Nord

The Nord — the industrialised, civic North. Its character was set by the medieval comuni and maritime republics — Venice, Genoa, Milan, Savoyard Piedmont — that pioneered banking, the Renaissance and later industry, and crucially it was Piedmont that conquered and unified Italy in 1861, so the North joined as the unifier, not the unified. Prosperous, Europe-oriented and home to Italian banking, fashion and industry from Venetian sea-power to the Fiat Turin, it is the productive engine of the country, with its own dialects and a risotto-and-polenta table across an Alpine-to-Po-plain landscape. Resentment at subsidising the poorer South fed the regionalist, at times separatist, politics of the Lega.

• Existed: 1150 CE – present
• Type: Entity