The northern Italian, 'Padanlan' identity, fostered by the Lega Nord, is rooted in the long-standing tradition. In political and scholarly discourse, of casting regional differences within Italy in terms of a North-South geographic divide. Trying to come to terms, in the late 1980s and 1990s, with Italy's (real or presumed) inadequacies such as inefficient government, corruption, and organized crime - the North became associated with the virtues of modernity and the South with the vices of un-modernity. It was not only politicians but also social scientists, who fostered and perpetuated this conceptualization of the North-South divide, thus imposing a normative hierarchy between the two parts of the country. The author provides a new, systematic and interdisciplinary approach that reinterprets the premises behind Italy's imagined geography or modernity.