15
No words descriptive of wretchedness can portray the utter deprivation
of the peasantry in these southern provinces, or the way in which large
families are huddled together, with their pigs and fowls, eternally
unwashed and covered with vermin, to which in time they become
impervious, like the beasts themselves.
Augustus Hare, “Cities of Southern Italy and Sicily”
THE PEASANTS OF THE TAVOLIERE became victims of latifondismo (land ownership), a term derived from the Latin word for the vast estates of Roman times that had been worked by slaves. Even if the Tavoliere men’s life on the former estates of the crown and the church or on the sheep runs had been wretched enough, it is no exaggeration to say that now they were reduced to slavery.
The introduction of free trade resulted in the collapse of Southern Italy’s factories and textile mills. Overnight, land became the only safe investment. Anyone who had any money or could borrow it rushed to buy when the confiscated estates were sold off, changing the Tavoliere out of recognition. For the first time in centuries it went under the plough, huge latifondi (estates) being created. The province of Foggia became known as ‘The Apulian Texas’. No attempt was made to form a new class of peasant proprietors, the buyers ranging from finance companies to tradesmen, many from Northern Italy. The enormous new farms were let on very short leases, run by massari whose sole concern was to make money as fast as possible, without worrying about the soil, let alone the workers. Grain yields were miserably low, wine of the poorest quality. Because the buyers had exhausted their credit, there was no capital for development, the purchase money going north. Far from “liberating” Apulia, as often claimed, theRisorgimento reduced much of it to semi-colonial status, especially the Tavoliere.
Augustus Hare, not the most compassionate of men, was horrified by what he saw. “Much of the misery is due to the immense size of the great farms (latifondi), which are worked by gangs under an overseer, and to the absenteeism of landlords... Their vast do-mains are managed by fattori [farmers] or rented by mercanti di campagna [merchants of the campaign], the sole intermediaries between the proprietors and the peasantry, of whom they are often as much the cruel oppressors as the slave owners in South America.”
Most Tavoliere labourers worked as diggers, zappatori, boys as young as eight spreading fertiliser or killing mice. Hired by the day, before dawn they lined up in the local town’s main piazza (city square), hoping to be hired by the massaro’s overseer, many of whom demanded a bribe to take them on. They then walked as far as twelve kilometres, to work from dawn to dusk, after which they walked back; at harvest time they slept in the fields or in dirty sheds. Their food was bread and pasta, broad beans, a little oil and plants picked on the way to work, vegetable plots having vanished with the common land; meat was eaten only at Easter and Christmas. It was a way of life that broke a man by the time he was fifty, when he became unfit for work in the fields. There was no poor relief, the system operated by the Church having disappeared with the monasteries.
There was competition for even this miserable employment, however, from migrant workers like those seen at Foggia by Charles Yriarte in 1876:
You would have thought the city’s entire population sleeps under the stars, when we walked through interminable rows of sleepers wrapped in cloaks on pavements turned into dormitories... Natives told us that these unwanted lazzaroni [homeless] had been camping on them for three days; they were all peasants from the Abruzzi, come for the harvest... I was able to watch them at my leisure, and they were thin and haggard if well built, dark-skinned; many shook with fever and had a greenish hue; their only belongings consisted of a small bag and a big, worn-down sickle with a very thin blade. All day long they wandered listlessly through the streets, their eyes lack-lustre and expressionless.
A small class of skilled workers, the annaroli, consisting of ploughmen, vine-dressers, shepherds and carters, were recruited from outside the Tavoliere, so that they would have no kinsmen or friends in the labour gangs, and hired annually instead of daily. They had good pay – an ordinary labourer’s wage could not even buy the bare necessities of life – and vegetable plots. From their ranks were recruited the overseers and estate guards, who were mounted, armed with rifles, cudgels and whips, and accompanied by notoriously vicious dogs.
When American wheat began to be imported in large quantities in the late 1870s, many landowners went over to vines. Minute plots were let on twenty-five year leases to day-labourers, who somehow found the money to buy them and time to plant and dress vines – the owner’s overseer making sure the conversion was done the way his master wanted. When the lease expired, the land reverted to the owner, turned into a thriving vineyard at no cost to himself. He then had it worked by day-labourers, whose conditions were only marginally better than in the wheat-fields.
A sub-human existence as a day-labourer was the sole occupation open to four out of five Tavoliere men. Not all accepted it tamely. Overseers and estate-guards were knifed as they slept or had their faces slashed with cut-throat razors, many never daring to go out of doors without a revolver. The fortified masserie (fortified farms, see chapter 27) were occasionally attacked, the occupants being murdered and the buildings going up in flames. Some labourers became brigands, fighting battles with the carabinieriespecially peasants known as ‘ciccivuzzi’ who had lost their land because of enclosures.
Cerignola at the end of the nineteenth century has been called ‘the company town’. Behind the corso (main street) on which stood the land-owners palazzi were the worst slums in Apulia. The streets were muddy paths that doubled as sewers, giving off a sickening stench, the houses hovels with ten people in a single, filthy, windowless room, often underground. Here lived the labourers who formed the bulk of the city’s population, paying exorbitant rents. From December to March, when there was no work, they stayed in bed, the only furniture. Diseases such as malaria, trachoma, syphilis and leprosy flourished. The death rate was the highest in Apulia, the chief causes in 1905 being cholera, enteritis and bronchitis, though tuberculosis took its toll. Starvation was the tenth commonest cause of mortality.
Most of the new landowners were ex-tradesmen, the old Apulian nobles making way for people with titles purchased from the House of Savoy or the Pope. Frank Snowden (in “Violence and Great Estates in Southern Italy”) writes, “as parvenu nobility with freshly acquired titles, the Apulian proprietors assumed the grand manner. On the rare inspection tours that owners made of their property, for instance, they insisted that the labourers should bow and kiss their hands.” To such men their workers were “wild unwashed people who lived underground with their animals, and spoke an impenetrable dialect. The workers believed in magic and committed savage crimes.”
The men in the labour gangs saw the new landlords as thieves who had stolen the common lands where they once grew vegetables and kept a pig or a goat. Enclosures had begun during the French occupation, continuing a little under the restored monarchy, but accelerated drastically under the Risorgimento. By 1898 only 6,000 acres remained. “They cannot accept the thought of having been robbed for ever of fields they regard as part of their very being,” a journalist observed: “Again and again they revisit them, like some Irish farmer’s children brooding over the cabin with a long dead fire from which the family has been evicted.”
After decades of bad farming, by 1900 the Tavoliere was producing less and less wheat, a crop fetching lower prices every year. Vineyards were destroyed by phylloxera; what wine was made faced a French tariff war. Employment was harder to find and at Cerignola starving men fell dead in the streets. All over Apulia rioters shouted for work, bread and a guaranteed wage at the start of the day. The first strike took place at Foggia in 1901 and ‘peas-ants leagues’ (unions) were founded. Their members, who called themselves “syndicalists”, demanded the replacement of landlords by workers’ co-operatives. In their few free moments, they tried to look like borghesi, wearing tattered frock-coats and battered bowlers instead of the old Apulian folkdress. Yet it was almost impossible for them to air their grievances in the parliament at Rome. Men were given the vote only if they had served in the army or could read and write; most Apulians were too undernourished to be accepted for military service or were illiterate. In any case, the ruling Liberal party was hand in glove with the latifondisti.
Even so, emigration was reducing the supply of cheap labour. “The roles are now reversed, and while landlords are impoverished, the rich emigrant buys up the farms or makes his own terms for work to be done, wages being trebled” Norman Douglas wrote with considerable exaggeration. Besides emigration, another escape from life on the Tavoliere was work on building the new Apulian aqueduct, which began in 1906, although contractors paid starvation wages. To some extent, the effects of emigration and the aqueduct were offset by labourers from the Abruzzi and Basilicata.
The new unions’ demands meant bankruptcy for the latifondisti. They fought back, breaking strikes with hired thugs and calling in troops, 2,000 of whom were needed to crush a rising at Cerignola. They welcomed the outbreak of war in 1915; wheat prices rose dramatically, there were government contracts and subsidies, and it forced into the fields women who could be paid less than men. When Italy was nearly defeated in 1917, they staved off revolution by promising to share out the latifondi and restore common rights as soon as the War was over.
The landowners went back on their word in 1918. But Apulian soldiers came home hoping for a Russian-style revolution. Very soon, bands armed with scythes and mattocks were terrorising the Tavoliere, and many other rural areas as well, slaughtering live-stock, burning masserie and lynching overseers. All workers demanded impossibly high wages.
In 1920, labourers from Cerignola occupied the land of a young ex-army officer, Giuseppe Cardona, burning his grain and smashing his wine vats. In response he set up a Fascist cell, recruiting veterans from the trenches. Union activists were beaten up, forced to drink quarts of castor oil or chained naked to trees while their offices were burned down. The authorities openly supported Cardona and by 1922 he controlled all the provice of Foggia. The unions had been broken. Overseers on the Tavoliere now wore black-shirts and the latifondi would survive until Mussolini’s land reforms of the later 1920s and the 1930s.