It’s another international episode. Bet you can’t guess from the title where we’re off to this week.

Elena Magrini is a researcher at the Centre for Cities, and a native of Bergamo, a city just outside Milan. Her colleague Gabriele Piazza is a native of Palermo, which, 900km to the south, is the largest city on Sicily. Since the Centre has staff from both the far north and far south of Italy, it seemed like an excellent opportunity to talk about Europe’s other big north south divide.

During the course of our conversation we cover how local and regional government works in Italy; why populism looks so different at different ends of the country; and why Italian governments don’t tend to last for very long. My interviewees also try and, I fear, fail to explain to me what happened in Italy’s recent election.

Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge.

Skylines is supported by 100 Resilient Cities. Pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation, 100RC is dedicated to helping cities around the world become more resilient to the physical, social and economic challenges that are a growing part of the 21st century.

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