amc252 that's very interesting indeed, I love such posts. I have indeed noticed that Italians are very different across regions but I have never imagined there can be such a granularity even within the same city 😲
As I mentioned in another discussion, as a brand new owner of an Alfa Romeo (never owned an Italian car before and owning an Alfa was my child's dream but that's yet another topic...) I started participating in an Italian forum because, expectedly, that's where there's a lot of information and Alfa owners (I use auto-translation though) and sometimes I notice how people bite on each other, like they don't want to help so much, as to outsmart the peer and even mock him for how stupid he is. I think that's a common behavior on many forums but it's somehow more pronounced there. What's more, one of them told a story about how a German tourist noticed his Alfa and expressed genuine praise about how beautiful it was, asked questions, etc. and other Italian members said something along the lines of "Yeah, that's how other Europeans are, unlike us Italians who can only envy each other" which made an impression on me. You kind of corroborate it. To a certain degree Bulgarians are the same, however the difference is we don't have a history of different countries/tribes or any historical division. It's just that we're a bit too nihilistic, jealous and negative (which in itself might be a Slavic trait).
As to Italy, I've been mostly to Northern and Central Italy, we've made a road trip with my wife many years ago which is when we've seen a lot of places but we also occasionally travel with low-cost flights to single destinations. I've never been to Rome or the southernmost parts though. From what we've visited, we mostly loved the Tuscany region (especially Siena) for its historic beauty, however more recently we've been to Bari and we fell in love with it. If there's a city in the world I would love to live in, that would be it!
And in contrast, our most recent trip was to Naples and while there's definitely no better pizza on earth than the Neapolitan style Margherita, we've been rather disappointed with how dirty, overcrowded and poor most of the city looked. It's actually the first time we visit a popular destination in Italy that we rather disliked. Hopefully there's not people from Naples here who can take it personally... 🙏🏻
