by Iris Origo
I was fascinated in those early days by the survival of some pagan ceremonies and customs, often incorporated, as the Church has sometimes wisely done, into Christian rites. Among the most beautiful ceremonies of the year were the services, after a day of fasting, of the quattro tempora, which were held at the beginning of each of the four seasons, and the ‘rogation’ processions, in which the priest, carrying a crucifix and holy relics, followed by the congregation chanting litanies, walked through the fields, imploring a blessing upon the crops—the women, with black veils upon their heads, joining in the responses, the children straggling in and out and picking wild flowers among the wheat. Both these rites dated back to the days of ancient Rome5 and were still being practised during our first years at La Foce, but they have now come to an end as part of the Church ritual, though I am told that some of the older peasants still hold a brief procession in the fields, and leave a rough wooden cross standing among the ripening wheat.
Other customs, too, linking pagan and Christian piety, were still practised during our first years in the Val d’Orcia, and some of them still survive. On St. Anthony’s Day (St. Anthony the Abbot, patron of animals, not his namesake of Padua) the farmers would bring an armful of hay to church to be blessed by the saint, so that for the whole year their beasts might not lack fodder, and a few of the older men still do so today. On Monte Amiata, on the Eve of the Ascension, some women used to put milk on their window-sills which they would drink the next day, in the hope that swallows would come to bless it. This is perhaps somehow connected with the custom still observed on this side of the valley, of not milking any sheep on Ascension Day. And even now, however deeply imbued with Communism a family may be, each one of them will bring a bunch of olive-branches to be blessed by the priest on Palm Sunday.
On Monte Amiata, too, at Abbadia San Salvatore—where chestnuts form a large part of the poor man’s diet—a procession used to walk through the streets on St. Mark’s Day singing:
San Marcu, nostru avvucatu,
fa che nella castagna non c’entri il bacu.
Trippole e lappole, trippole e lappole, ora pro nobis.6
And only a few years ago a peasant of Rocca d’Orcia, after saying the rosary with his family, used to add an Our Father and a Hail Mary to a saint whom you will find in no calendar, called ‘San Fisco Fosco’, a terrible saint who lived in the middle of the sea and hated the poor, and therefore had to be propitiated.7
Some other practices, too, were quite frankly pagan in origin. There are still both witch-doctors and witches in the villages across the valley, and to one of these, a few years ago, two of our workmen took the bristles of some of our swine, which the vet had not been able to cure of swine-fever. The bristles were examined, a ‘little powder’ was strewn over them, and some herbs were given, to be burnt in their sties—after which the pigs did recover. The same was sometimes done for cattle. There was also a very efficient witch at Campiglia d’Orcia (now dead, but I believe she has a successor) to whom one could take a garment or a hair of anyone suffering from some affliction that the doctor had been unable to heal, and which was presumed to be caused by the evil eye, and she—with the help of some card-reading and some potions—would cure him. Sometimes, however, trouble would be caused by her prescriptions, since two of our tenants’ families embarked on a long feud, merely owing to the fact that she had told the daughter of one of them, that one of her neighbours ‘wished her ill’. For all such cures, it was pointed out to me, faith was necessary: those who came to mock went away unhealed.
Divining of the future, too, was done by some of our older peasants. One of them, an old man who is still alive, specialised in foretelling, in winter, the weather for each month of the following year, by placing in twelve onion skins, named for each month of the year, little heaps of salt. These he would then carefully examine: the skins in which the salt had remained, represented the months of drought; those in which it had dissolved, those of rain.
The most interesting of our local superstitious practices, however—and probably the oldest, since it presumably had its origins in a very primitive form of nature-worship—was one that I myself have seen, that of the poccie lattaie (literally, milk-bearing udders). This took place in a secluded cave on our land, halfway up a very steep ravine, surrounded by dry clay cliffs, but in which a hidden spring, oozing down the walls of the cave, had formed something like stalactites, which had the shape of cows’ and goats’ udders or women’s breasts, each gently dripping a few drops of water. Here the farmers would bring their sterile cows and here, too, came nursing mothers who were losing their milk—and always, after they had tasted the water, their wish was granted. They brought with them, as gifts, seven fruits of the earth: a handful of wheat, barley, corn, rye, vetch, dried peas, and sometimes a saucer of milk.
After nearly half a century, distance has perhaps lent enchantment to these memories, but I must honestly admit that I can also recollect moments of great discouragement. I remember one grey autumn afternoon on which, having ridden on a small grey donkey to visit some remote farms (for there was as yet no road to the valley) I waited alone in a hollow, while Antonio and the fattore walked on to another farm. The cone-shaped clay hillocks in the midst of which I sat were so steep, and worn so bare by centuries of erosion, that even now no attempt has been made to grow anything upon them. Seated beside a tuft of broom—the only plant that will grow there—on ground as hard as a bone after the summer’s drought, I was entirely surrounded by these desolate hillocks: no tree, no patch of green, no trace of human habitation, except against the sky a half-ruined watch-tower, standing where perhaps an Etruscan tower had stood before it, and then a Lombard, rebuilt in the Middle Ages to play its part in a series of petty wars, and now inhabited only by a half-witted shepherd who sat at its foot, beside his ragged flock. Below me lay the fields beside the river—land potentially fertile, but then fallow, which would be flooded when the rains came by the encroaching river-bed. Against the sky, behind the black rocks of Radicofani, dark clouds were gathering for a storm, and, as the wind reached the valley, it raised little whirlpools of dust. Suddenly an overwhelming wave of longing came over me for the gentle, trim Florentine landscape of my childhood or for green English fields and big trees—and most of all, for a pretty house and garden to come home to in the evening. I felt the landscape around me to be alien, inhuman—built on a scale fit for demi-gods and giants, but not for us. How could we ever succeed in taming it, I asked myself, and bring fertility to this desert? Would our whole life go by in a struggle against insuperable odds?
Perhaps my early discouragement was also partly caused by the fact that our own house was not yet habitable. During our absence on our honeymoon, under the direction of our architect and old friend Cecil Pinsent, some indispensable work had been done. A skylight had been opened in the ceiling of the central room, to let in some light; another room had been lined with bookshelves; all had been cleaned and distempered and some open fireplaces, with chimneypieces of travertine from the local quarries of Rapolano, had been added in the library and dining-room; there was even a bathroom, although, as yet, in the dry season, very little water. But that was all. The cases and crates containing all our furniture and belongings were piled up in the dining-room, unlabelled, so that when we began to look for such necessities as sheets or cooking-pans, we would come instead upon a dinner-set of fine Sèvres or a large group of bronze buffaloes, sculpted by Antonio’s father. We settled temporarily in a maid’s room upstairs, and set to work. In a few weeks the house was more or less habitable: the red bricks on the floor had been polished and waxed, the furniture was in place (I did not like all of it, but it was what we had), the windows were hung with chintz or linen curtains, the bookshelves were half filled. (This was the only year of my life in which I have had more than enough book-space.) But there was still, of course, no electric light or telephone, and my greatest wish, a garden, was plainly unattainable till we could get some more water, which was fa
r more urgently needed for the farms. We both agreed that any plans for the house and garden must give way, for the present, to the needs of the land and the tenants. Anything that the crops brought in, as well as any gifts from relations, went straight into the land, and I remember that my present to Antonio, on the first anniversary of our wedding-day, was a pair of young oxen which were led under his window, adorned with gilded horns and with silver stars pasted on their flanks. It is sad to have to add that they were such a bad buy that they had to be sold again as soon as possible.
If there was much satisfaction in these efforts, there was also a certain sense of frustration, which was increased (as our advisers had foreseen) by the passive resistance of our contadini to any innovation. Our land was worked on the system which had been almost universal in Tuscany for nearly six centuries, the mezzadria,—a profit-sharing contract by which the landowner built the farmhouses, kept them in repair, and supplied the capital for the purchase of half the live-stock, seed, fertilisers, machinery, etc., while the tenant—called mezzadro, colono or contadino—contributed, with the members of his family, the labour. When the crops were harvested, owner and tenant (the date I am writing about is 1924) shared the profits in equal shares. In bad years, however, it was the landowner who bore the losses and lent the tenant what was needed to buy his share of seed, cattle, and fertilisers, the tenant paying back his loan when a better year came.
In larger estates, such as La Foce, which consisted of a number of farms, there was generally a central home-farm, the fattoria, usually adjoining the landowner’s house, where the estate manager, the fattore, lived with his family and assistants, and from which the whole place was run. It was the owner (or his fattore) who established the rotations, deciding what was to be grown on each farm, what new livestock or machinery should be purchased, and what repairs were necessary, and it was in the fattoria office that the complicated ledgers and account-books were kept, one for each farm, in which the contadino’s share of all profits and expenses were set down, and also the loans made to him, in bad years, by the central administration. It was in the fattoria cellars and granaries that the owner’s share of the produce was stored; it was there that the wine and oil were made, that the peasants came to unload their ox-carts, to go over their accounts, and to air their requests and grievances—and only those who have lived in Tuscany can know what a slow, repetitive business this can be. The fattoria was, in short, the hub of the life of the estate.
* * *
The origins of the mezzadria system are very easy to describe. After the breaking up of the great feudal estates at the end of the twelfth century, most of the impoverished landowners moved to the rising trading cities (Pisa and Siena, Lucca and Florence), exchanging their former castles and lands for a single grim tower in a city street, while their starving serfs, free or half-free, whose fields and houses had been destroyed by an endless succession of petty wars, also fled to the towns, to find work and bread. Many of them joined one of the guilds, and some eventually turned into skilled craftsmen or opened a small shop, or even became notaries or barbers. In a couple of generations they had saved up a small hoard and since, sooner or later, the Tuscan has always been drawn back to the soil, their first instinct was to put it back into the land again. This was not only true of great merchants like the Bardi or Rucellai, but also of small tradesmen and notaries, who, since they could neither afford to pay overseers nor to leave the town themselves, set a labourer—a colono—to work the land for them, drawing up a very simple profit-sharing contract, which gradually, during the second half of the trecento, came into universal use in Tuscany. The great feudal domain thus turned into a number of small profit-sharing farms or poderi, and the serf of feudal days became a mezzadro or colono. So matters remained for five and a half centuries.
The mezzadria contracts—patti colonici—that we found in use at La Foce were almost identical with those of the fourteenth century, even down to the specification of the small customary gifts from each tenant to the landowner of a couple of fowls or a brace of pigeons, or so many dozens of eggs, on certain feast-days.
Life on each farm, for obvious practical reasons, was still in the patriarchal tradition. The family had to be large, to provide enough hands to work the land, and its head, the capoccia, ruled over his sons and daughters, his sons-in-law and daughters-in-law, with a rule of iron. ‘Tristi quelle case’, said a proverb, ‘dove la gallina canta e il gallo tace’.8 The capoccia’s wife, however, the massaia, had plenty of power in her hands, too. Together she and her husband assigned the work to each member of the family, chose their sons’ brides and, as soon as the grandchildren were old enough to stagger into the woods as small shepherds and swineherds, sent them off to do their share. This manner of life, too, was to come to an end during our lifetime but it was in full swing when we first arrived.
In theory, the great point of the mezzadria was that, though landowner and mezzadro might and did differ on many points, their fundamental interests were alike and, indeed, the partnership could only work in so far as this was so. Certainly, in early days, the sacrifices were not all on one side. We read in the Ricordanze of Odorigo di Credi, a small Florentine landowner of the fourteenth century, that in order to buy the seed for the next year’s wheat he had to pawn his own gown. Moreover there has always been a strong Tuscan tradition with regard to a landlord’s responsibilities towards his tenants. ‘Aid and counsel them’, wrote a fourteenth-century Florentine, Giovanni Morelli, in his Ricordi, ‘whenever any insult or injury is done to them, and be not tardy or slothful in doing so.’9 Any good landowner of our own time, too, until a very few years ago, would have felt this to be his duty; and many of them, if obliged to send away one of their peasants because his family could no longer work the land, would have felt pangs of conscience similar to those felt in 1407 by Ser Lapo Mazzei, a notary and small landowner of Prato. ‘He is so solicitous’, he wrote about his farmer, ‘at the plough and such a fine pruner of vines and so ingenious that I know not how to make a change… and my cowardly or compassionate soul (I wonder which it is) does not know how to say to Moco: “Look for another farm.”’10 A conscientious landowner, too, always placed the welfare of his fields before his personal interests: a considerable proportion of each year’s profits went back into the land. If he did this, the tenant, too, profited, and when a hard year came, there was some margin to fall back upon.
Unfortunately, however, then as now, not all landlords were conscientious, and the bad aspect of the system, from the first, was that an idle or self-indulgent landowner, who did not repair and stock his farms, crippled his peasants, too; while, on the other hand, lazy or dishonest contadini could very swiftly ruin a farm. This was, I think, the origin of the mutual suspicion and dislike which, down the centuries, has all too often come to the surface in the relationship between the contadino and his padrone. Indeed, in some ways the relationship had been better—or at least simpler—in the old feudal days. The feudal lord had often been cruel and had made hard demands upon his serfs; but for all that, he had been much more like them than the new city-folk. To the shopkeeper or lawyer the peasant was merely a dumb brute, who often retorted with the weapons of the under-dog: sullen resentment and craft. Many domestic chronicles and books of precepts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries testify to this mutual distrust, in accents so similar to those which I have heard upon the lips of some of their descendants today, as to be positively startling. Paolo da Certaldo, for instance, a Florentine merchant, warned his fellow townsmen never to visit their lands on feast-days, when their peasants were gathered together on the threshing-floor, ‘for they all drink and are heated with wine and have their own arms, and there is no reasoning with them. Each one thinks himself a king and wants to speak, for they spend all the week with no-one to talk to but their beasts. Go rather to their fields when they are at work—and thanks to the plough, hoe or spade, you will find them humble and meek.’11
Another prudent landowner, Gio
vanni Morelli, gave very similar advice: ‘Go round the farm field by field with your peasant, reprove him for work ill-done, estimate the harvest of wheat, wine, barley, oil and fruit, and compare everything with last year’s crops … Trust him not, keep your eye always upon him, and examine the crops everywhere—in the fields, on the threshing-floor and on the scales. Yield not to him in anything, for he will only think that you were bound to do so … And above all, trust none of them.’12