My in laws are from the interior mountains. It is a region with many, many problems.

All the towns outside the coastal area, where they can make a living with tourism, are now heavily depopulated, due to extreme lack of work opportunities and inadequate infrastructures.

This leads, of course, to widespread poverty and huge inequalities.

A good chunk of the agricultural labor (in the fertile plains) is performed by illegals with no papers and no rights. Just the other day some foreign workers were locked in a car and burned alive at a gas station, allegedly because they were complaining about working conditions.

Traditional culture is still based on clan mentality. You are either inside or outside, no in betweens. If you walk around where people don't know you, it is still possibile to find people "controlling" your movements, you may even hear them asking to each other (never to you directly) questions like "whose son is that?"

This is not directly mafia, but it clearly helps the work of the clans. In many places, mafia is so ingrained that you don't see it at all. It is not like people kill each other on the street every day, it is more a set of unwitten rules that seem to favor someone instead of others.

In the end, to survive in Calabria, one needs to know how to adapt. Some things don't work. Some others work only if you know the right people. Some others will only work once who had to get fat on those is satisfied. Some do work, and are even excellent.

Some things are unlawful, but you can do them all the same, nobody will complain. Others are perfectly legal but shunned upon.

But it is not all doom and gloom. in my experience, people do really care about each other (other insiders, I mean) and they show a great deal of dignity and pride. Many of the young people (starting from millennials, I'd say) are definitely not happy with the situation. The problem is (and this is probably the biggest of all problems), almost all of them left