Italy is also famous for deli meats. I’m going to hazard a guess that not every Italian is buying raw meat and then preparing traditional dishes from scratch with it using only the freshest of natural ingredients etc.

No of course, but a whole prosciutto package is very little (100g). There aren't enough calories in a single package to make you fat. Way easier to attribute the problem to pasta. Eating that lunch and dinner, if you make it using non-veggies a pasta dish can easily be more than 600 calories (and that also depends on how much is eaten).

Prosciutto is often eaten with melon, or with figs, so yeah it's processed meat, but then it's eaten with fiber and healthy micronutrients.

Mozzarella could be a problem too (center of Italy), eating a mozzarella with tomato and basil (caprese) is simple, yet the mozzarella is loaded with calories.

Then again, most dishes in Italy use natural ingredients, but that doesn't spare you from getting fat. Take pasta with egg and guanciale (carbonara) is a ton of calories even if home made

I wonder if biscotti is the real deal. In Italy, kids have breakfast with a cup of milk and X amount of biscuits, those are sugar, flour, egg, milk and something else to give flavor. Eat 4 of those and it's 200 calories. Eat 8 of those and it starts to get scary (400 calories) + 1 cup of milk = ~550 calories.

I did not realize this is mostly in the SOUTH.

This would be funny to hear for you, but to become fat in the south you just have to have a good appetite: most moms, grandmas and aunts will cook you INCREDIBLE meals (very flavorful stuff), but of course it will also be loaded with fats.

The likelihood of this being a problem related to preprocessed stuff is low