by Iris Origo
For the other side of the picture we naturally have less evidence, so long as only the rich were literate, but already by the fifteenth century, some of the colono’s resentment had come to the surface in the following rhyme:
Noi ci stiamo tutto l’anno a lavorare
E lor ci stanno al fresco a meriggiare;
Perchè s’ha da dar loro mezzo ricolto,
Se n’abbiam la fatica tutta noi?13
And here are two other sayings, still in popular use, which reflect the feelings of the mezzadro only too plainly:
Ombra di noce e ombra di padrone
sono due ombre buggerone!14
and
Il bene dei padroni è come il vino del fiasco,
che la sera è buono e la mattina è guasto.15
All this hardly suggests an agreeable or stable human relationship, and it has often seemed to me extraordinary that it should have lasted without a break for nearly six centuries. One explanation is apparent if one looks at the Tuscan landscape: the system has produced a highly prosperous agriculture. Those terraced hills with their vineyards and olive-groves, those rich wheat-fields and orchards and vegetable-plots, speak for themselves: they show land as intensively cultivated and fertile as any in the world. But this prosperity is the result of centuries of unremitting hard work. Wherever the Tuscan countryman has been allotted a steep, stony patch of hillside, he has laboriously cleared away the tangled roots of ilex or scrub-oak, the bushes of juniper or myrtle, and dug up the heavy soil, the unwieldy stones and boulders; with the stones he has built, on even the steepest hillsides, little walls to support the terraces on which he could plant his olives and his vines. Selva del mi’ nonno, ulivi del mi’ babbo e vigna mia,16 so the saying runs. In three generations a bare hillside can become a garden.
In addition to this obvious explanation, I think that the duration of the mezzadria has a deeper psychological one. Its strength has lain in an unquestioning conviction on both sides (even with a good deal of grumbling) that the system was, on the whole, fair and equitable; it was this conviction that, for six centuries, made it work. A distinguished Tuscan economist of our own time—Jacopo Mazzei, who himself belonged to a family with a long tradition of responsible land-ownership—justly observed some years ago that the point was not the actual fairness or otherwise of the system itself, but ‘the conviction of its fairness’, which had given it ‘a stability and serenity unequalled in history’.17 On the day that this conviction began to be shaken, he said, the whole system would break down.
* * *
No such thoughts, however, crossed our mind when first we arrived at La Foce. We set to work, untroubled, within the familiar framework. Everything cried out to be done and, had it been possible, everything at once. Re-reading a paper which my husband read to a Florentine agricultural association, I Georgofili, I have found a summary of the work which, on his first arrival, he considered essential and immediate. Its main points were:
(1) To set up, on each farm, an eight-year rotation.18
(2) To start ditching, draining, and the building of dykes and dams on the steep clay hills, and of banks in the river-bed in the valley, so as to be able to cultivate land at present either flooded or water-logged.
(3) To increase further the arable land by arresting erosion on the hillsides, and by extirpating rocks and boulders in the fallow land.
(4) To rebuild and modernise the existing farms, as well as rebuilding the granaries, cellars, store-rooms and machine-sheds of the fattoria, and to renew the whole machinery for making oil.
(5) To increase the acreage of olive-groves and vineyards.
(6) To build new roads.
(7) To build new farms.
(8) To increase the number, and improve the quality of the cattle, sheep, and pigs and, for this purpose, to increase the acreage of alfalfa and clover.
(9) To suspend all cutting down of trees for at least eight years, and then to establish a regular rotation of twelve years’ growth.
(10) To increase facilities for education and medical care.
The programme was a sound one, but its execution was slowed down not only by lack of experience, but of capital. Every penny we had, had been spent on the purchase of the estate, so that all that was left to work with was the allowance of $5,000 a year given me by Grandmamma. On this we started.
I still felt myself, however, very much a stranger in this new world and was not very good at fitting into it. The solid, tradition-bound group of people living in the fattoria—the fattore and his wife and children, his three assistants and the fattoressa (who was never, according to custom, the fattore’s wife, but a woman who cooked and did the baking and the housekeeping and looked after the barn-yard) so deeply rooted in the customs laid down centuries ago, so certain that nothing could or should be changed—made me feel as shy and foreign as the peasant-women who, on certain feast-days, came from their farms on foot or by ox-cart, to place in my hands a couple of squawking fowls, a brace of pigeons or a dozen eggs—and often, too, a flow of grievances, tales of all the family illnesses, or requests for advice and help. But what advice could I give them, when I knew so little myself? Nothing that I had learned at Villa Medici or I Tatti was of any use to me now; I doubt whether any young married woman has started upon her new life more ill-equipped for the particular job she had to do. I did not even know, though Antonio told me that it was my business to concern myself with the fattoria linen-cupboard and the barn-yard, that the sheets, to be durable, should be made of a mixture of cotton and hemp, however scratchy, and that a part of our wool should be laid aside each year, after washing and bleaching, to make new mattresses; I could not distinguish a Leghorn hen from a Rhode Island Red. Nor did I succeed, for a long time, in being as easily cordial as Antonio with everyone we met, nor realise the fine hierarchical distinctions between the fattore and his assistants, the keepers and the foreman, the contadini and the day-labourers. I learned day by day, but never fast enough, always hampered by self-consciousness and shyness, seeming most aloof when I most wished to be friendly. I would walk or ride with Antonio from farm to farm and, while he was busy in the fields or stables, would go into the house and try to make friends with the women and children. It was uphill work. The women were polite—and wary. They offered me fresh raw eggs to drink, or a little glass of sweet home-made liqueur; they showed me the sheep-cheese that they had made, their furniture and their children. But I did not know the right questions to ask; I felt it an impertinence to comment on the way they kept their house, as Antonio said was expected of me; I could not tell one cheese from another; I had no idea whether the baby had measles or chicken-pox, and on the only occasion on which I attempted to give an injection to an old woman with asthma, I broke the syringe. I did better with the children and, when the new schools were opened, I spent a lot of time there—playing with the children during recess, looking at their copy-books, providing them with a small library, admiring their little vegetable- or wheat-plots and giving prizes at the end of the school year—and through the children I gradually got to know the women a little better. It was always a very one-sided relationship though, and hampered by the whole framework of the fattoria between us. If a woman came to ask for her sink to be repaired or for her child to be taken to hospital it had to be referred to the fattore, and sometimes I found that incautious promises I had made had not been carried out. I think, now, that one of the fundamental evils of the mezzadria system was the presence and influence of these middlemen—tougher with the contadini than any landowner, because conscious of being only one step above them, and often shielding the padrone from what they thought it was inconvenient or undesirable for him to know. In our particular case, Antonio was fortunate, particularly in later years, in being surrounded by a group of loyal and devoted collaborators, who have become his close friends, but I still think that the system was a bad one, though perhaps an inevitable consequence of the whole structure of the mezzadria. Always, too, I was distressed by a sen
se of injustice, by the worn, tired faces of women only a little older than myself, and by the contrast—though certainly at that time we did not live in great luxury—between their life and my own. It is now one of my greatest regrets that inexperience, shyness, and my own other interests so often led me to take the path of least resistance and to leave things as they were.
Antonio, however—simpler, warmer and tougher, and living in a world which he took for granted—went steadily ahead, and it was our good fortune that this was just the period in which the new laws passed by the Fascist government to reclaim the undeveloped regions of Italy were coming into action. The programme—that of the bonifica agraria—included the enforced development, which sometimes led to confiscation, of many large estates in the South, i latifondi, neglected by absentee landlords (who used sometimes to forbid their wretched labourers even to put up any dwelling-place more permanent than a reed hut, for fear that they might acquire ‘squatter’s rights’); the financing of public works on a large scale to stop land erosion; the encouragement of drainage and irrigation; the building of new roads and schools and, subsequently, large State subsidies or loans at low rates of interest to enable active landowners to intensify production and improve the standard of life of their tenants. This ‘battle of the wheat’—which was also accompanied by a good deal of rhetoric, since it formed part of the policy of ‘autarchy’ which was Mussolini’s retort to sanctions—began with the draining of the Pontine Marshes, the cultivation of the plains of the Tuscan Maremma (in which small plots were assigned to war veterans, i combattenti, in the manner of ancient Rome) and a campaign against malaria in Sardinia.19
In some regions, such as ours, where confiscation was unnecessary, landowners’ associations—consorzi di bonifica—were formed, assisted by State subsidies; and it was after Antonio had succeeded in forming (in spite of the opposition of some of his neighbours) one of these consorzi in the Val d’Orcia that we came to work with some men who represented what was best in the Fascist regime: the main initiator of the leggi di bonifica, Professor Arrigo Serpieri (a man of outstanding ability and charm) as well as some able technical experts, who were inspired by an uncritical acceptance of the Fascist slogans, but also by a deep enthusiasm for their work. In the Val d’Orcia, the consorzio was founded in 1930 and Antonio remained its president and moving spirit for over thirty years. An office was opened at Montepulciano, an efficient engineer was engaged, plans were drawn up for government approval, which included work in areas all over the valley from S. Quirico to Radicofani. The state contributions varied from 20% to 100%, according to their nature, while the landowners contributed to the rest in proportion to their acreage and goodwill.20
One of the most urgent tasks was to arrest the erosion on the steep clay hills, and for this purpose Antonio built some twenty-five dams of stone or earth in creeks or gullies as reinforcements against the danger of landslides. Simultaneously, by the building of groynes in the river-bed (consisting of broad walls of masonry jutting out into the stream) the course of the Orcia was controlled, to prevent it from flooding the surrounding fields; and water from the hills above was channelled towards the fallow valley-land and allowed to lie there for four or five years, so that a rich stratum of top-soil gradually raised its level, bringing under cultivation some 150 more acres. Artesian wells were also sunk, under the guidance of water-diviners whose forked willow-twigs often enabled them to forecast not only where water was to be found but at what depth and in what quantity. (This is a much more common gift than is generally believed, and I was delighted to find that I, too, could feel the willow-twig quivering in my hands, as we passed over a water-course.)
An equally urgent problem was that of re-afforestation. Here the government’s Department of Forestry gave us both technical advice and help; two large nurseries of young plants were started, and some 545 acres of hillsides or of ravines were planted with seedlings or young trees (mostly oak, pine and cypress). Now most of these areas are covered by green woods.
Then came the roads. When we first arrived, the only good road ended at our house, and many of the more remote farms could only be reached by rough tracks, almost impassable in bad weather. (I vividly remember, in our first year, the local doctor—an old man—attempting to reach a child stricken with diphtheria in the ox-cart which had been sent to fetch him, sitting bolt upright in his dark town suit on a kitchen chair, while the oxen ploughed on in the deep mud and the distracted father urged them on.) First the old roads were improved or prolonged, and then—on the additional land obtained by the purchase of the Castelluccio—new ones had to be built to link up the isolated farms.
Drilling for water
It is difficult to convey the excitement of this whole enterprise, but perhaps the photographs reproduced here may give some idea of it. Here soil was being turned up that had lain fallow for centuries and, before putting hand to the plough, it was necessary to extirpate and remove enormous boulders, as well as the roots of old trees, and to hold the land up with steep gullies by the building of some more small dykes and dams. This was the work of many months, but when we saw a stretch of new road lying before us, and the tractor could at last begin to turn over the great clods of untilled, shining dark earth, we felt some of the deep satisfaction and fulfilment that must have been felt, far more intensely, by pioneers in new countries, when they saw a desert beginning to turn into a land of promise. By 1940, that is, just before the war, some fifteen miles of new roads had been built on our land, as well as the twenty-five miles of main roads built in the same district by the consorzio di bonifica—each shaded by poplars in the valley or by pines or cypresses higher up—and every farmer was able to bring his produce to market, each child to go to school.
Clearing the land of stones
Next, the farm-houses. I have already described their state on our arrival. Some had to be torn down and entirely rebuilt, others to be repaired, enlarged, provided with modern stables, pig-styes, silos and dung-heaps built on a concrete foundation; wells were sunk or roof-cisterns built for drinking water and ponds made for watering sheep and cattle. Soon, too, modern cooking-stoves stood beside the old hearths with their enormous chimneys, beneath which il nonno used to sit to warm his bones on a winter evening, sometimes beside a broody hen in a basket; a bathroom was installed as well as a modern lavatory and, gradually, each farm was also provided with electric light, and then acquired a radio or television set. The first and most important change, however, was in the actual acreage of the land of each farm, which (after we had increased their number from 25 to 57), came to be of between 75 and 100 acres, instead of over 200, thus rendering intensive cultivation possible. A large part of the newly-cultivated land was sown with wheat, maize and various types of clover, some 6,200 young olive-trees were planted, the vineyards were increased to cover about 200 acres, and the quality of the wine, both white and red, was greatly improved.
New farmhouse
The need for schools was also very urgent since, when we first arrived, eighty per cent of the population could neither read nor write. We had at once organised some evening-classes for adults and moved the school-children into a better room, but now the consorzio built three new schools, one at La Foce and two in the valley. These were run at first along the progressive lines of the country schools around Rome in the agro romano, each school having its own experimental field and garden, so that the children’s lessons bore a close relation to their future life on the land. Later on, however, they were taken over by the State, and are now like any other school. The children’s pride in their new schoolrooms was delightful to witness. I remember that, when the one at La Foce was opened (its walls painted in gay colours and adorned with pictures and maps) we found the pupils, of their own accord, taking off their muddy boots before coming in, so as not to sully the shining floors. (We then provided them with warm slippers to wear indoors.) We also built three small nursery-schools with playgrounds, two in villages across the valley, where many of the
women went out to work all day, and one at La Foce, which later turned into the Home for children bombed out of their homes in Genoa and Turin, the Casa dei Bambini described in War in Val d’Orcia21.
The schools were followed by a men’s club with a bowling-green and a general shop beside it and, in 1933, in memory of our son Gianni—who had died the year before—we built what we had come to feel was one of the most urgent needs of the region: a small dispensary or ambulatorio, with an operating-room, a steriliser, four beds for emergency cases, a small stock of infant foods and indispensable medicines, and a flat upstairs for a resident district nurse. The panel doctor from Chianciano (five miles away) came twice a week, and soon his waiting-room was crowded. The nurse also supervised the school-children’s health, but perhaps the most useful of her tasks was her visits to the farms—often forestalling, by timely advice, the outbreak of an epidemic—giving injections, sometimes (but not often) opening windows, persuading young mothers to move their babies from the centre of their double beds into small wicker cribs or baskets, and often, when the midwife or doctor arrived too late, helping a difficult delivery or bringing what relief she could to a deathbed. The ambulatorio beds, too, were often filled—by accident cases, expectant mothers, or convalescent children—and, in addition, the nurse held elementary courses in hygiene for girls and young mothers. Later on, during the war (but this, of course, we did not then foresee) the ambulatorio also fulfilled another purpose: a wounded partisan had a bullet extracted there, another with tuberculosis was nursed during the last weeks of his life and, when an epidemic of virus pneumonia broke out among the partisans hidden in the hill-farms, Signorina Guidetti went secretly at night to nurse them.