"Lavali col fuoco" and Mount Vesuvius, is Google racist?

Good morning GEC, today I want to talk about something really funny that is object of some talking here in Italy lately.

A little background: Italy is very splitted in terms of culture from northern Italy, central Italy, and southern Italy, this brings a lot of hate and racism between cities. Precicely, in southern Italy there is the city of Naples that is subject to heavy racism from virtually everyone else who's not from Naples itself. As you probably know, Naples is located just close to the Mount Vesuvius, a dangerous and quiescent volcano. The sentence "Lavali col fuoco" is a VERY racist sentence, that everyone here has heard (and probably used?) many times in his life, referred to the Mount Vesuvius and the citizens of Naples, it translates literally to: "Wash them with fire", its true meaning is probably something close to "(Vesuvius) wash them with lava".

Now, why am I talking about this? Well, if you input the search "lavali col fuoco" on Google Earth or Google Maps, it actually directs you to Mount Vesuvius, as showed in this picture I created myself:



Obviously Google is not racist. We all know this is just an algorithm that is associating the words "lavali col fuoco" with the Mount Vesuvius because of frequent input queries with all these words connected (or maybe a mark created by the Google Map Maker service), but we also know that there is a lot of ignorance about internet (expecially in the south Italy), and everyone is just going full mad about this.

I actually find this very funny and interesting and wanted to share with you as its something so "local" that I think its very difficult to make it to any news outside of Italy.

Oh, that is unfortunate, ndrqu!  You might want to report this faux pas HERE.  By the way, I can confirm that Google is not racist.  I think a lot of people around the world are aware of prejudice there against Naples and Southern Italy in general.Regional bigotries happen in most countries, the US included. 

As you probably know, most of our Italian immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were from the south. The culture they brought with them is what most Americans think of as "Italian." I think southern Italy would seem vaguely familiar to us!