NAPLES, Italy — Spring is here. In southern Italy, the sun is shining, the sky is blue and the weather is balmy. Orange blossom fragrances mingle with wafts of jasmine. The food is good, the wine is inexpensive, the locals are friendly and beauty is all around. But where are the tourists?

The Amalfi Coast, south of Naples, is still a magnet for wealthy Russians and romantic Americans. Yet Naples itself is a tourist wasteland, and the rest of southern Italy is largely vacationer-free.

Only 13 percent of tourists who come to Italy go to the Mezzogiorno, as the south is known. The rest head for the center and north of Italy, or other Mediterranean countries altogether. German airports sent 223 flights to Spain’s Balearic Islands in one week last summer, and only 17 to southern Italy.

Defensive Italians, particularly from the prosperous north, will tell you that no one goes to the south because there’s nothing worth seeing (they’re wrong). But the lack of tourists in places like Sicily or Calabria is indicative of a larger, nationwide failure by the country to take advantage of its most precious resources — in this case, the region’s natural and cultural beauty.