waiting for too long for things so yeah that’s one difference owners between the north and the south of Italy so yeah that’s one

Thing that I noticed between the north and south of Italy was their punctuality when it comes to like appointments and even just like not being in such a rush in the south and then in the north where it’s more like rushing around and needing to be places at a certain time

And I guess just having more of a stress on time rather than in the south where it’s a lot more relaxed I found the second one I guess ties into the first one a little bit and it’s that eating time so in general you’ve probably heard that Italians eat dinner quite late and

It can be a bit of a stereotype but it’s really true like I remember I think back to my first day in Milan when I first arrived there it was a Sunday mind you but it was like I remember and we were looking for like somebody ate for dinner and all these

Places closed for a couple of hours during the afternoon and then they were going to reopen again at like 7:30 and that was like the absolute earliest um that you can go out for dinner on some nights like Sunday obviously I may be a little bit different but in general

Italians eat quite late and instead Italians eat quite late but in saying that the 7:30 for a southerner for example it’s really really early for dinner I remember when I went to the south of Italy and I stayed at my boyfriend’s place in the south in silly Casa

There they were lucky if they had dinner by like 8:30 9:00 o’clock like that’s just kind of like the standard time to eat dinner and that’s if you’re eating at home like if you’re eating out you could be going out for dinner like 10:00 11:00 p.m. you know depending on what

Day of the week it is and you know if you’re going out that night for example it might even be you might even eat dinner at 11 o’clock like it really just depends that’s what you’re doing but it’s like unheard of to eat dinner 7:00 p.m. or like in Australia how we

Think like six seven you know eight pm latest for dinner in Australia whereas in Italy particularly in the south of Italy there is you know they ate dinner really really late and compared to the North who may eat dinner you know a little bit earlier than the South I

Found so the third thing that I’m going to talk about is dialect now I believe usually became a nation in 1861 I think correct me if I’m wrong on that but before this time Italy was divided into a lot of different like smaller countries I guess you would say and they

Were ruled by completely different people they may not have even been Italian it could have been like French and the country was ruled by deeply influenced you know the language and the dialect the way that they speak and how the language kind of developed in specific regions of Italy and it’s so strange

Like looking on a map comparing it to Australia where the our states are kind of a very straight like straightly divided they’re not very like like they don’t kind of go like this whereas initially if you look at Asia Lee on a map and you look at all the different

Regions and how that kind of divided they kind of even like go into each other and they’re very nonlinear it’s very like curvy and the regions kind of like go in out and up and down and it’s definitely not a straight line because Italy wasn’t a unified nation at all

Until that time they have still a very strong and distinct dialect according to their region so given that for example the dialect from central Italy is considered like Italian like normal Italian language these days it makes sense that people from central Italy and more northern Italy are easier to

Understand for people like me who are coming to Italy learning you know a bit of the Italian language there are much easier to understand than people say from the south of Italy and whose regional dialects are very much so a lot of it doesn’t sound like the Italian

Language you know some words do but some words are completely made-up and it may not even be it may not even be Italian or you know like the kind of thing that we have in Australia where it’s kind of like you use slang but it’s not actually

A real word and you can’t really explain where it comes from sometime it just kind of is what it is so that’s one thing that I noticed that was a massive difference between the North and the South was the dialects and even not even between the North and South but

Even between different regions but particularly many coming from Australia I noticed the biggest difference between the north and the south of Italy and it was funny when it came back I actually work with an Italian lady and she’s from like Mia Venice that kind of area and so

Because that’s like more central more central ear like usually and I spend a lot of time in the south of Italy I picked up a lot of southern dialect like different words from from the south because I spent a lot of time there and I remember saying I was speaking to her

One time and I think I blurted out one of the like southern dialect words that I learned and she just had no idea what I was talking about and I had to think back and like retrace my steps and realized that it actually was southern dialect and it wasn’t Italian so that

Can be like a lot of barriers in terms of language I guess you know you always retreat back to normal Italian like that’s where I kind of had to do in the south of Italy even though I’m not fluent in Italian it was easier for me to understand Italian obviously than it

Was for me to understand the southern dialect so yeah that’s quite a difference in the different dialects in Italy for those specific reasons which I found to be quite interesting the next thing I’m going to talk about is tradition and the first thing that comes

To my mind might think of this and the reason why I say there’s quite a difference in you know traditional elements between the north and the south of Italy is that in my apartment where I lived in Milan I live next door to this old Italian lady

And her name was Clara and she was very she was from the south of Italy in a place called fatty part yeah and she often used to you know ring on my door doorbell and she would like ask me to help her fault her washing and she would

Ask me to go to the markets with her or on the weekends in the mornings and just various things like that it should ask me after the coffee and I wrote a blog post about this actually it was like communicating beyond language barriers because hi babe from

Magic Polly again it’s like another you know another diet you know no of itself so when she was speaking she was very different to how the northerners mistake and she was very traditional in the way that she was and even though I couldn’t understand her and she couldn’t really

Understand me we still found that kind of way to communicate which was really interesting and that was one of the biggest things in Italy that I learnt was you know to dig a little bit deeper and to try and understand things even though I may not understand the words

That they’re speaking so yeah when I say it’s a bit of a difference between the north and the south of Italy is like what do you think of the south of Italy think of you know people hanging there washing off their balcony and you can

See it from the streets and I just think of the example of Sicily when I went to Sicily and it was like all the old buildings and you know even though in the north there’s a lot of old buildings you know throughout the entire entire easily there’s old buildings

But in the north you know you don’t really see that you know the washing hanging off people’s lives outside from the streets and things like that whereas in places like Sicily and you know smaller towns in the south of Italy like the very very south of Italy you see

That kind of thing and it’s just kind of like I’m a traditional way of living but in saying that though in the north of Italy they do still have like lots of street markets and things like that which I found to be you know it’s glad traditional I guess like wholesome way

To live and like you know you go out a couple of days per week and you go to the fresh fruit vegetable markets and it’s like you know all the people the local you know butchers and people who sell like fruit and vegetables and and therefore like they’re so like no local

Produce and I don’t know I just found that to be so wholesome and that’s kind of something that links all officially it’s like you know there’s little markets they have such a passion for food and it really shines through despite the differences between you know different traditions and things like

That which I found to be really beautiful and really quite interesting that’s something that I miss a lot about Italy actually it’s like you know the different ways of life and now it’s kind of a lot a lot slower and slower paced and things like that the next thing that

I want to talk about is family life so one example that comes to my mind and I guess I am talking about like anecdotes here like learn my own personal stories and experiences but that’s really all I have to go off so I’m just going to talk

About this example in terms of a family life it’s like because I spent a lot of time in the south of Italy and I stayed with my boyfriend and his family there they live in a really really small town called Palacios Accio which is in basilicata in the

South of italy and it’s one of those places where you can literally walk anywhere like you can walk from one side of challenge the other and everyone’s house is like really close together and things like that sir everyone knows everyone and you know that means also

That a lot of the people in the town that workplace is really close as well like within walking distance so one thing that was really really nice was that a lot of the time the family the whole family would come back and you know from work on their lunch break and

That all sit at home eat lunch together you know the whole family was there for example so I found that to be really really nice and just like that family dynamic that family life is different in the south because of that reason because you know the challenge tend to be a lot

Smaller compared to the north you say if you live in Milan where it’s a little bit tricky you know to come home you can’t really just come home for an hour for lunch you know unless you happen to look really really close to your workplace for example which is less

Likely as it is like a bigger city and things like that so that’s another thing that I noticed was a difference between the north and the south but visually another thing that I noticed was universities so even though you know there are students who go to universities in more southern parts of

Italy most of the universities are in Italy are in the north of Italy or like central to the north of Italy so a lot of students from the South actually travel from the south to the north and stay there and live there for you know

Three years or four years to study so in terms of the university life it’s quite different um you know students at hold at school you know when you go to study like you you know for more opportunities and things like that if you don’t want to necessarily work in like agricultural sector or

Things like that if you want to study economics or psychology or finance or anything like that a lot of them tend to go to the north of Italy to do that sorry in terms of university life that’s one other difference that I noticed well as depending on you know what kind of

Work you want to do what kind of thing you want to study a lot of southerners tend to move to just study there’s more you know universities they’re generally more like work opportunities and things like that there the next thing you want to talk about is rules and regulations

Now this one is it made me laugh because again talking about my own personal experience from the north to the south well I guess it’s it depends as well like in the south if you’re in a really really small town like in the back streets things like that a lot of them

Don’t wear seatbelts in the car which I always like always would anyway like oh it’s just like you know it’s second nature to put your seatbelt on when you’re driving around in the car so it’s just every time I would get in the car in the south I would always like put my

Seatbelt on but when we went in like the really really really small parts of town we were just like driving around the corner kind of thing a lot of them like you don’t wear seatbelts and the road rules are I guess a lot more lenient compared to the north of Italy even

Though you know there are road rules obviously Italians just tend to be a little bit more what’s the word gung-ho on the roads but in saying that though they are you know quite good and quite experienced drivers so yeah that’s one difference I noticed between the north and the south of Italy in terms of like

Driving and like rules and regulations nough tend to be you know on in the northern Italy hit big cities obviously they tend to be more like police officers around and things like that so yeah the next thing that I’m going to talk about is weather so in terms of where the differences

Between the north and the south of Italy in general the north doesn’t get as hot as the south of Italy like their summers aren’t as hot even though they are quite hot like Milan get stinking hot because it doesn’t get any wind like there’s no breeze I think

Correct me if I’m wrong but I’m pretty sure it’s because the Alps because it’s so close to the Alps like in the north of Italy and like the Switzerland and things like that it kind of blocks any breeze or wind and the kind of area so

It does get quite hot in Milan but if that was a breeze it wouldn’t be nearly as hot whereas in the south of Italy they tend to have like warmer summers and even like just looking at the people from on the north and the south of Italy

A lot of them from the south have like you know dhaka features they have like darker complexions a lot of the time even darker eyes and darker hair so that’s what I’m going to end today’s video guys I really hope you enjoyed it give it a thumbs up if you did make sure

To subscribe to any videos every week and I’ll see you very soon in my next one bye