Policies that encourage local entrepreneurialism, urban regeneration and the efficient overall management of immigration from outside the EU are seen to be critical to southern Italian society. Anthropological fieldwork in Naples and its region, suggests that this requirement is not met in today’s scenario, which is marred by stereotype and bad governance. Pardo shows that ordinary Neapolitans’ entrepreneurialism is both strong and frustrated on the one hand by normative complication and distorted policies, particularly regarding access to credit and therefore capital and, on the other hand, by the double standards applied by a local governance that panders to the selective interests—via small but vociferous lobbies—of their constituency. In democracy, rulers’ recognition—in policy and legislation—of the structural value of grassroots culture and actions qualifies both participation and representation. As these two fundamentals remain unfulfilled in this ethnography, the gap between governance and citizenship appears to have become unbridgeable.