Premier Matteo Renzi said Friday that southern Italy could help the entire country return to economic growth.
"If the south starts moving again, we will start off again," Premier Matteo Renzi said in Sicily Friday at the start of a tour of the southern Mezzogiorno.
"There is a part of Italy that runs faster than Germany, but there is another that doesn't manage to show all its creativity and the capacity it has," the premier said at a gathering of Sicilian mayors at the Catania city hall.
"The south has a history of mistaken choices that can be changed, there is no room any more for those people who say 'one can't do it, we won't make it'," he added.
Before leaving Rome for Sicily, Calabria and Campania, Renzi tweeted that "Italy has many problems but also many beautiful stories. I am not going to close myself up in the palaces, I am going to listen to people, as always".
Renzi also spoke out against the legacy of organised crime saying Italians have changed.
"Legality is a positive element in our mentality. Twenty years ago people had a tendency, then they changed their behaviour, and we have to be even more ready than they were to change".
The premier urged the assembled mayors "to restore hope to the communities." "For a mayor an unemployed person is not an Istat statistic but a personal and family drama that he knows personally," Renzi said.
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