@Deplorable_Degenerate @Humpleupagus @LordOfTheKangs @Shadowman311 Kinda, southerners have an history with foreigners, they'll never be liked there, and they're profoundly structured around the family as a societal structure.
However, Italians had much less influence and have a wider variety of languages, italian, as a language, exist from less than a couple centuries.
If you know spanish, you'd know (while still understanding most of what they say) a Catalunyan from an Asturian.
In Italy a northerner and a southerner would hardly understand each other.
Some italian dialects have foreign influences, spanish doesn't have that, because they were exceptionally harsh at punishing those who butchered the language purity.