Less travelled than northern Italy, the south has kept many of its secrets. Hot and suggestive, it has been inhabited as long as the mind can imagine. Surrounded by water and jutting precariously out into four different seas, tides have brought in ship after ship full of pirates and marauders. Earthquakes have ravaged its interior, and droughts nearly starved its people. But as inhospitable as it may seem, it has also sustained human life for nearly a million years. (continue...)