Sicily Governor Nello
Musumeci said Thursday that tourists from northern Italy had
better not visit the island after two tourists who had come from
the north tested positive for the coronavirus.
"Sicily is not a land in which you can't disembark and land:
but we need controls because it is not possible that the two
cases of positivity to the coronavirus concern tourists from the
north, because there is no hotspot on our island," he said.
"It would be better for tourists from the north not to come".
Italian media have headlined 'Revenge of the South' over
reports that northerners are no longer welcome in the south,
after past years of prejudice against southerners in the north.
The coronavirus outbreak started in Lombardy, the affluent
northern region where hundreds of thousands of southerners
migrated to during the boom years from the mid 50s to the mid
70s.
More recently Neapolitan soccer fans have had to endure years
of chants of Come on Vesuvius and Come on Cholera from northern
fans.
The pejorative term for a southerner, 'terrone', or southern
yokel or clodhopper, is still in use in the north.
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