THE LAST PEASANT

and especially of the historian’s mentality.

I also believe that we must reconnect ourselves with our

primeval knowledge if we want to make sense

of the immanent reality.

No one has been able to express the idea of history more clearly and more succinctly than Leslie Poles Hartley in the opening line of his novel “The go-between”:

In my experience they not only do things differently, they also think and feel differently there.

The great dilemma about writing for those who are younger or for those who will come after, is the uncertainty of being understood. The business of conveying the feelings of one’s own era to the people of a different era is a tricky one. It may not work out. Indeed it is likely to fail. Since someone must write for those who come after, what is the solution then? I think the solution rests in the honest effort of trying to convey not so much the facts, as the mentality that perceives such facts. Such facts as the writer himself picks and chooses, that is. The mentality of the writer is therefore the crucial issue in history writing. The honesty of the writer is the only guarantee for the credibility and usefulness of the work.

Facts as such are not history, they are archaeology, they are the firm points of reference for the past, and they can be transmitted. But there are too many facts and not all facts are transmissible. Even more crucial is that the chosen facts must be told in a narrative fashion. Facts, objective or ascertainable, are the bare bones upon which flesh needs adding, and each culture, each generation, will add the flesh it sees fit to the bones which it gets. If not all facts are transmissible, not all facts are knowable either. It is therefore the explanations and the style and method of writing and ‘making sense’ of such facts as are available to a writer that make history.

When a writer becomes aware that he has no possibility of actually exposing and explaining facts, but only to expose his own mentality, it would be sheer dishonesty on his part to pretend to be “factual”.

I have two sets of children, and my second set is two generations away from ‘my times’. The eldest son was born when I was 50, the youngest when I was 60. But even my first daughter, who was born when I was 34 is far removed from ‘my times’ and beyond the reaches of the feelings of those times. Why write then? Knowing that with all probability I will either be not read or be laughed at. Why write at all?

Let us be frank, one write for oneself, and for one’s own contemporaries, however, by exposing one’s own thoughts as honestly as one possibly can, it will inevitably produce worthy material. And such material will be history as it can be afforded.

There are events to which one is a witness –primary, i.e. present to such events, or secondary, i.e. in close proximity. And there are events that one reads about, and which seem to give sense to the events one has witnessed.

Such writings as possess credibility by virtue of the writer’s own credibility, come to make history. They make the history that affect the way people think, which in turn will affects the future and destiny of a country, and of mankind as a whole.

Another matter is when facts are being selected and manipulated as to become not the firm points of a history but the justification and the props of an ideology.

If the effort of backing an ideology by manipulating facts, is dishonesty, the display of one’s own mentality, is an act of humility.

“I am a force from the past”

In tribal societies time is a wheel; human life follows the cycles of nature and the rhythm of the seasons; there is no linear sense of time, and no sense of history can possibly exist.

In the peasant world, which stands somewhere in between the urban and the tribal, time is also a wheel, and when unique and unrepeatable events occur, they are seldom welcomed and rarely understood. Any 'historical' (i.e. unique and unrepeatable) event invariably upsets the rhythm of both social and economic life. It causes an interruption, if not a disruption in the calendar of work, and in the cycle of crops.

When a peasant ceases to be such by joining the industrialised world, that's when a sense of history, and an interest in unique and unrepeatable events, arises in him, and that’s the point at which a perception of time as an arrow also arises in him.

The peasant is generally speaking a stoic, he does things ‘the proper way’ for the sake of harmony and righteousness and not for a precise purpose, for personal benefit or advantage, or for fear of punishment.

The peasant therefore resents the law of the city or of the state as he does not need it. In these respects and in many others, the peasant differs from modern man. The end of the peasant social type and its replacement by the hedonist consumer type amounts to an anthropological cataclysm.

On the 20th January 1389, in the Castle of Porciano in Casentino (Upper reaches of the Arno), 140 men, one third of the entire community, were summoned by Serraglio di Nencino, the Lord Mayor of the commune of Porciano.

These men gathered inside the communal Hall, within the castle's village (borgo), and made the following resolution:

"In consideration of the fact that the inhabitants of the borough risk their lives and their possessions daily, and in consideration of numerous other reasons, here they gather in assembly and freely decide to submit Porciano and its territory to the commune of Florence, demanding to be regarded hereon as citizens of the Committee of Florence.

They declare to make themselves subject to the jurisdiction and to the laws of Florence and thereby undertake to pay all those levies, taxes and duties, which apply to all other inhabitants of the Florentine Committee, lest a penalty of ten thousand gold Florins be imposed onto them.

The community of Porciano is here represented by Angelo di Guido, called "Quattrino", Giovanni di Paolo, Cione da Castagno and Renzo di Vanni, their elected representatives, before the Priores and Standard Bearers of Justice and other Officials...."

Among the named 140 men were Iacopo de Casella and Piero de Casella, very likely my earliest known ancestors. All my ancestors remained Florentine citizens until my own times

It was the plague of 1347, described by Boccaccio, which in the long run caused widespread disruption of social life in town and country, and eventually prompted the decision of the Guidi’s subjects to join the Florentine Republic.

In the Florentine Catasto (Land Registry) of 1427 one Caselli apperares to be the owner of a house in the Casentino. A house near the ancient Church of Romena, not far from Porciano is, according to local tradition, the original home of all the Casellis.

Around 1850 my great-grandfather and his brothers left their ancestral home of Valpiana, near Rincine, to move to another farmhouse next to the church of Sangodenzo, still in the eastern Sieve valley, a tributary of the Arno. The "podere", where apparently they had lived for centuries near Rincine, was the smallholding annexed to the parish church of San Pietro a Valpiana, and it belonged to the Curia’s demesne. The parish of Valpiana was suffragean of the Pieve of Sandetole, in the district of Londa, which in 1850s was under the administration of the commune of Dicomano.

The district of Londa had belonged to the lords of Porciano, the Conti Guidi, during the Middle Ages, this is why it is likely that the two Casella mentioned in the Porciano parchment were my direct ancestors.

Sangodenzo, is the last village on the Tyrrhenian side of the watershed, on the road from Florence to Forlì, close to the Apennine pass of ilMuraglione. The new podere was called "la Fonte" and was adjacent to the basilica of Sangodenzo, later the family moved again, this time to the nearby podere of "la Cavina" (a neo-Latin place-name meaning "the newly reclaimed land"). The Caselli family still lives there to this day (2001), but over the years many offspring swarmed out, one such swarm included my great-grandfather, his four sons and four daughters, who left la Cavina in 1908. Others had left earlier as there were already some Caselli in Rufina and in Florence at this time, no doubt all coming from either Londa or Sangodenzo.

My great-great-grandfather's name was Marco, sometimes in the early 1800s he married Rosa Cecchetti and had several offspring. My great-grandfather, Angiolo was born in 1838 and married Felice Celoni, a woman from a Sangodenzo family. My grandfather, Ottavio (always called Pìpi) was born a twin with Ottavia in 1877. Of his other sisters, Ada, was his senior, Rosa and Anna, were both his juniors by a few years; he was the second born of the males who were Giovanni (1874?) the first-born, Pasquale (1881) and Marco (1885).

The eldest brother, Giovanni, was a scholarly person, and since he was singularly bright, the parish priest educated him, as was then customary. He left the family before 1900 never to return. When he became the farm manager on a large estate near Ancona in the Marches, never looked back. This is all those left behind knew, or ever told me about him, this member of the family seems to have fallen into oblivion. Giovanni had an only son, who, himself, had an only daughter, but I have never seen them, so there are now no male offspring on his side.

Pasquale married Rosa Bravetti (born 1879 at Premilcuore) and had Angiolo, in 1905 (who died in 1911), Gino in 1906, Gina in 1910, Guido in 1914.

Gino married Assunta Mazzuoli, and had Lina (1935), Roberto (1939), Piero (1943). Gina, married my mother's brother Dino Montecchi (born 1910) and had Saverio (1939), Carlo (1940), Franco (1946), Grazietta (1952). Guido had Lucia and Riccardo, both around 1950. Marco married Filomena Stellini and had Giuseppe (1908), Giuseppina (1910), Angiolo (1913), Mario (1917). The only Caselli offspring from this branch of the family is Dino (1936), son of Giuseppe, who has an only daughter from the marriage with Anna, my cousin and the daughter of Renato Montecchi, my mother's brother.

The Casellis who produced male offspring are: myself, with Kenneth (1989), James (1992), and Enrico Orwell (1999). Franco, my brother, with his son Massimo (1975); Piero, with two sons, one of which is called Lorenzo, Riccardo , however, has had no offspring that I know of. Marco, my great-uncle, told me in the 1960's that what drove away the Casellis from Valpiana was hunger. He recounted that his father Angiolo told the story that his own father, another Marco, having gathered all the money available in the household, went to Florence to see if anything edible could be bought there. After a two day's journey he returned, threw the money on the kitchen table and said:

-Mangiate questi, non v'è nulla da comprare a Firenze! (Eat this, there's nothing to buy in Florence!)

The family survived a winter by eating chestnuts full of moth, roots, boiled grass, and bread made out of vetch flour.

In Sangodenzo life was probably better, the ample house of "La Cavina"adorned with a handsome loggia, and a perennial spring, overlooked the ancient Romanesque Basilical church and the village square from a ledge up the steep hill to which Sangodenzo almost miraculously clings. The family derived its livelihood primarily from sheep products, chestnuts, potatoes and maize. There was good grazing ground up on the Apennine range near at hand in the summer, and the abundant foliage of the black poplar trees along the stream provided winter fodder for all the animals. Only when the leaf crop failed the flock would be taken 150 Km away to the marshland of Maremma, near Grosseto. It was driven there together with thousands of other flocks during the seasonal migration called “transhumance” by hired drovers, as there is no record of any of the Caselli taking part in the annual migration.

In 1953 I spent the month of August in Sangodenzo as a guest of the Gennai family, where my great aunt Ottavia had married, and I participated in the life and the work of this family whose farmstead was located on the bank of the Sangodenzo stream. This experience gave me an invaluable insight into the agriculture and the management of livestock in a climatic area just beyond the olive and vine cultivation.

In 1908, my great grandfather, his children and grand-children, moved to Vallina, a hamlet which had developed around a water mill, 5 miles off the east gates of Florence. This was the first step of my family towards urbanization.

At the time the household consisted of 12 people – a regular number for a contadino. These moves of my great-grandfather and of his grandfather before him were presumably prompted by the emergence of social unrest, economic crises and confusion.

The latter move was probably due to the arrival of Socialist ideologies, and by political and economic events of national and international relevance.

Without pointing out some relevant aspects of this historical background it would be impossible to understand the extent of its repercussions upon my family and upon my own life.

THE HISTORICAL SCENARIO

The first cultural and self-help workers’ clubs appeared in the province of Florence between 1880 and 1886. The earliest statutes in our possession are those of two brass band clubs, the "Corpo Musicale Niccolò Tommaseo" of Settignano, and the "Corpo Musicale Fiorella Favard" of Rovezzano, very near Varlungo. Similar ones emerged in Bagno a Ripoli where my ancestors settled in 1908. When the King of Italy gave legal status to workers’ cooperatives, in 1886, there already were five such organizations in Bagno a Ripoli.

The first known cooperative was instituted in Settignano in 1887. This was ten years later destined to become "Unione dei Lavoratori - Società Anonima Cooperativa di Consumo in Settignano". Clause 3 of the statute declared that only people who derived their income from their own pesonal manual work may become members. Other worker's clubs had soon been infiltrated by non-workers and had excluded a whole range of people, particularly the anarchists. It must be remembered that none of the workers involved had any idea of what Marx had actually written. At best one had half-baked ideas about Socialism, such ideas as might exist among these people were mainly derived from the writings of anarchists, and from those of Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Giusti in particular. Such early Liberal-Socialists were all staunchly anti-clerical. It was however among the members of worker's clubs that Socialism found its adherents. However no worker was ever allowed to enter the management, or the Central Committees of the Socialist, and later of the Communist Party. The ‘leisure class’ has always ensured that true emancipation of the workers would not take place, and it took action right at the outset.

Between 1892 and 1911 the number of workers employed by a fast growing industry increased from 8.834 to 26.612. This astonishing rate of expansion, accompanied by a crisis in agriculture, must have exercised great strain upon the most hard up peasant families of the hills.

As some of the contadini of the neighbourhood of Florence joined industry their poderi became vacant, ready to be taken over by those who moved in from distant areas, in a now irreversible process of urbanization.

It was in 1900 that the first Socialist was elected to the Town Council of Fiesole, the administrative centre to which Varlungo belonged. On the occasion, an anonymous article in the Socialist journal "La Difesa" expressed the Party’s enthusiasm in this fashion:

"In the villages of Sant Andrea, Rovezzano, Varlungo and Quintole, there is still widespread jubilation at the victory obtained by the Socialist Party with its candidate Giuseppe Pescetti".

"On Sunday 10th at 8 p.m. a great procession of our workers departed from Varlungo Rovezzano. It was met by a great crowd of comrades who joined it"

The Carabinieri were quick on the spot. Five of them came out, guns in hand, and started butting the first in line, without hesitation. Five workers were arrested and Giuseppe Pescetti in person had to plead for the workers to be set free without charges. A great crowd applauded Pescetti outside the Carabinieri headquarters.

On May 21st, 1901 a public meeting against the petty transit tax called "dazio" imposed upon wheat, was held at Rovezzano, and 1200 contadini took part. Twenty days earlier the first "May Day" in Italian history had been celebrated with great jubilation, as "La Difesa" reported:

Alla sera i compagni della sezione con numerosi amici e simpatizzanti, si trovarono riuniti alla Nave di Rovezzano. Dopo una modesta refezione parlarono i compagni operai Adolfo Dini e Angiolo Caselli della sezione di Rovezzano e il compagno Sorelli di Firenze.

Molto opportunamente la compagna Maria Alinari di Varlungo parlò sul dovere che i socialisti hanno in rapporto alla famiglia e raccomandò che a tutte le nostre riunioni vengano portate sempre le nostre donne. Fu molto applaudita." La Difesa, 12/5/1901

(“Our club also celebrated May Day, and for the first time! In the evening all comrades of the club, with numerous friends and sympathizers, gathered at Nave di Rovezzano. After a simple repast comrade workers Adolfo Dini and Angiolo Caselli of the Rovezzano club, and comrade Sorelli of Florence, spoke.

Very appropriately comrade Maria Alinari of Varlungo spoke about the duty of the Socialists towards their families and recommended that our women should always be present at all meetings. She was applauded at length”)

It was thus that my great grandfather, at the age of 63, entered history, with a small contribution to freedom.

In 1907 the "Società Corale e di Mutuo Soccorso fra gli Operai di Varlungo" (Choral Society for Mutual Help among the Workers of Varlungo) was created and its first rule was that "tutti i soci dovranno essere operai"(all members must be workers).

Here in this club, my uncle Giovanni was to read and comment on newspapers and bulletins until he left to join the army (1922), not to return. By that time Fascism had won the worker’s hearts and minds, and all worker's clubs were disbanded, never to be re-instituted until 1946.

It is clear how the ruling class, foreseeing the inevitable spread of communication, education and information, endeavoured to terminate the social system of the "mezzadria", in fear of losing their cultural hegemony.

Whereas an investor could control a factory worker completely, by brainwashing him and turning him into both the producer and the consumer of the same product -at a remarkable profit- he could not do the same with the peasant. The peasant was an "independent" class, and an independent minded one, as it mastered the whole production process.

It was the only class of workers capable of surviving without an "investor", without a "capital"; it was able to make its own tools, and create its means of production out of none other than its own knowledge. It was quite obviously capable of doing twice as well without a master.

The peasant s belonged to a culture, of which the urban class was but a mere segment. The politically dominant class must have realized such a situation at the turn of the century, and it must have decided that this was an intolerable state of affairs. Therefore a campaign was started to undermine the "mezzadria" system at its very roots, by inducing the peasants themselves to rebel against it.

Once the peasants were harnessed into the capitalistic industrial system, with their clubs and unions, they would be entirely dependent upon the capital, and the game would be over. And so it was. (see GB Ravenni)

It was at Vallina that my great-grandfather and my great uncles made a resolution to ‘dump’ my grandfather. At the end of 1914 they announced to my grandfather, without notice, that they would move to a farm in Varlungo, where there would not be enough room for all of them. He and his wife and children would therefore have to find another podere and go it alone.

Of my grandfather's children Giovanni was the eldest. Born in 1902, he had distinguished himself as a scholarly boy. At Vallina and Candeli he used to read and comment on the newspaper at the local worker's clubs and wine bars, becoming both his father and grandfather's pride.

As the family legend goes, in every generation of the Caselli at least one would shine for his inclinations to learning, the legend still lingers to this day amongst the schoolteachers of Sangodenzo.

My grandfather had married Rosa Gennai (born 1878), a slight, blond girl from the forest hamlet of Spaliena, near Castagno. Spaliena is an Etruscan place-name, as there are many like that in and around the upper valley of the Arno, the enclosed valley of Casentino.

These Gennai were all fair haired, blue eyed, very short and stout people, typical mountain folks. These traits emerged mainly in my uncle Aldo and my aunt Vittoria. They were less pronounced in my father and in the others. Giovanni was the eldest child, and after him came two girls, Angiola, 1904, and Felicina (always called Felice), 1906. Then came two boys, Aldo (always called Ardino) 1908 he was born a twin with Ada, who only lived a few days, and Enrico - my father- (always called Pallino) in 1911, and lastly Vittoria, 1917. All fair-haired and grey or blue eyed little weedy creatures. Only my father grew to 1,74 m in stature, the family giant.

It was always said that the short stature of my grandfather's children was due to the genes coming from the Gennai side, as on the Caselli side many had edged 1.80m, including my great-grandfather.

It was the blondness and the shortness of my grandmother, which got on the Caselli's nerves, strange as it may seem. My grandfather's brothers could not stand my grandmother. Inexplicable antipathies of this kind, mainly due to physical appearance, were common in a peasant society. It was a kind of racial discrimination taken to its extreme limit; it was as simple as that.

When my grandfather agreed with his own father and with his ideas on socialism, it was the last straw. His conservative catholic brothers decided, behind their father's back, to get rid of him and contrived a lurid plan. One of his two sisters-in-law accused him of trying to seduce her. This was an old plot, probably learned from the story of Joseph in the Bible, or more likely from a local legend older than that.

“A KIPPER FOR THREE”

At this point, in 1915, my grandfather's saga started, an ordeal that was to last several decades, involving hunger, disease, death, hard labour, humiliations, and a relentless search for a better podere to farm.

Hastily a vacant podere was found at Rignalla, a north facing, terraced slope, above Vallina, and my grandfather applied to the Marchese Giaquilli-Ferrini of Villa la Tana to be the tenant there. Rignalla is a tiny parish, consisting of only a few families, (fewer still nowadays).

The place was considered so backward and poor that the sound of the church’s bells was interpreted thus: “un’aringa ‘n tre, un’aringa ‘n tre, un’aringa ‘n tre”, an onomatopoeic expression meaning “one herring for three!”

The house consisted of a sturdy Romanesque tower, an extraordinarily well preserved building, formerly a lord's rural repose, erected in a commanding position above a commercial road connecting to Florence. "Torrio di sopra" was the place-name of the podere, five hectares of stony terraced arable land, bordered by the road to Villamagna, the stream of Rio Romaiolo and the woodland of the Terra Bianca hill.

My grandfather and his eldest son Giovanni set themselves to the task of turning this stony slope into a source of sustenance, as it was unthinkable to achieve more than that in such a place.

Once the job had been accomplished, one could occasionally sit in the yard and bask in the winter sun. Furthermore, the spring water, though limy, was healthier than that of the well in Vallina, which was polluted.

The tower, being a tall building, housed another family, a childless young couple, the Baggiani, who lived on the upper floors. Normally a contadino lives alone, with his family on a single podere; rarely does the building house other tenants, and almost never non-farmers.

Here a casual labourer and his wife lived above and at first the matter might seem reassuring: there would be company during the long and dark winter evenings, someone to chat with and share in the occasional shopping trips to nearby Candeli, for salt, candles, matches and wicks.

In the course of time this ‘neighbourliness’ would prove disastrous to my family, and would mar my own life, which was to start several decades later.

GATHERING THE FRAGMENTS

“EST INTERDVM PRAESTARE MERCATVRIS REM QVAERERE, NISI TAM PERICVLOSVM SIT, ET ITEM FENERARI, SI TAM HONESTVM SIT. MAIORES NOSTRI SIC HABVERVNT ET ITA IN LEGIBVS POSIVERVNT, FVREM DVPLI CONDEMNARI, FENERATOREM QVADRVPLI. QVANTO PEIOREM CIVEM EXISTIMARINT FENERATOREM QVA FVREM, HIC LICET EXISTIMARE. ET VIRVM BONVM QVOM LAVDABANT, ITA LAVDABANT, BONVM AGRICOLAM BONVMQ.VE COLONVM. AMPLISSIME LAVDARI EXISTIMABATVR QVI ITA LAVDABATVR. MERCATOREM AVTEM STRENVVM STVDIOSVMQ.VE REI QVAERENDAE EXISTIMO, VERVM, VT SVPRA DIXI, PERICVLOSVM ET CALAMITOSVM. AT EX AGRICOLIS ET VIRI FORTISSIMI ET MILITES STRENVISSIMI GIGNVNTVR, MAXIMEQVE PIVS QVAESTVS STABILISSIMVSQVE CONSEQVITVR

When in England, in the early 1970s, I was studying the Latin agricultural writers (Cato, Varro, Columella, Pliny, etc.), I found striking similarities between Florentine agricultural traditions and Classical Roman practices as described by the above authors. I asked my father first, then my cousin Saverio, to write memoirs concerning those peasant days, and they happily accepted my request.

I must add here that this idea did not come out of the blue. As soon as I arrived in England, I had started studying English by reading archaeology from textbooks such as “The Dawn of the European Civilization” by Gordon Childe, “Prehistoric Europe” by Stuart Piggott, and many other works of the same calibre. At the same time I wrote a report on my archaeological discoveries in the commune of Bagno a Ripoli (now a suburb of Florence) where I had grown up and last resided.

In the course of my studies, I made some realizations that led to the development of my own brand of “ethnoarchaeology”. In short, I was convinced that in order to comprehend the Etruscan and Roman past of my homeland, and the nature of my own culture, I had to look at the peasants first and foremost, and regard them as the grass roots of Central Italian culture.

During regular visits to my family in Tuscany, I began a systematic survey of the material culture of Central Italian peasants. With my old friend Silvano Guerrini of Antella, I created the Comitato per le Ricerche sulla Cultura Materiale della Toscana, CRCMT for short (Committee for Research on the Material Culture of Tuscany). This was a long-winded way of expressing a “politically correct” intention, and it worked.

We were taken seriously by the predominantly Communist administrations and educational institutions, while we carried out our work according to an ante literam post modern “method”, which in plain words means no method at all. To be more precise this consisted of a “let us see what we find and then go on from there” attitude.

I always brought the subject of my enquiry into every conversation, such was my enthusiasm, and in Great Britain I was invited to lecture on my research at the University of London, and at various polytechnics.

In 1972, Dr. George Bankes, then Keeper of Ethnography at Brighton Museum, had caused me to be elected a Fellow of The Royal Anthropological Institute, which gave me access to a vast library. At the same time Prof. Donald Strong of the Institute of Archaeology of London made me a member of the Society for Roman Studies. Later I also became a member of the Folk Life Society, of the Museum Ethnographer’s Group, and finally, in 1985, a member of The Institute of Archaeology of London.

In 1975, with my friend Silvano Guerrini, I publicly exhibited the preliminary results of our field research at the Worker’s Club of Antella, a village of Bagno a Ripoli.

What we exhibited was an archaic assemblage of tools and implements hardly changed since Roman times, together with numerous texts including my father and my cousin reports, astonished many scholars and lecturers in agricultural history and economics at the University of Florence.

Evidently these specialists had carried out practically all their field research from their desks, never taking the trouble to get out on to the actual field, relying solely on assumption and prejudice, following in the footsteps of their predecessors.

More of this later, for now I shall only say that the following descriptions of the culture of the contadini in Tuscany -together with the archives of the CRCMT- are practically the only first-hand facts on the matter available to the scholars of today or of the future.

IMPOSSIBLE TO BELIEVE”

" In quanto alla vita vissuta dalla nostra famiglia ti parlerò di quella vissuta a Rignalla, la peggiore, ma in quanto al lavoro dei campi o ai raccolti,

(As to the kind of life led by our family I shall speak of the times of Rignalla, the worst, but as far as work in the fields goes, it was like any other time)

The podere of Rignalla was called ‘Torrio di Sopra’ and measured 5 hectares (c.15 acres).

The soil was mainly derived from hard limestone (alberese), but many fields had sandstone derived soils (galestro). That is to say that all the soil of “Torrio di Sopra” was all very ‘lean’. The podere was situated on a slope, and when looking at it from the main road one could see a series of great high walls, the terraces that held the soil in place, some reaching 3 metres in height.

The podere was mainly planted with olive trees, pear trees of three to four varieties, apricots (only a few) of two varieties. I remember in a field we dug two or three trenches and planted plums. These trees were grafted with the variety called ‘Bulbach’, and in a very short time, perhaps three years, they gave us fruit.

I remember these trees one year, when their branches were all bowed and propped up with poles by my father, for the quantity of fruit which they had produced. You must bear in mind however that when any species of fruit tree has produced a good crop one year there is practically no fruit the following year. This is so even if the weather is favourable. Sometimes there was no fruit even when it was due, and two or three years may go by without any fruit.

We had apple-trees of two varieties, and naturally there were vines. There were fig trees of two or three varieties, a few walnuts, and a great jujube tree next to the house which produced a fair amount of fruit.

It is difficult to remember the exact amount of fruit produced by these trees. I remember the wine, which came to an average production of 10-12 ql. but perhaps more likely 7-8; olive oil 3 ql., but perhaps less. (Bear in mind that this was to be shared by 50% with the padrone). In fact we were never able to spare any wine to sell, whereas on some good years we managed to sell a little olive oil.

From my description of the trees you may imagine our podere as a kind of garden; it was instead, as I said before, very lean soil, and both the trees and the soil bore very little fruit. The trees especially had to ‘rest’ as much as two years before they could bear another crop, and this only if and when the weather was favourable.

We also worked some clearings in the middle of the wood, which we called piagge, here we sowed wheat the first year -which gave a poor crop- legumes the following year, namely vetch for the pigeons, or cicerchie (‘lesser chick-pea’ Lathyrus sativus). My mother sometimes cooked these like beans, and they might have tasted good if she could have dressed them properly as we can today (actually they are better than beans). They have the same shape as lupines but are smaller, and they taste roughly like lentils.

We adopted a rotation system for cultivation as follows: one year it was wheat and the next pulse to ‘fatten’ the soil, then it was fodder such as ‘medic’ (erba medica) which sometimes we kept growing for two consecutive years without ploughing it over.

When we ploughed over the ‘medic’ meadow in summer to allow all roots to dry out, we would sow wheat the following winter, and this usually bore a good crop. After harvesting this wheat we sowed rape and other fodder crops such as oats and Celtic bean (faba celtica), or oats and vetch, which with the autumn rains and tepid air grew to 80 cm, as thick as was sown. In winter these fodder crops were cut and then mixed with some straw and hay, and fed to the cows.

As to the origin of our family you know it better than me. We know for certain that around 150 years ago the Casellis lived in the commune of Londa. Then they moved to Sangodenzo in a podere called ‘la Fonte’ (The Spring), whose casa colonica was situated right at the end of the village, behind the church. There my father was born in 1877, and later -I do not know in which year- the family moved to a nearby podere called ‘La Cavina’, where it is to this day.

In February 1908, my grandfather with his three sons (one, Giovanni had already gone), their wives and children, moved to Vallina (8 km east of Florence on the south bank of the Arno).

From there my parents started their “Calvary”, the darkest period of their existence; through no fault of their own, other than that of being too good, too honest and of loving their neighbours.

I am not going to tell you why. It would be of no use to you, and it may seem that I bear some resentment -after so many years, and after all is forgotten- against people long dead.

My grandfather and my uncles, behind my father’s back, found a podere at Varlungo (on the opposite bank of the Arno), and left my father out on a limb. It was then that he had to take on the podere of Rignalla, having found nothing better.

We moved to Rignalla in February 1915. We were 5 children; I was the youngest, at 3 and a half. On that podere there was a great deal of work to do and very little to eat; enough land but very ‘lean’ soil, as I have told you above.

There was a great drawback. Water was at the bottom of the hill, and it had to be carried up to the house by pale and jug. The number of sacrifices that my mother made in that place is beyond belief; she had to look after a household of seven people, who became eight after aunt Vittoria’s birth in 1917.

When my father was called up for the military service, -I believe for 5-6 months in 1917- he was soon dismissed and sent home due to the birth of his sixth child. During that period my mother had to do all the work. The help which the elder children could give her was minimal; the eldest (Giovanni) was 15, the second (Angiola) was 13, then (Felice) 11, (Aldo) 9, and I, 6. She had to cut the grass to provide all fodder for our stable animals, and see to all the work on the land, including ploughing and spraying the copper sulfate on the vines and the olive-trees. Much of this work no doubt was done by my eldest brother, and also by my eldest sister. At last my father returned home, when the war ended, but Bolshevism started arousing as much tension and fear as the war had done.

And so we come to September 1922, when my eldest brother was called up to do military service, and he never returned, as you well know.

Hit by this tragedy our family fell as if into an abyss, a psychological chasm. It was the loss of hope in a better future that made us see all black. It took decades to reclimb the precipice. Thanks first of all to the health and will power of my parents in raising the surviving children, we finally overcame that crisis. As we all grew up we began to work and to reason with our own minds.

No specific task was allotted to any particular person in the family. In the various working processes each task was taken up by the person who was communally believed most suitable for it, or was more simply free to do it. Sometimes we found ourselves all doing the same thing, such as digging, hoeing, harvesting the wheat, picking fruit, weeding the maize field, or hoeing the bean rows, etc.

Food came mostly from the granary, in the form of bread, home made pasta, bread soup ‘ribollita’ (this was very good and I still like it), ‘pappa col pomodoro’ and olive oil. We used to eat a pan of boiled potatoes, sliced and dressed with a little olive oil, salt, pepper, and accompanied by mouthfuls of bread. We ate white beans, chickpeas, cicerchie (dwarf lentils) a pan of baccala’ (stockfish) on Fridays. Sometimes we ate an egg each, hard-boiled or fried in the pan, but this was considered a luxury. Mother used to sell eggs to get some money for clothes, shoes, etc. On feast days we used to have boiled beef, which also constituted a good stock for the minestra, which consisted of homemade tagliatelle floating in the stock.

We had no milk –as we kept no milch cows-, and only had bread at breakfast, sometimes with onion or garlic, or a tomato salad (chopped half-green tomatoes, dressed with oil, salt, pepper and vinegar). In winter we had walnuts and dried figs, but not always because we did not have great crop of this fruit. It was bread, bread and bread, about 3 ql. per head per year! (Almost 1 kg. per person per day).

On rainy days, and after supper in winter, my father repaired our farming tools and implements, but most of all he made wooden clogs. In a season, from the beginning of autumn to the end of winter, he would produce up to 150 pairs. I cannot remember how much he sold them for, but I believe it was 1,50 - 2 lire a pair. He also had some customers who came to have a haircut or a shave, as he had the necessary tools for the job. All this to help the family budget.

Somehow we made it to 1925-26, when we moved to the podere of the Cacchiani (Verone II) where we stayed for 5 years. After this we moved to podere La Massa. But things did not improve much; it was still ‘a short blanket’, when it covered the shoulders it would expose the feet, and vice-versa. Things only changed a little after the war, when I decided to call it a day working on other people’s land. We may not have achieved much, but there was less strain and sacrifice.

The entrance hall to our home was ample and also served as a wardrobe where we hung work-jackets, hats, cutting tools -pruning scissors, pruning knives, billhooks, axes, and adzes. In the drawer of an old chest we kept the hammer, pinches, augers, various nails etc.

At one end of the entrance hall there was a landing, which led on the left to an under-stair cupboard where the rabbits were kept. From a hole in the wall they would go outside in an enclosure of chicken wire, right above the cesspit.

From the entrance hall on the left there was the door to the stable - this door was only 2,50 m from the kitchen door. The stable was a single room with manger 4 metres long.

In the entrance hall on the left was the stone staircase leading to the first floor; from the landing on the left there were two bedrooms, and on the right two storerooms including the granary.

Entering the kitchen a door on the right led to the drawing room. We had six rooms in all for the living quarters; two rooms on the ground floor (kitchen and drawing room) then there were the entrance hall, the stable and the understair cupboard. Four rooms upstairs.

Outside there was the threshing floor (the ‘aia’) with splendid views; opposite the house was the barn with a loggia where we sheltered the cart and the ploughs, and behind the barn there was a small loggia for the beehives.

Behind the house there was the entrance to the flat of the upper part of the tower, where a tenant, a poor labourer, lived. Furthermore behind the house, to the north, there was the manure basin (concimaia) and the bread oven (forno) with a small loggia in front of it.

The smaller olive-trees were called ‘morinelli’; they had smaller leaves and produced smaller, rounder and darker olives. The larger trees were called ‘infrantoi’ (this is how we called them, others called them ‘frantoi’, but the Montecchi, for examples called them ‘cureggioli’ when they first arrived here at Candeli), they had larger leaves and bore larger olives which ripened later.

These two varieties of olive-trees are the commonest in Tuscany. There were only a few other varieties; perhaps two or three of a variety called ‘morchiacci’ (from the Latin ‘amurcacei’) whose olives produced more dredges (morchia) than oil.

I remember a tree which produced very large olives, as large as a pigeon’s egg. It produced negligible quantities, around fifty in number per year would be regarded as a good crop; we called these ‘olive da guazzo’ (pickling olives) without any other particular name for the tree.

Vines belonged to the ‘Sangiovese’ (the red grapes), ‘Trebbiano’ (the white grapes), ‘canaiolo’ (dog’s delight). The latter was the best in taste but we had few plants. Then there were a few vines that produced those large grapes, rather bland in taste and with little spirit, which we called ‘ingannacane’ (dog-fooler).

The greatest number of apple-trees belonged to a variety called ‘spennacchini’, some to the ‘franceschi’; some were ‘cotogne’ (quinces). There were some others whose precise names we did not know.

We had the ‘gentili’, the ‘cosci’, the ‘giugnolini' (ripening in June), the ‘spini’ (ripening in winter), the ‘spadoni’, also a winter pear.

The fig-trees belonged to the ‘verdini’ variety, one or two to the ‘sampieri’ (large and black), there also were some other fig-trees which we simply called ‘fichi neri’ (black figs), but their fruit was of little worth.

Cherry-trees belonged to the following favourites: ‘cuore’, ‘poponcini’, ‘cornioli’, and the latter being good to pickle in grappa.

Two were two varieties of apricot trees, one ‘with bitter-heart’, the other ‘with sweet-heart’, but they had no particular name beyond ‘dal nocciolo dolce’ and ‘dal nocciolo amaro’.

A renowned variety for its exquisite taste was the plum called ‘claudia’, but we only had one or two trees of this variety. The others were of a black variety, similar to prunes, and which one buys dried in winter. Finally, as I mentioned earlier, we planted the so-called ‘bulback’. This was a new variety.

Naturally we had a small patch of artichokes, and we grew some vegetables for our own use.

I asked my father the exact meaning of the word ‘porca’, which I had heard in my youth and which Cicero uses to mean a field or a strip of land where wheat is sown.

The ‘porca’ is the bed where parsley, chicory or lettuces are grown. The true ‘porca’ however was not the strip of land between two rows of trees, but the ridge between two furrows made with the ‘aratro’ (the wooden symmetrical plough).

We used to level the ploughed fields in summer with the ‘spianatoio’ (literally ‘flattener’, a harrow without teeth to break up the clods), or with the ‘erpice’ (harrow). Then we scattered the grains of wheat, naturally by hand. Then with the wooden plough we made furrows spaced out at 80 cm or over one metre, from one another. Finally with the mattocks we rounded the edges of the strips and cleared the furrows properly, spreading the soil evenly on the ‘porca’, in order to cover all the seeds.

We endeavoured to produce straight furrows, as we were aiming at an aesthetically good-looking field. We wanted well-made ‘porche’.

The reason for such a work derives from the need for good drainage during rainy winters; rainwater will run down along the furrows leaving the young roots free from waterlogging and consequently from the hazard of freezing.

Wheat grown in dry soil produce s straighter and harder stems, and it is more likely to withstand the winds and remain upright until the harvest.

Often though, especially in the spring, and until June, there were downpours accompanied by blustering winds, and the wheat was flattened before it was ripe. This resulted in greater labour at harvest and a great loss of crop.

The varieties of wheat were the ‘ciritella’ (but some called it ‘civitella’) the ears had long ‘whiskers’. Then there was the ‘gran gentile’, without ‘whiskers’. They were always these two grains which we used, perhaps on rotation but always in the same fields, therefore they only grew weaker and weaker.

Later a new grain was introduced (but this was after Rignalla), the result of cross-pollination, and the yield increased dramatically.

We had a pair of small oxen, and sometimes, when we had enough fodder, we might keep a calf for veal.

My father occasionally bought untrained oxen (da domare). These were very young, you may have called them calves, and we ourselves broke them in using the following technique:

One of us boys stood ahead of the team and held the rope which was tied to the animal’s heads. Father stood behind holding the ‘reins’ (guide), the ropes which were tied to the ‘nose-pinchers’ (nasiere), of the animals. The ‘nose-pinchers’, wrapped with cloth, had to be put on the nose slowly and very carefully, after wetting them with salty water. The calves, or if you like, the would-be oxen tasted the salt and started licking their nostrils, and eventually accepted this harness, gradually becoming used to it. Next came the yoking (aggiogare); initially the young oxen were scared of it, and often attempted to escape. This constituted a grave danger for the person who held the reins. We started by harnessing a long shaft to the yoke (giogo); finally then came the ‘debut’ with the young oxen harnessed to the ‘sled-car’ (the treggia).

When they accepted the ‘sled-car’ the operation was almost accomplished. Gradually we would harness them to the ox-cart (carro), and lead them on to the main road (strada maestra), where they might have to contend with a noisy truck, as they were so in those days.

We bought these calves; we broke them in; we trained them to pull the vehicles which we then had; we got them used to pulling the plough in the fields. Meanwhile they grew and became true working oxen. At this stage we sold them, and they were naturally worth much more than when we had bought them. With the profit we paid the expenses, such as copper-sulfate, tolls and machinery repairs, the shoeing of the animals themselves. In our case, we paid the seed of wheat which we had to buy back from the padrone, as our share was just about enough to feed us. As I said our consumption of wheat amounted to 3 ql. (300 kg.) per head per year.

Oftentimes the oxen fetched a high price when we bought them and little when we later sold them. In these cases therefore there was little or no profit, and we had to run into debt with the padrone. Equally, when we reared a calf for the butcher, which was expected to earn a good profit with its increase in weight.

The oxen were generally of the ‘Casentinese’ breed (from Casentino); there was also the ‘Mugellese’ (from Mugello), which were alike; then there was the ‘Calvana’ (from Prato), all short legged, and apt for the hills. The calf might be of the ‘Friulana’ (from the Friuli) or ‘Chianina’ (from Val di Chiana) breeds, or perhaps of the same breed as the oxen. It might even have been black, the offspring of an ‘Alpine Brown’ cow (Bruno Alpina). The Chianina breed -oxen, draught cows or calves- is the largest, the tallest and the longest of all bovines. Of this breed I have seen specimens taken to the slaughterhouse weighing 10-12 ql. I have seen bulls that frightened one on entering the stable. There was also the ‘Romagnola’ breed (from Romagna). This for example was common at Sangodenzo. It has very short legs, and it is adapted to mountainous terrain.

As far as chickens were concerned there were customary laws established in the ‘Patti Agrari’ (Agrarian Pacts). A podere such as that of Rignalla afforded what we called ‘mezzi patti’ (demi-pacts). This is to say that we were allowed 12 hens, and were obliged to give the padrone a dozen eggs per year and a capon at Christmas.

We were also allowed two to three broods of chicks per year. When the chicks had grown the massaia would sell them in order to pay for household expenditure: salt, sugar, socks, a pair of shoes once in a while, a few ‘rags’ (cenci) to dress us children, etc.

We kept a pair of breeding rabbits, as we usually ate rabbit on feast days. We also kept some geese and ducks. These were mostly eaten at harvest and vintage time by the farm hands who came to help, and who as a payment expected a lavish meal.

Rabbits were liable to catch diseases such as impetigo. We had no idea then what was happening. In a matter if a few days all the rabbits would die. After the plague we had to disinfect the pens and await a quarantine (40-50 days) before buying new rabbits and having meat again at the table in 6-7 months time, and only on a feast day.

At times we reared Guinea pigs, which multiplied like head lice! But they were noisy and sometimes they woke us up at night. We ate these animals stewed or roasted, but I would not eat such animals now.

We also kept 2-3-4 pairs of pigeons; from the age of 7-8 years I looked after them, I made their nests, I matched them, etc. I used to sell the pigeons in order to get some pocket money for us children. I also used to sell rabbit pelts, which I dried by stuffing them with straw to stretch them well. We had a cat, but when it was a female and produced a litter, it was my task to choose a male kitten and put the rest to sleep (others had taught me how to do it, I could not do it now).

We had a guard-dog, a bitch, to protect the house. It was shorthaired, dark-brown, I believe it was a ‘hound’ (segugio). I remember in 1922, she had a litter. On that occasion I had to choose a little boy, and the rest, I cannot remember how many, were put to sleep, I cannot remember by whom. The spared puppy was born at the time when my brother Giovanni left for service never to come back, I called it ‘Pirino’. Pirino, a shaggy red-haired, lived with us for 17 years, he was a good warden, a serious one, with no fickle in his mind. Not even love interested him. He guarded the house and that was all, -He had a different character from mine, evidently!

Jokes aside, that dog was treated like a person, perhaps because he was born when our beloved eldest brother left us, never to be seen again.

I nearly forgot the bees, of which my father was very fond. Bee keeping was his ‘hobby’. At Rignalla, behind the barn facing south there was a suitable low wall, well sheltered by an overhanging roof; usually 10 hives were placed here. At times there were up to 15 hives.

My father had no special tools to extract the honey. This meant that he had to kill the entire ‘family’ to take out the honeycombs (the ‘fiali’, as we called them), then he squeezed the honey out of these hand.

He used to kill, I remember, three-four-five families of bees every year. The remaining would, however, swarm and form new families regularly. I cannot remember how much honey we obtained every year, perhaps 4-5 kg.

To kill the bees, my father blocked all orifices in the hive, except the gap at the base. Then at night, when all the bees were in, he lit some wicks (these had been previously embewed with molten sulfur then dried) and put them below the hive -which was sometimes made out of an upturned grape-crushing vat (bigoncia). Occasionally it was a herring barrel. The smoke would rise into the hive and kill the bees instantly. We used to call the bees ‘pecchie’ (from the Latin ‘apiculae’), and not ‘api’ as they are called in modern Italian.

We had a farm-cart on trust (carro). We owned a sled-car (treggia) like the model I made for the Dutch encyclopaedia (The Joy of Knowledge, Spectrum, Holland and Mitchell Beazley, London, 1974). We had a sled-car (treggiolo), a simpler contrivance for carrying barrels of water or copper sulfate to the fields. These vehicles with the exception of the ox cart (which was wheewright made, and given to us in trust) were made by ourselves and were our own.

We had a heavy wooden (symmetrical) plough (aratro), which was used to break the fallow soil. We also had a lighter one (sementino) to make furrows for sowing potatoes, beans, maize, chick-peas, Celtic beans, etc. Both of these were home made.

We had a harrow (we called it ‘erpico’). It looked like this -drawing provided- The shaft was about as thick as that of the ox-cart or sled-car. The cross-beam was about 1,50 m long. This was dragged on the ground which had previously been broken with the heavier plough to flatten it. The wheat seed would then fall on flat soil and covered evenly, neither too much nor too little. This implement, as I said, was called ‘erpico’, ‘erpice’ or ‘spianatoio’, according to the habits and provenance of the family in question.

We called a plough ‘aratolo’ (from the Latin ‘aratro’), but we knew that our term was a rude one and that we should have said more correctly ‘aratro’, like nowadays.

We had 5 hoes (zappa) some old and some new, 5 foot-rest spades (vanga), 2 iron pitch-forks (forcone), 2 wooden rakes (rastrello), made by my father, and 2 wooden forks (forca). My father, made these forks out of a suitable young tree found in the woods (it was a tree that branched out in the correct way forming three or four prongs). The freshly cut tree was put inside the hot bread oven, to make it malleable in order that it may easily be bent into the required shape; the prongs were bent to look like cow-horns, while boiling hot (a bollore).

In order that the fork should keep its shape, we forced the prongs into the iron grates of a window until the wood was dead dry. Then the fork would keep the required shape for good. This fork was used to shift hay and straw.

We had a pump for spraying copper-sulfate and a bellow-duster for spraying sulfur powder onto the trees.

We had four stepladders (scala), some longer some shorter, for picking olives, fruits or for pruning the trees. There were also two prop-ladders (scaleo) of this shape -drawing provided- used to pick grapes and for pruning vines.

We did not always use the threshing machine (trebbiatrice) for threshing our grain. In order to avoid the expenditure of the meal, which we would have to provide for the machine expert and for the hands, my father took it upon himself to thresh all our wheat by hand, seconded by the whole family.

Each sheaf was picked up at the base and beaten on the side of the ears against a horizontal wooden board. Often this was a sturdy barn door laid horizontally on two trestles. The threshing floor had previously been spread with runny cow-dung to create an even, clean surface once dried in the sun. The chuff (loppa) and grain would be heaped up in the middle of the threshing floor after beating, and winnowed with wooden shovels and sieves on a breezy day.

(This is the calendar of work as followed throughout the Florentine countryside during the first part of the 20th century, as my father described it to me at my request; some months after he had written the above report:)

During the first fortnight there may still be olives to pick. This is the case either when the crop is abundant or when the picking has been hampered by bad weather.

We mow the meadow for fodder, if it has survived the frost; we dig the trenches for planting new vines, we dig ‘formelle’ (holes) for planting fruit-trees, or olive-trees, in the rows wherever an old tree (or even a young one) may have died and left a gap.

We may repair a dry stone wall, when the padrone does not have it done at his own expense, as is his duty by contract.

If the fallow fields are dry, we begin manuring and breaking them with the heavy plough - there are two hectares of fallow land to break up. This is no time for sleeping!

During the second fortnight, preferably on mild and humid days, we startpruning the vines and the fruit-trees.

Women cut the grass, and gather the twigs from the pruning of trees into bundles ...and when it’s cold they blow in their hands!.....

Fallow ploughing is in full swing (‘rinnovo’, or the ‘renewal of the land’), so is the pruning of fruit-trees, which had begun in January.

Ploughing was a slow process, especially because when approaching the rows of trees, which divide the fields into strips. We have to break the soil with the foot-rest spade, dig around the tree-trunk and thoroughly manure vines and olive-trees.

We poured the liquid manure from the cesspit, accompanied with artificial fertilizers on the meadow. The spraying of copper sulfate is carried out on peach, pear and apple trees.

Time for tying vines and pruning fruit-trees. Ploughing of the fallow terminates, as does the digging around trees. The ploughing up of the meadow, the ploughing of oat-fields and wheat-fields, all this comes to an end.

During the last decade of the month, if the broken soil is sufficiently dry, we make furrows with the light plough pulled by one or two cows, to plant potatoes, and also beet-root for fodder.

From the 1st to the 20th of the month, sowing is in full swing. The light plough is busy furrowing the ‘renewed’ soil, where maize, beans and chickpeas, etc. are planted.

The sowing of vegetables, the planting of tomatoes (end of month), marrows, cabbage, and cauliflower takes place. The furrows and holes for all this plantation are well manured with stable manure and liquid from the cesspit. We will also sow a meadow of sorghum and maize to be cut young as fodder.

The hoeing and weeding of all spring seedlings (sarchiatura) takes place now that they are growing fast.

We begin the first spraying of copper sulfate on vines, on potatoes, on beans, marrows, and tomatoes, etc.

At the end of the month or at the beginning of June, according to how advanced the flowering is, we thoroughly spray the olive trees with copper sulfate; this is best done when the buds begin to open.

Around the 15th or the 20th of May, the first cherries (‘primaticce’) are ripe. Let us not forget that during this month, sooner or later, haying must begin. Mowed hay must be turned over and made to dry fast, then it must be carried to the barn.

We scrape and clean the trunks of the vines and of their supporting trees (chioppi), or Celtic maples ‘acer campestris’ to which vines cling for support, (an Etruscan tradition); all useless saplings and offshoots are removed.

The harvesting of wheat, of oats, of Celtic beans etc., is in full swing. All these crops must be tied up into bundles and heaped up in the fields before they are carried to the threshing floor.

Wheat and oats are threshed when the threshing machine becomes available. That may be in July or even in August. However, Celtic beans, white beans, chickpeas, etc. are threshed with the flail (‘curreggiato’) on the threshing floor (‘aia’)

Again vines need spraying with copper sulfate - from May to July; vines need copper sulfate at least five times, after July there is no longer any need - at intervals of 15 days, or according to the weather, which if it is humid brings more vermin.

As soon as the harvest is over and the soil has been freed, the ploughman (‘bifolco’, for the Latin ‘bubulcus’, which literally means ‘cow-boy’) begins to plough it. First he will plough the soil which must be ‘renewed next winter with the light plough for immediate sowing of sorghum and maize as fodder. This is cut continuously until the autumn.

In June too we must mow the hay, for the second time, and if the weather is cool, hay may be cut five times in one season.

Another busy month for vegetables. Watering of the crops, picking and arranging the produce in crates, ready for taking to the city market by cart and donkey.

Generally all crops may be harvested during July, if they haven’t been harvested earlier.

In fact we pull up all the beans, all the chickpeas, and we thresh the Celtic beans on the threshing floor. We pick pears, apricots, plums and peaches (although there are varieties of peaches, which ripen as late as October). We tie the tomato plants to reed supports (gradually as they grow). These must be sprayed with copper sulfate four or five times. As the soil is freed from the old crops, and especially where wheat and oats have been harvested, ploughing takes place at once and thoroughly with the wooden plough. We called this operation ‘the breaking of the soil’ (‘rompere il terreno’), especially where hay has been mowed to avoid the draught of the season expanding in depth.

Meadows are mown continually. Potatoes are dug up. Right upon the stubble where wheat has been harvested we sow beans to be picked when green and taken to market.

We also plant leeks and several varieties of cabbages. More harvested wheat-fields are now sown with sorghum and maize to be cut young as fodder.

During the early days of this month we sow turnips for autumn and winter fodder.

As the fields are cleared after harvest we plough them in order to expose the soil to the sun (the sun is the best fertilizer and it is free) in order to make ready for the autumn sowing, and in particular for wheat.

Now with the sun so hot we must look after the vegetables and keep them cool and well watered

During this month the men are very busy hoeing between the trees, where the plough cannot manoeuvre.

We hoe the artichokes, 4 inches below ground we clip the stems which have already borne their fruit. From the root left underground, at the first rains, new plants grow, and these bear their fruit the following year.

We plant the winter lettuces in the fields where wheat has been harvested - this is to say on the stubble (stoppia)- the same soil is renewed as soon as the lettuces have been picked, in February or March.

On parts of the fields where there was wheat we sow a mix of Celtic beans, oats and vetch, which is like peas. All these grow into a tall grass in late autumn when it is mowed and mixed with straw and hay for fodder.

Figs are now ripe and the women dry them and make ‘picce’ (split figs pressed together, each with a section of walnut inside and a sprinkle of aniseed). These are put out to dry in the sun on special wickerwork trays shaped like a large tennis racket. They are withdrawn inside at night and when it rains. If there is a good crop of figs we might sell some at market.

We also at this time ‘take a look’ at the vines. We lift the sagging branches, and we pluck some leaves in order to expose the young grapes to the sun. We once again spray the olive trees with copper sulfate.

We plough up the old meadows of clover and medic, in order to make ready for wheat sowing. The meadow greatly ‘fattens’ the soil and the wheat here gives a good yield.

At the end of the month we ‘beat’ the walnuts. We pick winter fruits, apples and pears, and then take them home and spread them all on special reed shelves (‘stuoie’) in the granary.

According to the weather these fruits may be ripe later than this, sometimes after vintage.

This is vintage time: first we choose the best and healthiest grapes, and we spread them on the reed shelves to dry and wither. These grapes added to the wine in the barrels give it additional taste and sugar (this operation is called ‘governare il vino’ = to feed the wine). When the first grapes are picked the full harvest begins, within the first 10 days of the month. At the end of the month we make wine (svinare). 3-4 days before winemaking we pluck the berries from the previously selected and dried grapes, and we put them into the vats called ‘bigonce’ and crush them with the pestle. As soon as the must has been squeezed out of the main grape harvest (svinatura), the selected grapes begin fermentation (bollire). When the main must has turned into wine in the barrels we add the specially selected crushed grapes (governare). This addition causes enormous general fermentation again. In 15-20 days fermentation gradually ceases, and we seal the mouth of the barrel with cement. This in case one is not provided with a special glass ‘boiler’ applied to the mouth of the barrel. At any rate, air must not enter the barrel at this stage.

With this operation all dredges in the new wine precipitate (spogliatura) completely, and the wine acquires its colour and alcohol.

If the weather has been cool, or rather wet, weeds will have grown on the ploughed fields ready for wheat. In this case we proceed with the weeding with hoes (we have no machines). Then again we harrow the earth and then sow the wheat with the sowing machine pulled by the oxen.

We must dig around the artichokes and cover them well with soil to protect them from winter frost. We shall also plant new seedlings wherever a plant has died. This is for the sake of order. Otherwise we may start a new artichoke field, after 1 foot-deep digging.

After the 20th of this month the olive harvest begins. Then the work for November is enough to keep busy.

In November too we may sow some broad beans, giving them plenty of manure and after quite deep ploughing.

This month is almost entirely devoted to olive picking. There is little else to do in the fields

When it is too cold for picking olives we may dig some trenches for new vines, or holes for new fruit-trees, or we may dig a whole vineyard.

“SEVEN AFTER ONE EGG”

THE RISE FROM DESTITUTION TO POVERTY

In 1919 the first socialist MP for Florence was elected, and in October 1920 the first Socialist mayor was elected in Bagno a Ripoli, the borough (comune) where my family resided.

Giovanni Frizzi, the humble owner of a laundry in Rimaggio, was elected mayor, and Angiolo Pestelli became the first peasant to be elected a councilor.

Fascist violence now was widespread, but my grandfather had more serious problems in hand: hunger, up at “il Torrio”. In September 1922 tragedy struck my family. My uncle Giovanni suddenly died in Turin while doing military service -he died of an ear infection, which might have easily been cured if antibiotics had been discovered –

A few months earlier the mayor of Bagno a Ripoli, Giovanni Frizzi, had made a dramatic public announcement:

We were elected with an imposing majority to administer this commune on behalf of the Socialist Party, and for the purpose of carrying through its programme.

We can state with all confidence that through these difficult times we have been fully engaged in order not to betray your faith in us. Our work is however made useless by the staunch opposition of the tutorial authorities who would like us to follow administrative criteria, which are at variance with our principles!

Rather than betray our faith, we prefer to resign. In order to fully appreciate the reasons for this decision examine the conditions imposed upon us for the approval of the budget. The tutorial authority wanted us to DENY hospital benefits TO ALMOST ALL PEASANTS AND TO MANY WORKING CLASS FAMILIES, we should send home the CHRONICALLY ill from the hospital, that we should deny benefits to the POOR, that we should deny health summer-camps to CHILDREN IN NEED, that we should restrict the free distribution of books to destitute schoolchildren!

On the other hand they wanted this Administration to increase TRADING LICENSE fees, the tax on FARM ANIMALS, and the FAMILY TAX, WITHOUT SPARING EVEN THE LOWEST OF CLASSES!

All this only to allow large PROPRIETORS to save about one hundred thousand lire, and also decreasing to their advantage, the tax on farmland and buildings. Such facts require no comment.

Judge for yourselves whether by handing over my resignations, in order not to bow to doing deeds contrary to our programme, to our faith and to our conscience, we have rightly interpreted the thoughts and the will of all those who elected us to administer and not to please the egotistic self interests of the privileged few, but to do what the working and producing majority want.

In 1922, the year of Mussolini’s “March on Rome”, the political situation of Florence reflects the character of Italian attitudes to political changes throughout history.

The Fascist party had 20.880 registered supporters, the Socialists a mere 1.967 and the Communists only 913. Note that at this time no impositions or pressures came from the Fascist Party. People were still free to choose, and they did, backing what suited them best in the circumstances. By spontaneous support by the people, Fascism became a mass movement like no other before or after it. Florence, one of the cradles of Italian Communism had become, together with practically all other cities in Italy, a wholly Fascist city.

The city that had promptly supported the newly established Communist Party of Italy –founded in Livorno the previous year - had quickly turned her back on its murdered leader, Spartaco Lavagnini, brutally “eliminated” by the Fascists, and rallied behind his murderer.

The negligible groupings of Socialists and Communists were very quickly shifting their allegiance from Bordiga, a pragmatist, to Bolshevism rallying behind Gramsci and Togliatti.

At this time my father was just 11 years old, and had been at school with Frizzi's two children: Omero and Oscar.

They shared Socialist views throughout the Fascist era and in 1946 they, all together, joined the new Socialist Party of Bagno a Ripoli, all convinced that Fascism and Communism, so far as method was concerned, were one and the same thing.

When in 1989 fact proved them to be right, only Omero was left to witness the fall of Stalin's empire and of the Italian Communist Party.

My father, Omero and Oscar had always stated that with its institution, in Livorno in 1921, the Communist Party had deprived the workers of Italy of the chance of a victory over Fascism, by splitting in half the worker's movement.

Later, when the Italian Socialists presented themselves at the elections with the Communists, my father resigned his membership from the Party, remaining a Liberal Socialist. He remained an “Orwellian”, sympathetic to the British Labour Party, a champion of liberty, and an enemy of dogmatism for the rest of his life, at a cost…

My mother, Renata Montecchi, was born on November 25th, 1914 in the hamlet of Mugnana, near the village of Strada in Chianti about 14 Km south of Florence, on the old road to Chianti.

The Montecchis were tenant farmers of the local parish podere, but their family memories recount that their ancestors were coach drivers ad not peasants –perhaps only a comforting family legend.

My grandfather, Ferdinando, born in 1872, married Giuseppa Cozzi, a feeble woman with deep dark eyes and somber countenance, who gave him eight children, six males and two females. She died of TB before I was born.

The Montecchi’s surname is as uncommon as the Caselli’s, and almost any Montecchi or Caselli in Tuscany is likely to be a blood relation to us.

My grandfather Ferdinando was a red-haired, blue eyed, proverbially proud and fiery man. He was said to be able to hold a pale full of water with his erect penis, and to bathe in a reservoir of water in winter, after breaking the thick layer ice which covered it.

Once he had a fight with a scoundrel in front of the parish church of Mugnana. He was knifed, but after losing blood he felt stronger and overpowered his attacker. Later he was arrested for yet another fight. My grandfather's children were Angelo (always called Angiolino), born 10th June 1900, died 6th April 1965; Antonio (always called Tonio), born in 1902 died in 1973; Renato (always called Naho) born in 1910, died in 1989; Dino, born in 1911, died in 1983; Renata, my mother, born in 1914, died in 1987; Franca, born in 1917, living; Franco, born in 1922, died in 1943 at el-Alamein; Torquato born in 1924, living.

Ferdinando moved to Candeli in 1928, while his brother Raffaello, educated by the local parish priest -like several of the Casellis- became the bailiff of a large farming estate in Maremma.

The Montecchis became tenant farmers at "Il Verone I", belonging to the estate of Villa La Tana, of the Marquis Giaquilli-Ferrini, and became neighbours of the Caselli during the brief spell which saw my grandfather tenant of "Il Verone II", sharing the same building. That's how my father and my mother came to meet and then married in 1938.

Angiolino married Santina, a maidservant of the Marquis, from Friuli, on the Austrian border. She never learnt to speak the Tuscan vernacular. Angiolino and Santina did not have any children. Tonio married Bruna Cappelletti, thereby reconciling, in another time and in another place, the Montecchis with the Cappellettis, whom Shakespeare had anglicized as the "Montagues" and the "Capulets".

Bruna died of TB before I was born. Tonio he later got married again with Rina Baldini of Antella and had a son, Maurizio, born in 1946. Dino married Gina Caselli, daughter of my great uncle Pasquale, and had four children: Saverio, born March 11th, 1939; Carlo, born in 1941; Franco, born in 1946; Grazietta, born in 1952. Naho married Gina Marzoli and had Vasco in 1939, Anna in 1941, and Fernando in 1946. Parish priest Deacon Giovanni Coppoli married my mother and father in Candeli on May 19th, 1938. He was the only priest who ever saw me at mass with some regularity.

Franca married Ruggero Rontani and had Sergio in 1941. Torquato married Piera and had Stefano 1958, Stefania 1962, and Barbara, 1968.

During fascism, Ferdinando never took part in any compulsory meeting or bowed to any imposition from the fascist authorities. When a visit by the black-shirts was expected he would pick up his prunning knife and vanish into the woods, on the pretext of coppicing.

Franco was a literary genius, and was described as ‘a force’ by my relations. His letters, which I inherited from my mother, are not those of a peasant but compare well with those of a highly educated person (I have translated some of the letters for the appendix of this work).

Franco was a short and slender man, all muscles and nerves. Like a monkey, he was the fastest of all the boys at climbing up the haystack pole. When the war came he joined the parachutists of the glorious Folgore division. He fought at Tobruk and fell under British machine-gun fire at el Alamein.

In 1972, when I asked my father to write his report on his life as a contadino, I also asked my cousin Saverio -the last peasant among my relations- to write a memoir concerning the life-style of the Montecchi at Il Verone in the 1950s. Saverio did it enthusiastically, and here below is a translation of what he wrote.

Later, after my father had written his report, he topped up Saverio’s description with other essential details, which I also include here below in a faithful translation.

THE GRASS ROOTS OF ECONOMICS

I shall speak to you of the life in the Montecchi household in general terms referring to the period 1950-57. It is the one I remember best, as in 1957 the family split, and my father’s side moved to the farmhouse next door, in ‘I Lagi’.

The podere, Verone I, consisted of 7 and a half hectares of arable land, three and half of which are levelled and four hilly. The hilly land was partly slope and partly terraced.

I make a parenthesis here: I always speak in the past tense, but do bear in mind that wherever there are still peasants, things function in the way I describe them here. Words in brackets represent the way we pronounce them.

The stable produced the greatest revenue. This hosted an average of 5 adult bovines, which we called ‘vaccine’, one or two calves, one she ass (‘ciuca’) and three pigs. The number of pigs may vary according to market prices at the moment of purchase or from the moment of purchase. I shall make myself clearer: if during the period January-March the price was high with respect to earlier years, we may have bought two, if it was lower we may have purchased three or four.

If we bought pigs in the period April-July, we would look at the weather forecasts, and if they were promising a good crop we would buy more than we would otherwise.

As to the price of pigs I remember little, but I can tell you that the profit was slim. When we kept two the profit from the sale of one did not recover the expenses for the two.

As a rule we butchered them in December, we sold one and ‘worked’ the other for ourselves (into hams, salame, sausages, brime, etc.) The one which we sold to the butcher was taken to the slaughter house and the one for us was butchered and ‘worked’ at home.

The law allowed us only one pig all to ourselves. Any others were owned by half by the padrone. When the pigs were sold, of the shared pig we had little more than one half to ourselves.

In the stable, as well as the two working cows (vacche da lavoro) we had three milch cows (mucche da latte). When all went well they each gave birth to one calf per year, at any season. Working cows might belong to different breeds: from the ‘nostrali’ (our local breed), a cross between the ‘Chianina’ and the ‘Calvana’, with a touch of ‘Maremmana’, to the pure ‘Chianina’, to the ‘Casentinese’, to the ‘Romagnola’.

Among the neighbouring contadini we would find all breeds, but generally speaking the ‘Chianina’ and the ‘Casentinese’ were found on level ground, the others on the hills. Draught bovines were 95% female, before the war many contadini used oxen, which of course are castrated males. I believe you are familiar with the ‘Chianina’ breed. The ‘Casentinese’ is similar, only a little smaller, with longer horns pointing higher up.

The ‘Romagnola’ too must be known to you: stout, short legged, with a lot of black hair on the shoulders, with quite long, upright and pointed horns.

The ‘Calvana’ breed differs from the ‘Romagnola’ in that it is larger, white coated and with shorter horns. We kept the ‘nostrale’ until 1953, and then we had the ‘Calvana’.

We used to keep the calves born of the working cows up to 6-7 months of age, then we used to sell them to those contadini who did not rear milch cows. They reared these calves until they were 17 months old, ready for slaughter. Nowadays we don’t rear calves, as we cannot afford milch cows any longer, due to lack of manpower. Milch cows belonged to the ‘Bruno Alpina’ breed until 1953. At that time we began to see Dutch cows, the breed was called ‘Frisone’ (Frisian). Calves born of milch cows were sold after 10-15 days from birth, the cows were then milked and produced about 20 litres of milk per day per cow for the first three months. Then, gradually the yield decreased to about 8 litres, until they were again 7 months pregnant, they would ‘rest’ -with no milk- for two months, then give birth, and so on.

You should know what the she ass (‘ciuca’) was used for… …solely for work.

We paid, I remember 70 to 80 thousand lire to buy an ass, and we used to keep it until it was too old to be of use.

We also reared rabbits (‘coniglioli’, from the Latin ‘cuniculi’), and chickens, all ‘bastard’ breeds in those days. You should know who first brought good breeds of rabbits? (Saverio himself)

We kept 6-7 female rabbits for reproduction, a male, and in all 50 to 70 rabbits for meat.

To be honest I achieved these numbers only around 1968-69, with only three breeding females!

We kept chickens: a cockerel and twenty hens. We allowed them broods amounting to a total of about forty chicks in March and again as many in August. The March chickens ended up as Christmas capons. Some of the August females we reared as brooding hens. We sold the remainder, but they weren’t many, for the best part we ate them ourselves.

We also reared 5 to 8 turkeys in the spring, in order to sell or eat them in winter.

We took the wheat to the water mill and made flour with the stone wheel until 1956-57. The mechanical engine mill was then introduced. We used to make flour every two and a half months, and we made bread every five days.

When I made the bread, I used to bake a lot. I prepared the yeast in the evening and it took me all of the next morning to make the bread. I heated the oven with the twigs from the pruning of olive-trees (vinciglie), as these were no t very good for the fireplace.

As you know we were a large family, 16 in all. The average in the neighbourhood was about 7 to 8 persons per family.

Work in the fields followed the ‘classical’ system of ‘agricultural rotation’; (I discovered this

at school) This rotation functioned more or less thus, whether in the plain or in the hills, it was the same.

About a quarter of all arable land was worked as ‘rinnovo’ (fallowing). One quarter because in our area a four-year rotation was the practice -in other parts, even close to us might be different.

Working with ‘rinnovo’ consisted of a very thorough ploughing of a whole field -a ‘field’ (campo) must not be mistaken for a ‘strip’ (striscia). The field, which would measure about one hectare (10,000 sq. metres) or more, was bordered by drainage ditches or by lanes. The strips are the subdivision of a field and were, as you well know, bordered by rows of vines, olive-trees or fruit-trees- .The ‘rinnovo’ took place between January and March. We brought stable manure (concio) for the soil and cesspit liquid (bottino) for the trees.

We ploughed with the asymmetrical iron plough (coltro, from the Latin ‘culter’= knife, as this implement has a knife ahead of the ploughshare for cutting roots), but we dug around the trees with the foot-rest-spade (vanga). It was during the ‘rinnovo’ that we dug the deepest. In spring we sowed vegetables, particularly tomatoes and potatoes, in a lesser quantity marrows, and beans. We also sowed fodder crops such as maize and beet-root, and maize for ripening. In September-October, as a field was cleared of these crops, we would plough it again to sow wheat. Sowing took place during the first half of November.

In the spring where the wheat was sown we also sowed medic and clover. We gently covered this seed with the rake without uprooting the young wheat. When in June we harvested the wheat, the alfalfa (erba medica) and the clover (bolognino) continued to grow and we mowed them the following year between May and August. According to the weather, which might be more or less dry, we might mow the meadow from two to four times.

We kept the meadow going for one or two years (when we kept it for one year we adopted a four-year rotation, when two years it would have been a five-year rotation).

We ploughed the alfalfa meadow between August and September. We did this in order to sow wheat, and after the wheat had been harvested the stubble would be left. We ploughed this with the wooden plough and made furrows where we sowed either turnips or what we called ‘ferrana’, a mixture of oats (avena) and Celtic bean (fave), to be mowed as grass for fodder. These fodders were cut in winter and the soil would then be ploughed again for the ‘rinnovo’.

Olive trees must be pruned in March and April. They must be sprayed with copper sulfate continually from May to September. Olives can be picked from mid November onwards.

Now that I remember I am going to tell you how copper sulfate (‘ramato’) is made:

We put from one to three kilos of those bright blue copper sulfate crystals in water. When these have dissolved we add quicklime in the same quantity. We then add water to reach 100 litres.

The weaker ‘ramato’ is used for the earliest sprays of the vines, whereas the stronger we use for the last and for the olive trees

We made copper sulfate pesticide at home, at the vivaio, then we filled the barrel which we carried to the field on the sled-car pulled by the cows.

Vines were either puned immediately after vintage, or in February-March. In March we tied the vines and at the end of April we plucked the new shoots (occhi) growing on the old stem (tronco). Between May and June we clipped the excess growth of new shoots (tralci).

Copper sulfate was prayed first from the 5th to the 10th of May, and for the last time at the end of June or early July, five times in all. Vintage took place in early October.

I am now going to tell you how we tied the vines. In our neighbourhood some did it differently. Around Incisa, for example, vines were allowed to grow taller and developed longer branches.

Normally we kept our vines low -from 1 m to 1.30 m- at this height we bent all one-year-old branches downward and allowed them 60 cm of length.

We clipped off all the buds of these new branches except the two nearer the trunk, these would grow and be bent the following year. There is a great deal to say about vines and wine. If you need to know more, just ask, I will try to tell you all I know.

In response to the request in your letter I will now tell you all I know about “la Tana” (the fattoria to which the podere belonged).

Our podere, as you know, was situated on the extreme north -of the estate-, it was the richest in crops but not the largest. The podere of the Gasperini family, situated in the extreme north-west, for example, measure over 10 hectares of arable land (accoltivito), plus some clearings (piagge) in the woods, where wheat may be sown every other year or so.

There were in all 32 contadini -there were no vacant poderi-, and the whole estate measured about 400 hectares, of which two fifths only of arable land, the rest was woodland –mostly temperate deciduous woodland.

Crops were many and varied. Vetch, for example, were cultivated by some from Rignalla upwards, but in a very small quantity. On the hills the crops consisted of olives, wheat and livestock, not much of the latter though.

An average of 30 barrels of olive oil (3-kg. net weight each), with a maximum which reached twice the average on good years. In fact the quantity of both olive oil and wine varied greatly according to the weather each year.

An average of 800 barrels of wine (50-kg. net weight each). The maximum record was reached in 1957 with an excess of 316 barrels.

The wine and oil barrels were the property of the estate, such as were the wheat sower. All other implements were our property, or lent in trust (a stima)- such as the iron plough and the ox-cart. This meant that we kept them in trust from the beginning to the end of the contract.

The amounts listed here represent the whole crop, which must be divided thus: 54% to the contadino, 46% to the padrone. Nowadays it is 57% to the contadino.

We produced about 100 sacks of wheat (63-kg. each, it is the generally accepted weight).

One sack contained three bushels (staia), each 21-kg. The ‘bigoncia’ or ‘grape-rushing-vat’, measured one and a half bushels.

The olive oil crushing mill (frantoio) was the property of the padrone, and the contadini paid for its use in kind - above the padrone’s share- the dredges (sansa) and their labour.

In those days the oil crushing mills were antiquated and to produce 2-ql. of olive oil took three people and one day’s work plus the assistance of the oil-mill-man (frantoiano), paid by the padrone.

The house had 12 rooms as living quarters, plus the cellar and six other rooms including the stables and storage, and other facility rooms. Then there was the barn, the pigsties, the loggia and a hut to shelter firewood and implements.

Now in detail: 6 bedrooms, four of which were double, one for the male children, one for the females.

There were four storage rooms where we stored olive oil, wheat and cereals, drying grapes for wine-making, olives while the picking was in progress, winter fruits, bread flour and many other things which we did not throw away but which we would today.

There were two toilets, one on the first floor and one outside the house. We bathed in one of the storage rooms in a large basin (tinozza).

On the ground floor there was the kitchen, the drawing room, the cellar with 3 barrels of 7 to 10-hl. Among the other contadini nobody had 10-hl. barrels, but at the fattoria there were larger ones with a 50-60-hl capacity.

When I lived in the casa colonica there was a direct communication between the stable and the kitchen. From the stable, big enough to house seven adult bovines and 3 young, we passed into the fodder-cutting room (segatoio). Outside the house there was the manure basin (conciaia) where the stable bedding (concio) was kept to ‘ripen’ for the longest possible time, since, as you well know the longer it stayed there the better it became as a fertilizer.

There were rooms for rabbits and poultry, while the pigsties were located near the manure basin.

All straw was kept in the open, heaped up in a typical conical stack (pagliaio). Later when straw was mechanically pressed into cubes we heaped it up into what we called a ‘barca’.

Hay was kept in the barn, an especially drafty and airy room on the first floor; only if we had too much would we heap it up into a haystack.

Under the loggia we sheltered the ox-cart and the horse carts, but in the huts (whose walls were made of reeds and the roof was of corrugated iron sheets) we stored firewood, iron-plough (coltro), wood-plough (aratro), hoes, foot-rest spades, sickles. scythes, some straw and bundles of pruned olive-tree twigs (venciglie). We shook off the leaves of the latter from the branches and added them to the fodder in winter.

As far as the organization of work was concerned us the Montecchis were exceptios to the rule. This was the result of communal agreement among us.

Such an agreement was the result of our attitude, (I don’t know how to explain it) a bit militaristic perhaps, of conducting our business. This was largely unnecessary in smaller families. Other families as large as our own were simply not capable of organization.

In our household each of the grown ups had an allotted task, helped according to necessity, by the others or by us children.

Earnings, no matter where they may have come from, were communal, as were all expenses. Everything was registered in the double-entry account book. Everything was registered, even expenditure of a mere 100 lire, by my mother (Gina Caselli) or by aunt Santina.

Every now and then, the account book was read aloud, income and outgoing, in the presence of all those that bothered to listen. Only on such occasions we might hear money talk. I say ‘talk’, because I have never heard a single argument on the matter.

Whenever a component of the family needed money he or she went to aunt Santina. She recorded the outgoing and handed over the money without asking the purpose or whether it was a personal need.

As far as work was concerned, uncle Angiolino was the one who dealt with the city market (piazza). He took our fruit and vegetables there, he looked after the she-ass and managed the watering of the vegetable patch (innaffiatura).

Uncle Tonio took care of the cellar, of the pruning, and roughly speaking of the technical side of farming the land.

My father (Dino) dealt with the stock markets; he dealt with the padrone and his farm manager, and carried out all business.

Uncle Naho (Renato) looked after the animals and was the ploughman. He was the ‘bifolco’(stable-man).

Among the women, aunt Gina (Renato’s wife) looked after the rabbits. My mother was the cook (massaia), but there were no strict rules as to tasks for the women beyond what I have said.

The women mow the meadow with hand sickles, and they had to collect firewood, and help the men during the harvests.

The registered family head (capoccia) was the eldest. This is to say uncle Angiolino, but, as I have said, nobody would make important decisions without consulting with all the others.

I shall end here. I am almost certain of having bored you, I am not even sure that you will have read this letter up to this point. I have written it during my spare time, some days a few lines, other days nothing at all...

On receiving this letter from my cousin, I asked my father for more details about the Montecchis household and podere. He was happy to provide the following details, which constitute a very valuable view from a different perspective, of what Saverio said.

If the two accounts differ in detail, it is impossible to asses which of the two is the most accurate. Both reports are, in my view, accurate in so far as they are written history, and all written history is nothing but a history of the historian’s mentality.

In 1950 the Montecchi family was composed of 15 persons, 8 adults and 7 minors. The podere consisted of seven hectares of arable fields, and a vineyard. All the fields were more or less cultivated in the same way, both in the variety of trees and in crops. The exception was a vineyard of 2000 sq. m. with 1,700 vines, which gave an average production of 25-30-hl. of red table wine, which I will include in the average total vine production of the whole podere.

Practically all adult individuals were capable of doing and did the same things, but as far as ploughing the field with the ox-team was concerned it was always the same person (uncle Renato) who did it. Uncle Angiolino was the one who milked the cows. The others might also milk the cows, according to how many cows needed milking at any one time, and according to the availability of any one person. The same applied to work in the fields.

In summer as in winter, or during any other season, the Montecchis rose before sunrise, and until it was time to go to the fields men were busy around the stable. One milked the cows, one cleaned the bedding (lettiere). While one took the milk to the fattoria, another would linger in the stable finishing off this or that job, while the others left for the fields. Both in the stable and in the fields, when the men could not cope they got help from the women.

It was always the same person who managed the cellar (cantina), namely uncle Tonio, always helped by another, according to the job. He also made bread, helped by one of the women (until Saverio was old enough to take over bread making).

It was also the same person who always took fruit and vegetables to market. It was the ‘capoccia’ (the family head), uncle Angiolino, as far as the Montecchis were concerned.

We must bear in mind that in all families, after school, boys and girls were allotted suitable tasks in the home, in the stable, in the fields, and especially in the irrigation of the vegetable patch.

They had two working cows, the white Chianina or Calvana breed, and four milch cows of the Bruna Alpina breed. Each female, milch or working cow was expected to produce a calf every 12-13 months. These calves were sold within a month from birth, when they weighed 70-90-kg.

Milch cows were milked until they were about 7 months pregnant. If a working cow had sufficient milk, and it allowed a man to milk her, then her calf would follow the same fate as the milch cow. Working cows rarely allowed milking. They violently kicked anyone who tried; otherwise the calf of a working cow was raised in the stable until the age of 4-5 months. It was then sold to other contadini who reared calves for veal and kept no milch cows.

Sometimes, when there was sufficient fodder, a working cow’s calf might be reared for the slaughterhouse; that is to say until the age of 20-22 months.

There was an average production of milk of 100-120-hl. - with four milch cows, and two working cows when agreeable to being milked.

They also had a horse, which was used to pull the cart to the vegetable market in Florence, to cart goods to the fattoria, to fetch fertilizers, to cart hay from the fields to the barn, or to pull the gig (calesse). They also reared 1 or 2 pigs for fattening, one all to themselves, one shared with the padrone to be sold at the market.

Bread was baked every 5-6 days. A family like this would use about 30-ql. of wheat per year; this including bread and home made pasta.

The wine in the cellar required constant attention and care. During the decreasing moon of March wine had to be removed from the old containers (travaso) in order to rid it of the dredges (posatura) which would have deposited at the bottom (spogliato).

With the raising of the temperature, from March onwards, the wine might ferment again and turn into vinegar. This applied both to new and too old wine, unless it had been bottled and sealed.

Olive oil had to be shifted during the first fortnight in June, (still during the decreasing moon) as the dredges that deposit at the bottom of the containers would ferment and oil would become sour and inedible.

All chores concerning the cellar were preferably carried out on rainy days, or when work in the field is not possible, but had to be carried out at the right date in any case.

In winter or when persistent rains or frost made access to the fields impossible, men would mend their implements and tools. They would haft their hoes and spades, etc. and take care of the vehicles, including making a new sled-car if needed. They would weave all their baskets and panniers. They would clean the granary, the poultry pen, the pigsty, the rabbit enclosure, and mend the horse and ox-team harnesses.

One or two women capable of weaving, worked at the loom and made cloth for bed-sheets and blankets. When necessary they would weave linen and cotton, sometimes canvas, to make very tough fabrics, also used as shells for the mattresses.

They knitted underwear for the family. They would do the washing (bucato), sewing and mending of clothes, ironing, and they would carry out embroidery on their bed-sheets and that of their future daughters for their wedding dowry. They would obviously also clean the house and make pasta.

All fields were planted and cultivated in the same way. Everywhere there were olive-trees, fruit-trees and vines dividing the fields into strips at regular intervals. It was a uniform soil, practically all limestone (alberese), although near the river it was rather sandy (renoso).

Rotation took place all over the podere, with the exclusion of vegetables which always were planted in the same strip, between the main road and the river Arno. This made irrigation easier and work less arduous (piu’ gentile).

The ‘rinnovo’ (renewal of the land) involved deep ploughing and deep digging with the footrest spade (a typically Tuscan way of working the soil), in January and February -also in March if frost and rain had hampered work earlier. Heavy manuring with stable dung (letame stallatico) was necessary. On the ‘renewed’ soil, maize, potatoes, beans, chickpeas, beetroot for fodder, were sown or planted, and finally vegetables and tomato seedlings were also planted.

As the ‘renewed’ soil is ridded of the remains of the harvested crops, ploughing takes place again (in those days, 1945-50) mostly with the iron plough (coltro), rather than with the wooden plough (aratro), to prepare the soil for the November wheat sowing.

On some of these fields, the meadow was sown in March-April -alfalfa and clover- by first raking the dry soil very carefully -with a mechanical rake- in order not to uproot the seedlings of wheat.

In another part of the fields, after the wheat harvest deep ploughing took place. In October-November, Celtic beans and oats are sown after heavy manuring to grow a meadow for fodder.

After the mowing of Celtic beans and oats -the year after- ploughing again for wheat sowing took place. This required heavy manuring especially where oats had grown, as they greatly deplete the nourishment of the soil.

The following year, after the wheat had been harvested, less thorough ploughing took place, and turnips (rape), oats (avena), sorghum (saggina) and Celtic beans (fave) were sown together again in order that a tall thick meadow would grow. This would be mowed in autumn and winter, and until the frost would kill it, and be turned into fodder for the livestock.

When this soil became bare (scoperto) in mid winter, the rotation began its cycle again with deep ploughing and heavy manuring.

Note: Deeply ploughed and heavily manured soil, especially when the dry northerly wind blows, is ‘cooked’ (cotto) by frost and its fertility increased. That’s why we call this operation rinnovo.

We take into account the phases of the moon only as far as the sowing of cereals, pulse and vegetables in general are concerned, and (but only if we are fussy), also during vine pruning. Sowing and pruning should be done during a decreasing moon (‘luna scemante’, or ‘luna dura’ as we used to say). Legumes and vegetables in particular if sown on an increasing moon (luna giovane), grow too long and thin, and give little fruit. (This may sound like an old woman’s tale to the city dweller who does not know that a bright moon produces enough night glow to causes faster growth of grasses and legumes)

Land size mq.. 25.000 : Seed............................................. kg. 450-500

Land size mq.. 5.000: Seed................................................kg. 10-15

Land size mq. 2.000: Seed................................................kg. 100-150

Land size mq. 1.000: Seed.................................................kg. 5

Land size mq. 500: Seed....................................................kg. 2

Land size mq. 2.000: Seed.................................................kg. 50

Wine.....................................................................................ql. 120

Oil..........................................................................................ql. 20

Cherries..............................................................................ql. 8-10

Apricots..............................................................................ql. 10-15

Plums...................................................................................ql. 3

Peaches...............................................................................ql. 25

Walnuts...................................................…...........ql. 0.80

1 Light wooden plough (aratro in legno piccolo) pulled by a single cow, to produce shallow furrows on harrowed soil for spring sowing.

4 Metal hand rakes (rastrelli a mano in ferro) for raking on wheat-sown soil for sowing the meadow.

2 Liquid manure carrying vats (bigoni per il liquame) for manuring or carrying water, copper sulfate etc.

3 Whetstones (coti) these were held in a cow-horn containing water strapped to the belt.

1 Anvil (incudine). The edge of sickles and scythes was hammered thin before sharpening on the whetstone.

2-3 Serrated sickles (falcetti a denti) to untie the sheaves on the threshing machine.

3-4 Stable forks (forconi per il lettame), for minding the animals’ bedding.

4-5 Hard heather brooms (granate di scopa) for brushing the stable and the threshing floor.

50 Chianti bottles (fiaschi) the typical container of Tuscan wine, covered with straw.

The sowing machine and the threshing machine were provided by the padronee who received a fee called the ‘fintassa’, according to contract.

Fruit and vegetables were sold at the open market in Florence. The farm manager cashed the money from the market’s middlemen, and then all the money was divided according to contract.

Livestock was rarely sold or bought at a market. When such a purchase was envisaged, a middleman was put in charge, he found the seller or the buyer; this may be a breeder, a butcher or trader.

When buying or selling an animal, 40 days were allowed as a warrantee, to report a complaint. The cow might refuse to be milked, it might bite, it might kick, it might charge, or it might turn out to be unfit.

In case of complaint the cow was checked by a vet, or by an expert, in the presence of both the buyer and the seller. Should it turn out that a complaint was grounded, the beast would go back to the seller and the money returned, or the price readjusted.

The fair of Impruneta, during the week of October 18th was the largest, and perhaps dating back several centuries.

Another fair was held at Pontassieve on August 10^th; also an old traditional event.

In the commune of Bagno a Ripoli the most important fair was the cattle market held at Capannuccia in August.

The fair of Antella was renowned for both cattle and other goods, as there were several large stables in that district.

Two small fairs were held at Bagno a Ripoli and at Osteria Nuova, both for livestock and merchandise.

The Montecchi seldom traded at these fairs. Both buyers and sellers came from other districts.

Livestock was taken to the fair only for the purpose of showing it off, or in order to get a prize, which was often offered by the Government for the best pair of oxen, cows or calves.

Wheat was turned into flour at the nearest water mill, or by a trusted miller somewhere not too far. From two to five sacks of wheat, or more, were milled at any one time.

The miller considered that 1% of the flour was left at the mill in dust (spolvero), and offered a discount accordingly.

Those who milled two to three sacks (c.150 kg.) left their flour in the sacks, whereas those who milled from 8 to ten sacks put their flour into special chests where it was pressed.

We used to say that ‘rested’ flour (farina riposata) in this way gave softer and longer lasting bread. This may be true, but the difference was negligible.

Those who aimed at a white bread wet the wheat before putting it into sacks. The bran softened and separated well from the flour that of course came out white from under the stone mill. Those who wanted brown bread milled it very dry, and naturally obtained more flour and less bran out of the same amount of wheat.

The quality of bread depended upon various factors, good milling, well made dough, good yeast, good fermentation in a warm room, a good oven heated at the right temperature and that kept its temperature and did not cool down before the bread baked.

Many families never managed to bake good bread, mainly because different wheat gave different breads.

Olives were crushed at the press of the fattoria. The new oil was divided in the established portions between the padrone and the contadino. A percentage of 1,5% was paid for the use of the machinery by the contadino.

During pressing, room temperature had to ideally reach 22-25 degrees Celsius. The olives themselves heaped up produce heat and the oil flows well and completely out of the dredges.

The dredges were left at the fattoria and were sold by the padrone to industrial mills. All profit was the shared as by contract.

Until the 1950s all weights and measures were still the old Tuscan measures and not yet metric

All recipients for oil and wine were precise standard measures, but generally speaking everything was weighed on the scales or on the weighing machine.

As regards the number of poultry the contadino had to follow the rules established by the Patti Agrari, the Agrarian Pact as the contract was called. The padrone allowed a certain number of chickens, not exceeding 30. These were called Tutti Patti ‘Full Pacts’. In the case of the Montecchis Mezzi Patti, ‘Half Pacts’ were agreed, that is to say 15 chickens. The padrone received one capon at Christmas, weighing no less than 2,5 kg., and two dozen eggs.

There was trouble if the established numbers were disregarded, the farm manager (fattore) would keep a close look at the number of chickens in the yard.

There were no restrictions on rabbits, but one was careful not to exaggerate in numbers.

Saverio's report is discursive, it does not aim at systematicity, but it contains some specific points, which were either missing, wrong or unclear in my father's report. On the other hand my father’s report on the Montecchis helps a great deal to fill the gaps in Saverio’s description.

The two reports contain considerable linguistic differences. These are due to several factors. Although both Saverio and my father were born in the parish of Candeli, in houses scarcely one km apart, the difference in age and experience (if not in education) between the two was considerable.

Another point is that Saverio grew up in a family that had migrated to Candeli from the Chianti, and it carried with it a number of linguistic differences with respect to the vernacular of Candeli.

On the other hand my family too had migrated to Bagno a Ripoli from Sangodenzo, and although that was before my father was born, slight linguistic differences with respect to the vernacular of Candeli lingered on.

One of the points, which might strike the novice reader of such matters, is the attitude to money of both these families. Money is unmentionable, as it is the substance of the Devil, in as much as it can create discord among men and among brothers and sisters.

The attitude to money found in this society is that of an aristocratic class, not that of a wage labouring class. All researchers have overlooked this fundamental point.

Two dramatic events contributed to the obliteration of the traditional agricultural landscape in Tuscany. The great flood of November 4th 1966 wiped out all the podere of La Massa where I was born. The fields were washed away by the water of the Arno to expose the bare rock. The lower and most fertile fields of Verone, by the Arno were covered with a thick layer of sand. All the trees were uprooted and washed away.

The exceptionally cold winter of 1985-86 practically killed all the fruit trees and all olives in the region, thus disfiguring the entire agricultural landscape that has since developed to be a very different one from the original.

The present landscape of rural Tuscany bears no relationship to that which existed before these events.

The same cataclysm has affected the culture. No trace of the culture described here is to be found today in Tuscany; soon not even a reliable memory of it will exist.

Chapter Three

Per me l’e’ stata una Maremma amara

All over pastoral Italy –and throughout the Mediterranean world- transhumance was necessary as in winter the grass would wither under frequent chills and snowfalls in the mountains while it would flourish in the tepid plains by the sea. Conversely the grass would wither in the plains in summer, whilst growing green soon after the melting of the snows.

Some of the men would spend six months of the year away from home, living in large huts, in communities of men only.

This tradition was established out of necessity and originated during the late Neolithic period among the shepherds who developed their semi-nomadism in symbiosis with the expanding economy of settled agriculture.

It appears that the culture of semi-nomadic sheep rearing throughout the Old World is one and the same. That is to say that from the Atlantic coasts to the Pacific watershed in the heart of China, all shepherds shared a similar material culture and probably once also shared a common language.

I had the opportunity of gathering considerable proof of the existence of a common shepherd’s culture throughout Eurasia in my field research in Xinjiang and in Epirus, and I am now convinced that most European shepherds carried an important Indo-Iranian legacy.

The numerous Alans herders and shepherds who accompanied the Goths, the Vandals and other Eurasiatic nomads in their invasions of the West, during the 5-6-7th centuries, were Iranian speakers. During their westward movement they apparently abandoned their language and learned Latin very readily, out of necessity, as they needed to trade with the local populations who were Latin speakers. From Moldova to Portugal transhumant shepherds still speak, or spoke in the main, Neo-Latin idioms. Only some groups had to learn Slavonic, Turkish or Arab languages.

Even if historical evidence for transhumance in classical times is only limited to the Abruzzi, Apulia and Latium, it definitely occurred in other regions where it was practiced until modern times. The integration of the Alan immigrants with Sardinian, Abruzzese, Iberian, and French ‘aboriginal’ shepherds must have been very easy to accomplish on account of common customs and affinity of language. It was with the input of the Alan migration that the number of transhumant shepherds increased in the Balkans and in Western Europe during the early Middle Ages. However transhumance was not ‘invented’ at this late period; it only became numerically more relevant.

Coming back to the northern Apennines, not all sheep breeders practiced transhumance. Smaller flocks were kept in the stable and fed with aspen or populus nigra leaves, collected be men and women on the banks of the torrent during the summer months, and stored away in barns for winter fodder. Only larger flocks were driven away by hired ‘professional’ shepherds to graze the vast pastures of the province of Grosseto, 150 Km away, from September 8^th till mid May.

Vast flocks were driven along a specific network of droves all called “Via Maremmana”, as they led to the Maremma (the Sealand).

But this was not all the migration that there was. Regularly, every generation, some of the family would swarm away from the uplands and migrate to the hills and lowland, or even abroad, to Switzerland, Germany or France, to do hard jobs, such as harvesting, lumbering or mining.

The district of Londa gravitated around the Casentino, both administratively and culturally.

An ancient road connected Arezzo with the Mugello across the ridge descending due west from the mountain of Falterona, at Caspriano.

This road descended to Londa where it is still known as Via Etrusca, from Caspriano and Varena, where the Conti Guidi had a fortress. The ruins of the Castello di San Leolino are still an imposing sight, towering as they do above centuries old forests of chestnut trees.

The consul Flaminius probably turned this sheep track into a military road during Hannibal’s invasion. It then served the purpose of taking the Roman troops onto the Via Aemilia near Bologna directly from Arezzo, and it remained a trade road during the Middle Ages. This is why the lords of Romagna and Casentino held this bridgehead towards the north until recent times.

The mountainous region where my ancestors lived is characterized by an underlying ethno-cultural continuity. Place-names which date back to prehistory and proto-history are singularly numerous there, and this can only mean that there never was demographic replacement, no significant invasion, and that the people who now live there are predominantly the descendants of the same inhabitants who populated the area around 2000 BC. The Germanic conquest of these valleys –Goths and Lombards- must not have amounted to more than a few dozen s individuals. They became and remained the rulers but apparently mixed with the local population without establishing significant class or cultural barriers.

The local population of those days had carried out their farming in the old Roman tradition. Gathering the fragments of the Roman establishment, farmers had built their own dwellings on the abandoned estates, or had taken over the half-ruined “villas”.

The German invaders largely changed all that, and between the 5^th and 7^th centuries established their serfdom. They organized rural economy along different laws and customs, alien to the Western tradition and more akin to the Iranian cultural sphere. However, not all peasants were rounded up and confined into castles, or walled hamlets and villages, and turned into serfs.

Old traditions die hard, and especially so in mountain valleys. Old traditions somehow survived to re emerge later, as they suited the geography, the climate and people’s mental attitudes.

There is a good book, a very rare one it seems, written by an American anthropologist, Charles Godfrey Leland, President of the Gypsy-lore Society at the end of the 19^th century, entitled “Etruscan Roman Remains in Popular Tradition”. This book was published by Fisher Unwin, London in 1892, and it consists of the most detailed, remarkable and astonishing report on the survival of ancient pagan traditions in the Apennines that divide Tuscany from the Romagna, then under the administration of Florence.

If the book is not an elaborate hoax, which I think it very unlikely, it presents one of the most astounding accounts of cultural survival in the whole of the Western world. This work may prove that the people of this region are the descendants of those who inhabited these valleys three to four thousand years ago.

At the dawn of civilization the Etruscans had penetrated deep into this recess of the Arno valley, from the plain of Florence, to gain a passage through the Apennines to the Adriatic coast, south of Rimini. Etruscan remains of the archaic period have been found at Vierle, and place-names such as Varéna, Gugéna and Spaliéna, are clearly of pre-Latin origin, and might well express the name of the "eponymous heroes" who first settled each of these sites before 600 BC. Such an eponymous hero and his descendants inhabited their own "palace", a house with numerous outbuildings including storage rooms and a temple.

This petty king, or prince-warrior, would administer religious and civil matters, allocating arable and grazing land to his subjects, who were sharecroppers. This meant that the peasants would hand over to their prince half of their produce, or at any rate, pay him in kind. The petty king might also have owned slaves who would work his own personal estate, or the land that belonged to the temple/palace.

This is the "Orientalizing" system of production of Mesopotamian and Anatolian derivation, also adopted in Minoan Crete.

The emergence of the Etruscan state system coincided with striking changes in the agricultural system and in rural settlement patterns. Whereas farming in pre-Etruscan times had consisted of cereal-legume cultivation and generalized stock rearing, there is overwhelming evidence of more intensive systems of land use in the Etruscan period in both plant and animal husbandry.

Etruscan farming marked a clear break with the past in the systematic cultivation of tree crops as well as cereals and legumes. Vines, olives and fig trees were introduced below 600-700 metres of altitude on sunny slopes. Above all there was widespread cultivation of grapevines. Cereals increased in number of varieties. Emmer, einkorn, bread-wheat, barley and millet are all present in archaeological records.

The proto-historic system of mixed farming (cereal/legume cultivation and generalized stock keeping) was replaced by Mediterranean poly-culture (cereals, legumes, olives, vines, figs) and more intensive stock keeping, with probably an emphasis on wool production.

Although both olive and vine are native to Etruria, they were not in widespread systematic cultivation until the formation of the Etruscan state, (9^th -8^th century BC in the south of Etruria and 7^th to 6^th century BC in the Arno Valley).

Later, in Hellenistic and Roman times, the administrators of the chief town of the district replaced the prince in his functions. A kind of Greek-style ‘polis’, and private ownership of land, more or less as understood today, was introduced.

However, not all the land was farmed under the well-known Roman system of the slave-run agricultural estate. It has been proved that throughout the Roman period there was a great deal of small private as well as communal property in marginal areas. In the mountains, on the hills, and in districts which remained off the beaten track, small and medium size estates existed throughout the Roman period. Here there were small farmers who carried on the indigenous tradition; otherwise practices and implements going back to Etruscan times would not have come down to us.

Ancient traditions once lost are not recoverable. One does not ‘invent’ pre-Roman implements and practices, like those that I myself observed and studied in the province of Florence and elsewhere in the 1960s and 1970s.

Scholars with insufficient field experience seem to believe that ancient traditions may be ‘invented’, and that a labourer or another person may become a peasant if he so wishes or if circumstances arise: well, this has never happened, as it could not happen. Has ever a Spanish Conquistador become an Amazon Indian? The same anthropological laws ensure that one does not become a peasant from being something else, even if one wishes.

The earliest inhabitants of the upper reaches of the Arno were Ligurians -as suggested by the name of the local tribe, the "Casuentillani”. Later the Umbrians took over the lower arable lands and adapted it to mixed farming, while the Ligurians were relegated to the uplands and remained tied to older traditions. There seems to be philological and archaeological evidence for this conclusion.

I myself have found confirmation of this whilst studying local traditional crafts. The ‘slide-car’ used up until recent decades in the Casentino, known as the "treggia", has the same design as that of Mugello, Frignano and Lunigiana and throughout the area of the Ligurians, whereas it differs from the vehicle used in adjacent areas. The huts built by the shepherds and the inhabitants of the higher ground, above the vine cultivation line, is again the same as those in all the Ligurian cultural area, but in the lowland it is of Umbrian type. I published this research both in "Archeologia Medievale” and in "Ethnologia Europaea", between 1974 and 1979.

The Etruscans, being an aristocracy, had no influence on local peasant traditional implements and techniques, but only on the production relationships that they clearly imported from Asia Minor.

Genetic tests recently carried out confirm both my suppositions and those of most philologists and archaeologists of the old school.

David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch Zuber, two scholars, the first a professor of history from Harvard University, the second Directeur d'Etudes of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, in their book "Tuscans and Their Families" (1985) state that " To the east (of Florence), the ancient Via Flaminia Minor joined Arezzo to Bologna, traversing the Mugello and the Casentino. It linked Bologna directly with Rome. In suppressing the feudal clans perched on the Apennine slopes (the Conti Guidi in particular), Florence gained control over a segment of this highway and turned the traffic toward itself"

This is how this district became part of the Florentine territory and what part my ancestors played in this event.

The Augustan administrative division of Italy was maintained practically unchanged until the Middle Ages, and largely survives today in ecclesiastical administration.

A "raegio" or region was divided up into "coloniae" or colonies (the territories of an important city, which correspond, to the Diocese). These were divided up into smaller units, called "plebs", which literally means ‘peoples’ or ‘boroughs’. This administrative system survived the fall of the Roman Empire when each borough had a main church where all newborn were baptized (and where the books listing the population were kept) and a number of parishes.

Incidentally, this division was reflected in the subdivisions of dialects. As certain accents and terms were peculiar to the Diocese, other more subtle differences were only found within the "plebs". Others, yet subtler, were unique to each parish. Such extremely subtle linguistic variations persisted until the diffusion of television in the 1960s. Since then dialects and vernaculars have become standardized over a whole region.

FROM THE FEUDAL SYSTEM TO THE CITY-STATE

After the fall of the Roman Empire and the breakdown of the state system, rural communities gathered the fragments and re organized themselves to carry on their productive tasks.

Sometimes old Etruscan sites which had been abandoned for several centuries were re occupied and rebuilt. Sometimes burnt down Roman villas were refurbished and turned into hamlets.

With the arrival of the Germanic tribes from Central Asia, what is best described as a Sassanian mode of production were introduced, and the system of society known as ‘feudal’ was traumatically enforced.

Studies carried out in several parts of Tuscany and especially in the Val d’Elsa illustrate this passage from a “classical” to a “medieval” social system.

An elite of mounted warriors took over a majority of natives and imposed upon them a social system and a mode of production hitherto alien to the classical world. A civilisation based on Indo-Iranian models appears to have been introduced suddenly and on a large scale to change the face of the landscape and the attitudes of people.

Naturally, in some outlying areas the old tradition lingered on, and once the yoke of the oppressor was released, people turned back and adapted themselves to a way of life and tradition which was a mixture of the old and the new.

The private demesnes became incorporated within the Florentine state, which was again divided into ‘circumscriptions’, the "contadi" (comitati literally means counties). These assumed judicial, military and fiscal responsibilities. The largest of these ‘circumscriptions’ was the Florentine "contado" itself, a territory stretching 5 miles out of the city walls in each direction. This territory was divided into quarters each becoming and extension of one of the city’s.

In the early thirteenth century the city was re-divided into "sestieri" (six parts = sestieri, four parts=quartieri) and so was the territory around it.

The administrative and economic bonds linking the urban and the rural sestieri were very strong.

Members of the rural populations would migrate to the city and settle within the urban sestiere, to which their territory belonged, retaining close ties with their villages and lands, which were administered by the corresponding city sestiere.

By the middle of the fourteenth century this system grew obsolete and the territory as well as the city were again divided into quarters. The new rural and urban quarters were laid out in roughly equal proportions, and Florence remained the centre of jurisdiction, but the tie between the city and the rural quarters were loosened a great deal.

Gradually the rural quarters were left without a social administrative and ceremonial role. The city became closed within itself and contacts with its countryside were weakened considerably. The new rural quarters were entirely artificial, being bordered by the Arno and by main roads, as it was thought convenient. The vast quarter of San Giovanni, about 1.600 square kilometres in area, stretched eastward to include our district. It then climbed up the Apennines, and went over the watershed reaching into the Adriatic valleys of Lamone, Senio and Santerno.

It claimed the eastern Sieve valley and the upper Arno valley cutting across the massif of Pratomagno towards Arezzo. This large quarter was dotted with feudal enclaves called contee, (counties), such as the one belonging to various branches of the counts Guidi.

The smallest administrative units in these territories were tiny communes and between these and the state there were a number of larger groupings such as the 10 vicariates (vicariati). These were themselves divided into 85 "potesterie" and 3 "capitanati".

The "pivieri", of the ecclesiastical administration, which numbered 94 in 1427, replicated the ancient "pagi (sing. pagus)" or rural community of Roman times. These rural communities had a "pontifical" role, looking after roads and building or repairing bridges (ponti). The "pievi", or main rural baptismal churches, were generally located on Roman or Etruscan roads that mainly ran along the ridges of the watersheds. From 1293, the rural pievi were grouped by threes or fours to form larger units called "leghe"(leagues). These divisions survived other administrative divisions and were adopted by Florence as basic fiscal units. In the quarter of San Giovanni, the league of Dicomano included the pievi of Santa Maria a Dicomano, San Detole, San Bavello and Corella. Towards the end of the 13th century Florence grouped numbers of these leagues to form larger units which by the 14th century became "potesterie", under the rule of a peace officer, the "podestà". These were military a well as juridical divisions which in time took all civil roles away from the pivieri.

Each "popolo"(the inhabitants of a piviere), assumed, as a civil body, important secular functions. It took its name from its own church and saint protector and prepared the rural "estimo"(estimate), this was a list of the residents of the community. The "massai", or rectors, collected the declarations of inventories, which verified the data, and entered births and deaths for the Florentine revenue.

These "popoli" sometimes only included a few families, others more than 100 hearths, on average 10 or 15 households. When their population surpassed the number of 80 to 100 hearths they were called "comuni", whilst a smaller unit was called a "villa". They sometimes consisted of a single parish, other times they included several.

In the mountainous regions of Tuscany, people lived mostly in villages, larger in the south of the region, small in the north and northeast. Elsewhere farmers lived, as a rule, in scattered farms or hamlets.

Nearer Florence, in the fertile plains and hills, the system of land tenure referred to as "mezzadria" was characterized by dispersed settlement with its social focus upon the parish church and the landlord's residence, the "villa cum fattoria". More about this later.

Although the mezzadria had never been the only form of land tenure in the Florentine territory, it nevertheless became predominant from the 14^th century onwards. The earliest reliable record shows that 70% of holdings were assigned to farmers under a mezzadria contract. Other contracts contemplated rent payable in kind. In other cases the land was assigned to a family, which would keep it from one generation to the next only paying a nominal amount of money. The landowners were either the bourgeoisie or the church.

Only when the first socialist ideas began to seep in, towards the close of the 19th century, did the contadini become increasingly restless, and events took a path of no return.

In the mezzadria economy there was no room for any kind of formal, or institutional education. Children began to work as soon as they walked. The parish priest would undertake to teach reading, writing and arithmetic to the brightest child of his choice in a family of his liking.

It appears to me that generally speaking the brightest were taught, regardless of rank, social or financial status. The parish priest taught to my great uncle Giovanni, my grandfather and also my uncle Giovanni to read and write.

Without a full comprehension of this background it would be hopeless to try to understand this part of Italy from the historical, political, economical or sociological points of view.

There can be no better way of evaluating a social and economic system than through long term results.

The validity of the mezzadria system may be judged through an assessment of the human and intellectual qualities of the people that it produced through history, and in my view the reports written by my father and by my cousin speak for themselves.

There can be no question about the ‘superior quality’ of the mezzadria over other systems of production in pre-industrial and early industrial Italy.

Although this consideration may be based on the presupposition that it is “the economy that shapes the culture” if the reverse were true (and an entire generation of social scientists, economists and anthropologists would have to think again on several issues) the above conclusion would still stand.

I am convinced that the culture that adopted or created, as the case may be, the ‘mezzadria’ system was a valuable asset within the ethno-cultural context of pre-industrial, and before the decline of traditional farming in general.

I entirely disagree with the view that a proletarian is better off than a peasant in all cases. The reverse appears unquestionably true to those who have experienced the transition from one condition to the other at their own expense.

There is a curious overlap between the area where the mezzadria originated and the area known as the cradle of the Renaissance. This overlap appears to have been overlooked by generations of historians, economists and sociologists, and yet it is so striking a reality as to appear impossible to ignore.

Today, the area of mezzadria is not merely the only economically sound area of Italy -this is plain enough- it is the only area in Italy that both culturally and economically has nothing to envy in the most advanced countries of the Western World.

As this forsaken culture has evidently left a legacy in the area where it has had its home for well over one thousand years, it is important to analyze its economic system, and the historical vicissitudes that befell it.

The mezzadria was the customary system of land tenure, in parts of Veneto, Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, Marche, Umbria, before industrialization, but had its distant roots in the Province of Florence.

There existed some crop-sharing systems in other regions, such as for example in parts of Sicily, but these are not comparable with the mezzadria, as one can observe in the documents published within the appendix to this work.

The mezzadria consisted of a crop-sharing agreement between a landowner (padrone) and a farmer (contadino). The padrone provided a plot of about 7 hectares (20 acres) of arable land, a farmhouse, some heavy implements and machinery, some draught and stable animals (oxen, milch cows), a half of the required fertilizers and seed. The contadino provided an adequately sized family (which ideally should have consisted of a couple in their sixties, three grown up sons with their wives) light implements, some yard and draught animals (a she ass), and his half of the fertilizers and seed.

The system of cultivation adopted in Tuscany is known as “mixed farming” and was based on a three-year rotation, the main crops being essentially wheat, olives and grapes.

Until capitalistic ideas came in, late in the 19th century, what a contadino cultivated was NOT dictated by the demands of the market or by any other economic consideration. It was solely dictated by local custom. Hard as it might seem to an economist, this is a plain fact well remarked by Iris Origo and by other scholars and field researchers.

The expenses and the produce of the farm were shared at 50% between the two parties. From the 1940s the share was fixed at 48% to the padrone, 52% to the contadino.

The contadino had to be skillful in bookkeeping and in the management of his work force and natural resources. The family was obliged by contract to render occasional services (corvee) to the padrone, at his country villa and at his town home; this may have involved washing the household linen, ironing, cutting wood, gardening, providing a capon at Christmas and eggs at Easter.

The country house of the padrone, called the fattoria, (literally the farm), was the hub of the estate. It was usually located in its midst. It might consist of 30 or more holdings (poderi), each with a farmhouse (casa colonica) within it, extending over seven hectares of arable land, divided into about seven fields (cultivated on a rotation system), and a vineyard.

The fattoria consisted, as a rule, of an often ancient country residence -where the padrone, his family and servants, would spend the hot summer months. It was provided with all necessary cellars, storage jars, storerooms, granaries etc. It was large enough to hold the padrone’s share of the produce from all 30 poderi. The fattoria would also provide the oil and wine presses on the premises, for all the contadini to use. Wheat would be ground into flour at a private water mill, while the blacksmith would either reside within the fattoria or at his own home, never too far. A farm manager (fattore) would supervise the running of the fattoria, and police the contadini, ensuring that all parts of the contract were fulfilled.

The settlement pattern in a typical mezzadria district did not include ‘the village’ as such. There were no villages in the best part of the province of Florence until well into the eighteenth century. Parish churches stood isolated in the countryside much as the fattoria was, so did the town hall, the smithy, inns, shops for provisions, and wine bars. Villages grew around such isolated ‘public’ establishments, usually situated near a bridge, at a crossroads, by a post house, etc. only starting from the late 18^th century.

The head of the extended family, the patriarch (capoccia) managed the farm, while his wife (massaia) managed the home, the yard animals, and the kitchen garden.

The only cash came from trading in milch cows, calves and draught oxen, at an annual market; little money came from the daily sale of fresh vegetables, fruits and eggs at the city market.

Up until the First World War all required textiles for household furnishings and clothing -i.e. linen and wool- were woven and knitted at home. Flax was grown in the field and enough sheep were kept to provide wool where there was nearby pasture. In old images peasant women are always seen spinning.

The earliest published mezzadria type of contract dates back to Carolingian times (16 December 804), and comes from Capezzana, near Florence. A slightly later one (821) was published in the 1950s and comes from near Siena. Archaeological research suggests, that this was probably a left over of the "Orientalizing" system of land tenure dominant among the earliest Etruscans, (8th-7th century BC).

D. Herlihy and C. Klapsich-Zuber state that if hardly an idyllic contract in human terms, the mezzadria nevertheless sustained reasonably well managed agriculture in central Tuscany.

Documents from the Florentine “Doomsday Book”, the Catasto of 1427, relate that three families out of 5 throughout the Florentine Republic, lived primarily by working the land.

56.6% of these farmers lived then in their own homesteads, and were basically independent cultivators. Only 18.9% appear to have been under a mezzadria contract; 4.3% rented their farm and land.

The mezzadria was particularly common in the centre of the Florentine territory, it stretched south towards San Gimignano and north into Mugello. It was rare outside Florentine territory and totally absent in the Maremma, around Lucca, and in the mountains. In these areas farmers lived in compact villages or towns, often working countless plots a great distance away from home.

It was the rationalization of agriculture prompted by economic growth that pushed capital into the countryside contributing to the spread of the mezzadria..

By 1469, over 30% of all peasants worked under a mezzadria contract in the Florentine Republic, soon after they were the majority.

The oldest system of land tenure in Tuscany thus again became dominant after the fall of the Etruscans!

The Tuscan farmhouse, or casa colonica, is no hovel. It is instead a considerable and rational building, far from the thatched shack of other European regions -as the ‘conspicuous consumers’ that now inhabit “Chiantishire” can tell!

Most case coloniche in Tuscany and Romagna, were actually designed and built anew between the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries or later, by landlords, on a specific design to suit the requirements of the mezzadria. Others were efficiently converted older buildings.

Many case coloniche were in fact restorations of older ones, dating back to the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries; these older houses, which often had a tower and were enclosed within a precinct wall, were themselves built upon an older site. Most of them still bear an Etruscan or Roman place-name. Shards of pottery gathered in the vicinity of such houses have often told me the whole story of the site.

Such studies, which I have pioneered, have recently been carried out more extensively, and show that Etruscan peasant families lived as single units in the middle of their holding, exactly as happened in the mezzadria system, which in its area of origin is probably older than recorded history.

The last mezzadria contract in Tuscany lasted well into the 1980s. Today the left politically dominates the area of the mezzadria, which is by far the wealthiest region in Europe in pro capite income, thanks mainly to the numerous small family business enterprises that have developed there. Such family businesses are run no differently from the podere of my maternal uncles, the Montecchis.

To my knowledge not many contadini became, or had the ambition to become, FIAT workers. A strong spirit of independence remains the most notable characteristic of the local culture to this day.

This account should not be regarded as a romantic backward look at “the good old days”, as the writer is undoubtedly more aware than any of the readers as to how good or bad those days were. The days we are concerned with here are still the vivid memories of men and women, who grew up in that culture and bear witness to them and to it, any outsider’s opinion in irrelevant.

In 1982 the mezzadria was made illegal by legislation throughout Italy and the first visible sign of this law was the disappearance of the huge white oxen from the Tuscan countryside. Also the contadino as such vanished, and our research drew to a close, during the mid 1980s , for lack of study material in the field.

There must be little doubt -many years after Gramsci’s death- that there has never been -as there could not be- such a thing as a “proletarian culture” or a “proletarian world view”.

Many ‘bourgeois’ writers have wasted a great deal of paper and time on this myth, which if it came in handy to back their phoney ideology, would never withstand scientific test.

The only possible “culture” and “world view” that the proletariat could have adopted -having opted out of an agricultural society and having become totally disoriented- could only be a pathetic clone of the capitalist class. What alternative model was available?

When I became a proletarian, at the age of 13, my primary aim was to cease to be such at the earliest opportunity, and my ideal life-style was the one I admired, i.e. that of the man I both hated and respected: that of my master.

What might be the incentive for consolidating one's position in society as a "proletarian"?

Every one I knew on the factory floor laughed at the very notion of a "dictatorship of the proletariat". This was regarded as a mere propaganda paradox.

This mental process, which Pasolini alone among Italian intellectuals noticed from the 1960s, had actually occurred, as those feelings, (not only mine), were shared (so far as my experience on the factory floor goes) by all proletarians.

The typical FIAT worker of today has put aside Marxism and strives to become a “conspicuous consumer”. He may own a villa with a garden, and also a holiday home -an inferior replica of Mr. Agnelli-. He may own two or three cars, -sold to him by Mr. Agnelli’s-. He may spend his summer holidays sailing his own boat -an inferior replica of Mr. Agnelli’s -. He may spend his winter holidays skiing at the same resort as Mr. Agnelli, albeit for a shorter time and at a cheaper hotel. Finally he may read newspapers owned by Mr. Agnelli. He may watch the same TV as Mr. Agnelli’s, he may share his political views with his master whom he considers his friend and equal. Indeed these facts, astonishing as they seem, are here for all to see.

The lifestyle of a typical FIAT worker of the year 2000 (the age of spensieratezza and buonismo) is but a pathetic copy of Mr. Agnelli’s.

It is not a coincidence that Mr. Giovanni Agnelli is today a life senator of the governing coalition of the Left. Common sense would make any sound-minded person wonder what Mr. Agnelli’s grievances might be! Or is he really a good man who does it for the welfare of his workers, against the interests of his own class”?

The peasant on the other hand may have had a landlord, but he had no master. He relied on his own culture and worldview, which he had inherited from his ancestors.

That alone was the culture that made him what he was, and which enabled him to feed both his own family and the landlord.

The peasant had no ideal social model to aspire to. He was proud of his own status, and in my own view had many reasons for being so. In my opinion he was far removed from the narrow-minded fatalist that the social analyst wants us to believe he was.

THEY WERE BETTER PEOPLE

“…manners have progressively deteriorated as society has receded from the patriarchal stage. Many a gentleman of the old school has been provoked to remark regretfully upon the under-bred manners and bearing of even the better classes in the modern industrial communities; and the decay of the ceremonial code – or as it is otherwise called, the vulgarization of life- among the industrial classes proper has become one of the chief enormities of latter-day civilization in the eyes of all persons of delicate sensibilities.” Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (Conspicuous Leisure)

My grandfather, my father and my uncles -all dead now- were “better people” all round, than any of their descendants of the present generation.

Our ancestors were better people than us in so far as they were not only more literate, they were comparatively better informed about history, politics, and economics, than any trades' unionist I have ever met or heard speaking, and than ourselves.

They were more confident, more sensible, more capable of handling difficulties, such as war, famine, or natural disasters. Finally, they were more capable of lucid thinking than the proletarians of their times and of ours.

The duller-wits of the present generation, are indeed more laid back than their ancestors, but clearly only because they are less aware of their “immanent condition”.

They may feel free and satisfied but only because their ideal model -basically Mr. Agnelli or any TV personality- can be successfully copied, if not really matched.

Their former ‘partners’, the old padroni, are themselves better off than their fathers were in old mezzadria times. They now lead the left wing parties. They still hold on to university chairs, to the legal and political positions that matter, and to all social positions of prestige and relevance such as diplomacy, and are more highly respected by their subjects than their fathers ever were.

The mayor of Florence, so far as I have witnessed, is still chosen by members of the “leisure class” often from its own ranks, before the people confirm that choice in a largely predictable election.

The "leisure class” may accept newcomers from the “working class”, but it will not allow any of them to emerge outside the rules and regulations which it establishes. One does not make it, unless one becomes like them, and accepts the rules of the game.

The damage done to the grass roots of our culture by ‘rampant’ capitalism, by the intellectuals of the ‘leisure class’, by the press, by the Italian educational system, and lastly by television, is impossible to assess.

Charlatans and impostors have won the day. They have undermined the culture and humiliated worthy men.

THE CULTURE ‘MAKES’ THE ECONOMY…

Giuseppe Lisi, a Florentine student of the mezzadria culture, brilliantly described some of the remarkable features of Florentine peasant mentality in the early 1970s.

I partly paraphrase his words here below, in my endeavour to put across my own views.

Here is a summary of Lisi’s observations, and of mine, on the culture behind the mezzadria social system.

The contadino judges categorically. His judgment is definitive, and his sentence final and irreversible. The contadino has good taste. Scarcity refines taste; it sharpens the ability to judge. Taste leads to good choices, to the quest for the best produce, for the healthiest among the few available.

It is this relentless quest for quality that has laid the foundations of a civilized society such as the Florentine one.

Taste in general has been acquired through the experience of scarcity, which has lasted for centuries; scarcity, yes, but not sheer poverty, such as for example the Italians of the South or of the Northeast have experienced.

In the ‘county’ of Florence (Contado Fiorentino), the contadino, has always mastered all processes of production, and has preserved his culture because it is vital to the economy at large.

He has molded this culture through the ages, on his land, beginning from a time when cities had not been built and no class above his own existed or was perceived by him.

A dish of chickpeas or lentils, a slice of bread, a glass of wine, are precious things, as they are obtained through skillful labour. They are too important to be regarded simply as "food"; they cannot be listed or measured. They are entities that are liable to vary not only in value but also in mood, in weight and importance, daily.

A hardened soil is "stubborn". The hoe is "offended" when the contadino hits a stone with it.

There cannot be an understanding between a culture based upon analogy and one based upon cause and effect.

The way a contadino perceives a movie or a television play based on a consequential narrative, is not the way intended by the director and scriptwriter.

The concept of cause and effect is essential to the comprehension of such a work, but this is not understood by this culture.

Everything on the screen, or stage, every new element that appears, must be discussed and thoroughly explained, before the narrative may proceed further.

The analysis should take into consideration, and thoroughly explain, every new occurrence, in all its components, social, moral, political and aesthetic.

The narrative should not proceed in a straight line as normally happens, but by ever expanding waves, such as those caused by a stone thrown into a pond.

Individual objects are perceived independently of the narrative of which they are part. They are evaluated for what they are in themselves, therefore the viewer loses the thread of the narrative itself, which is being continually interrupted and interfered with by relentless questioning.

For example, when a new object comes onto the scene, questions arise as to why it is in the possession of a given person, as to how it is that the person comes to own such an object. All of this with the parameters of personal experience.

No film director could ever embark in such a colossal task as to produce his play for a contadino. A great effort would be necessary from both sides: the director would have to change his language and the viewer his way of reasoning.

This has gradually happened over the past forty years or so wherever peasant societies still survive, but these are ‘peasant societies’ in the Redfield sense, not societies of contadini mezzadri, an important difference not appreciated by all anthropologists. If it is true that “peasants are the same all over the world”, then the contadini must be unique.

The sun is like the padrone. In the morning mist he makes "l'occhio di pollo" (a chicken’s eye), "di capra" (a goat’s eye) or "l'occhiolino" (he is peeping out). The sun, like the padrone, gives his morning warning as to his mood for this day.

- The weather "has an idea" today! Perhaps HE is now thinking of what to do, and later HE will send rain. Come on! What are you waiting for? Don't let me beg you! Do send the rain!

- Tonio! Will it rain? What do you think? - Well, HE's leaning towards it! Isn't HE?.

The landlord, as Jupiter, is calm, serene and well fed but he is fickle and frivolous. He may even appear ‘foppish’, but he is not a ‘fop’ altogether.

- The padrone acts according to his mood, or according to his own principles. He reasons in a different way from our own. He stands above us.

The contadino’s dependence upon the padrone is not cultural, it is only economical.

The contadino makes his own plans; he doesn't sell his work force to the best offer. He is an entrepreneur, at least by half, as he owns half the means of production. He may not own the land, but he alone knows it, with all its secrets, and the land knows him and not the padrone: - The padrone, alone with his land, will starve!

A contadino may become a padrone, or a professor of semiotics, but no padrone or professor of semiotics could ever become a contadino, even if they wanted to. They would only become ‘farmers’, and probably die of starvation.

An urbanized individual cannot become a contadino for the same reasons that makes it impossible for a modern Greek to become an ancient Greek.

The culture to which both the professor of semiotics and the padrone belong is "subaltern" (i.e. dependent) on that of the contadino. He can do without theirs; they cannot do without his.

- I won't listen to anybody! I know this much: if I don't work, I don't eat, and if I don’t eat, nobody else will!

The contadino knows he is the master of the production process and solely responsible for the produce. He masters both, production and reproduction, with the will of God, not the padrone's.

This gives him a feeling of superiority that nothing can undermine. No subjection, force of arms, unjust deals, compulsory ‘corvee’, injustices of any kind can undermine his pride as he is the master of production and reproduction, the custodian of the "source" of the national culture.

The relationship between contadino and padrone is highly structured and complex.

Whereas the padrone may sack a contadino at the end of each seasonal cycle, it is the job of the contadino to stretch this relationship to the limit, but not beyond, and keep his job:

Iris Origo, a well-known Anglo-American historian, and a Tuscan padrone herself for many decades wrote in 1970:

“ 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 it was so. Certainly, in early days, the sacrifices were not all on one side. We read in the Ricordanze of Odorico 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’. 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”. 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...

.... I think that the duration of the mezzadria has a deeper psychological explanation. Its strength has lain in an unquestionable 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”(pp. 214-15)

Returning to the “culture” of the mezzadria, it was the contadino’s own, and it was far from “subordinate”.

The soil may be "fat", or "lean", what is in the soil also matters. All mushrooms that grow near a rusty piece of iron, a piece of tanned leather, or carrion, are poisonous.

No mushroom would be poisonous were it not for the nature of the soil where it grows.

-The peasant's son is stubborn; he must be, on account of his ancestry. He is a "stubborn peasant".

- A weed becomes an herb thanks to the good quality and moisture of the soil, thanks to nutrition.

- Wheat grown on “fat” soil is larger, heavier and more nutritious than wheat grown on “lean” soil, this is the opposite.

- The important thing in life is to be your own master, and have enough food and drink.

Too many mushrooms found by the edge of the field irritate the housewife, whereas a few make her joyful.

- Thank god it didn't rain, otherwise we would have had too many potatoes! No room to store them!

- What will you do with all that money? Will they wrap you up like a mummy with it when you die?

The contadino cannot compare himself with the padrone; he is no measure to compare with.

According to this principle, a distant object is smaller than the same when near.

Experience may correct the theory, but where experience is not possible, where the object cannot be seen, smelt, touched and felt, there is no possibility of knowing.

An experience reported by an outsider can only be regarded as “a story” or as “a tale”.

What the scientists say has no more value than the neighbour stating he has seen the devil.

- Who can prove that the moon is larger than my hat? Who can take me up there to see for myself?

Television too, presents the views of others. Anything they say on TV is a story, a tale, as good as a child’s fairy tale.

A scientist is a man whose trade does not allow imagination: -Science and imagination are like water and oil!. (i.e. they don’t mix)

Giotto’s paintings represent a world without perspective. They illustrate the world of the contadino, yet even a Byzantine painting is far from naive. It simply does not try to represent reality but meaning, and for this reason it is regarded as a work of greater intellect than the work of an impressionist.

The question of "size", as concerns the moon, is immaterial. What matters is the significance, the power of the moon. The padrone is powerful, even when he is only 5f tall, like the king of Italy.

-The moon is less powerful now that the ‘Americans’ have landed on it. It was far more powerful before. Who can deny that?

THE ‘NAIVE’ ANTHROPOLOGIST

I am wondering whether this is the culture that the Gramsci school of thought wanted to become “hegemonic”.

Is the above the “world view” the one that would have pervaded our civilization today if Gramsci’s ideas had won the day?

I see no way in which any intellectual, no matter how enlightened or well meaning, could ever have helped such a culture, or any culture at variance with his own, to become “hegemonic”. Only history itself might have done it, despite any intellectual's or contadino’s conscious effort.

Whatever a sociologist’s method may be, the culture outlined above can only be regarded as “subalterna” by those who don't know it.

Of course, Gramsci is to be forgiven, as he had scant knowledge of such a culture, having based his assumptions on the very few works on peasants available to him in the 1920s. Alas, prejudice has been pervasive in this field of research until very recent times.

Extensive research on folklore was carried out by Ernesto De Martino in Southern Italy, mainly in Lucania during the first half of the twentieth century. This research was restricted to popular oral traditions, and uncovered a backward mentality, the survival of pagan beliefs and prejudices, among a starved population of exploited and destitute labourers.

Carlo Levi’s famous book “Cristo si e’ fermato ad Eboli” (Christ stopped at Eboli) also unveiled a hitherto unknown world of destitution, despair and backwardness. There, men were eager to join Mussolini’s army, rather than stay at home with their starving families, for the sake a guaranteed dish of soup a day!

Some ethnographic research was also carried out in the most ‘quaint’ parts of Italy -such as Sardinia or the Friuli-, but none in central and northern Italy, where nothing interesting was expected to be found by the erudite gentlemen-researchers of past decades.

A serious researcher of today would not attempt to judge and assess a culture with the parameters of his own. Imagine an intellectual being assessed by his ability to lead a team of oxen! Or by his ability to forecast the weather by looking at a corn -field. He would inevitably be classified as 'primitive' by the peasant! By the same token a peasant assessed from the point of view of his oral articulacy or written literacy would result 'primitive' compared to a sociologist. The well-known opinions of Karl Marx concerning French peasants, together with the conclusions of De Martino and Carlo Levi, led Italian intellectuals to fatal generalizations and misjudgments. At any rate, any evidence which might be at variance Karl Marx’s doctrine, or with any aspect of it, was systematically banned from the research notebooks of my Italian colleagues during the 1970s.

Another problem with the contadini was that they would not be indoctrinated, due to the very nature of their culture, and to the low opinion that they rightly or wrongly held of ‘conspicuous consumers’.

If the Fiat workers in Turin, on the other hand, were readily convinced by agitators to hail a delegation from the Soviet Union in 1917, no contadino would have been so readily taken in. Although the contadini would not be indoctrinated and would ignore outright any outsider who would attempt to do so, the contadino would very seldom resort to illegal actions, an attitude inherited by democratic Socialism, his method is pragmatic, not conservative.

The contadino was a pragmatic socialist by nature. He would not indulge in illegal action, but would rather try to change things in a gradual and possibly harmless way.

The lack of revolutionary spirit in the contadino derives from the experience of famine and hardship, and the constant endeavour to avoid them. Only in case of famine and blatant injustice would the contadino take up arms or join a revolution. This attitude evidently suited the Fascists who were in favour of the mezzadria system and encouraged it.

THE GRASS ROOTS OF POLITICS

It should not surprise anyone that it was the left-wing intellectuals, and not the Fascists who allowed the only cultural asset of the working classes of Italy to fall into oblivion unrecorded.

The archetype of Italian culture died practically unrecorded (or at any rate unrecognised as such), due to the unwillingness of the aristocrats who led the Italian Communist Party from 1921 to 1990 and to the pig ignorance of all other intellectuals.

The largely ignored culture or ‘world view’ which I have tentatively illustrated in this brief outline, has been scantily recorded and only by self-styled researchers.

It is only thanks to the unpaid work of people such as Giuseppe Lisi -and of a few others such as the writer- that we have some coherent and reliable record of this dead culture, which was not merely ‘alternative’ or ‘subaltern’ to the dominant, but its very source, matrix, and grass-roots.

Our research material, which included 5.000 photographs, 1000 artifacts and numerous records, (the results of a 15-year field research in the Province of Florence), was offered to the local authorities of Bagno a Ripoli, today a wealthy commune adjoining Florence, at the end of the 1970s. Eventually we only handed over the artifacts.

According to an article published in the Florentine newspaper “La Nazione” of April 2nd 1996, this unique evidence now lies rotten and forsaken in a dilapidated farmhouse.

This ‘tragic crime’ has been perpetrated in a district where all former ‘case coloniche’ have been turned into Californian type villas by professionals, intellectuals, TV personalities, and wealthy left-wing politicians. These are the people who as one body, staunchly refused to ever consider setting up a ‘museum’ to preserve and show these relics to present and future generations.

It is of paramount importance to note that on April 2^nd 1996, the Neo-Communist Councilor for Education and Culture of Bagno a Ripoli was an aristocrat!

We, ourselves, discovered that this extinct culture was ‘subaltern’ to none as it embodied the continuity and the heritage of the indigenous pre-urban civilization of Italy. It was the ‘stuff’ of which Roman, Medieval and Renaissance Italy was made of. Urban or ‘high’ culture in Italy, was its subaltern, as it stemmed out of it, and depended upon it, until very recent times.

No intellectual in Italy’s recent history, would have been of any use to peasants for advice on how they should have settled their grievances, or on how they should have governed Italy, should they have won a hypothetical ‘peasant’s revolution’.

The house at La Massa stood near the grand Villa of the same name, which is now one of the smartest five-star hotels in the Florentine neighbourhood.

The house still stands unaltered, as it was abandoned in the 1950s and has never altered or inhabited since, except by squatters.

The building has a U shape and it surrounds a courtyard, closed off by a wall with a solid wooden gate, facing north to the fields, the Arno and the hills of Settignano.

On the ground floor are the stables, the utility rooms and the ‘rimessa’ for the gig, which also opens out onto the road at the back of the building.

A door and a flight of steps lead down to the wine cellar. From the same landing an open flight of steps leads up to the living quarters: a large kitchen with a typical fireplace with two utility rooms beside it and a long corridor leading to a row of bedrooms and the tiny indoors toilet.

Our house was a castle; it certainly was to my eye. Outside, in front of the main gate was the threshing floor, paved with squared shiny limestone slabs hard as iron. All else was green.

On the green were the conic haystacks, the pile of firewood and the manure heap.

The orchard was vast, running straight down for hundreds of yards to the scarp on the riverbank, where the earth was sandy, and had mixed cultivation. The field was well drained, and the grassy banks of the ditches hosted, in spring, hundreds of bird’s nests. I remember going ‘nesting' with my father, who would not however touch an egg or a nestling, but only look at the tiny nest of a long-tailed tit (velia).

I remember the calls of the woodpeckers (torcicollo), migrating from Africa and announcing the spring, together with the cuckoos (cucule), the fig-pecker (beccafico), and the conspicuous hoopoe (bubbola). Under the eaves were stuck scores of swallow’s nests, but under the lofty eaves of Villa la Massa, only the swifts nested.

At the time of my birth my grandparents, my parents, my uncle Aldino, and my aunt Vittoria comprised the household.

During the war we were joined by my aunt Felice and her husband Alfredo. They spent the entire wartime with us.

(“May God curse the English!” a motto of the Italians during World War II)

My family always believed and told me that no less than 98% of the Italian population loved Mussolini and his fascism until the 8th of September 1943.

This realization caused immense sadness, and our esteem and admiration for the British nation grew day after day, year after year, as the catastrophe was seen by my father to be inevitable.

Here below is but a small token sample of what was going on in the heads of young Italian intellectuals who would be called to rebuild the homeland they had themselves destroyed, after the conflict they had themselves caused:

“Le minoranze e l’intelligenza valgono nella vita della Nazione appunto in quanto orientano le masse. In ogni caso e’ certo che per arrivare alla vera anima del popolo bisognera’ rifarci

“L’imperialismo non puo’ sboccare in definitiva che in un piu’ o meno vasto e solido dominio coloniale, non puo’ affermarsi cioe’ che sopra genti nettamente inferiori e pressoche’ prive di civilta’"

Mr Hitler had visited Florence in 1938 receiving great acclaim, and bringing out into Piazza Signoria, the main square, hundreds of thousands of jubilant Florentines.

In the same year Mussolini passed the “racial laws” against the Jews. These restricted the activities of all Italians of Jewish religion, preventing them from any public employment and especially in civil service, teaching academic and scientific research. Many Italian intellectuals left the country , most of them settled in the USA. Among these were scientists Enrico Fermi and Rita Levi Montalcini, and economist Modigliani, just to name a few.

As I was coming into the world this is what the much-loved rulers of Italy were up to:

Starace: I said to the Duce: “push a button and the system will be set into motion”.

Count Ciano: Being far from convinced, I sent for information. There is nothing there, do you understand? Nothing, except a plan on paper...Valle goes around saying that he has not a litre of petrol. The army has only enough supplies to last a week.

Bottai: Should there be a war, we shall al do our duty. But if there is no war, we should all the same draw our conclusions from this experience

Count Ciano to Bottai: I am here, helpless. At one o’clock I sent cables to London and Paris, proposing a European conference. No answers. We, do you understand? Must not and cannot intervene. We must not. Germany has acted against the agreements. I broke off with that fool Ribbentrop at Salzburg. I reminded him that our alliance involved a status quo until 1942. I told him that an immediate action for Danzig would have meant a European war. The British and the French, even if he thought otherwise, would have come in. I returned from Salzburg in complete disagreement. No joint communique was issued; there was only a statement from the German side, whose unilateral stand showed our disagreement. The Germans have violated our pact. We have no duty to intervene, and I might add no interest in doing so. We should bear the brunt from a position of vulnerability. Think of the Empire, Libya, the Aegean, the Mediterranean, and the western Alps. Are we in a position to intervene? No, no, no. There are astounding deficiencies. We have 13,000 artillery guns. Among them, 4,000,( either ours or seized from the enemy) are pre-war, with a range of about 6,000 metres, compared to the French. Valle (head of the air force), after having boasted, now says he has no fighters, and that he has fuel for only fifty days of flight. He is making his own alibi by stating that with the interventions in Ethiopia, in Spain and in Albania, he has had no time to prepare the air force.

Cavagnari (head of the navy), who has enough fuel, declares that the Italian navy is ready to be sank, as the balance of forces between us and the French and British -who don’t have to face the German navy in the North Sea-, is 6 to 1.

Pariani (head of the armed forces) is boasting “the army this, the army that”. The truth is that we are not ready. It takes a buffoon such as Starace to state the contrary. The Italian people do not want this war, they don’t feel it, they don’t believe in it. Starace says that he holds the people in his hand. Do me a favour! It takes much more, much more. Obviously he takes full advantage of the intimate dilemma of the Duce. Everything about the Duce, his past, his character, his temperament, all bring him to repudiate neutrality; and his pride makes it impossible for him to abandon an ally, after a betrayal such as that of Italy 1914. How can Mussolini act as a Giolitti? And yet he sees, he knows he feels that the people cannot be brought into a war in these conditions, for the benefit of an ally who has broken agreements. Here is the drama. But we should all contribute to clarify and resolve the problem according to conscience. My own conscience tells me that we must detach ourselves from Germany. I am in daily contact with the ambassadors of France and Britain. He came to see me three times, in the evening he also came to see me at home, for a brandy. Three times I have spoken on the phone to Lord Halifax. We must decide...You see? This war apparatus, what does it mean? Are we already at war? If so, with whom? Against whom? Is it logical to do this while we call for conferences? This in the eyes of France and Britain means to have already decided, against them.

No, the Duce says yes. But ours was a vague piece of news, left half in the air. Attolico had indeed told us that he was preparing for something, but without specifying what. The evening of the 21st, I remember, I was about to depart to meet again Ribbentrop. My saloon was ready at the station. At 20 hours Ribbentrop called me on the telephone “Do you know? I shall leave tomorrow. I must let you know a personal secret, both you and the Duce. I shall sign an agreement with Russia” I jumped “What? An agreement? Of what kind?” He gave me some summary explanation. A quarter of an hour later, the “personal secret” had already been made public through the DNB Agency of the Reich.

The consequences? They are here: Spain, Japan etc...... All this paraphernalia is stupid. It makes us look ridiculous. Think of this, it would suffice to switch on the light and our situation would manifest itself, it would be literally manifest. Alfieri, that idiot! He already thinks of himself as the leader of the army in the forthcoming war.

Enter Anfuso with some dispatches, one of these announces that France and Britain have severed all telephone communications with Italy.

Count Ciano to Bottai: My problem is to convince the Duce. The success that inevitably the Germans will initially have in Poland, will electrify him and he will again regret not having intervened with them. It is he, only him, do you realize, the one who has wanted the pact with the Germans. They had never asked us for it.

Lantini: Yes but our soldiers have no shoes and our economy is flat on the ground. We won’t make it.

This morning “Il Messaggero” carries an unsigned editorial claiming that Mussolini was the author of a friendship pact between Fascist Italy and Bolshevist Russia. Therefore Mussolini claims a priority even in the ideological marriage promoted by the Moscow pact.

This pact with Russia was made in 1933. Some commercial deals that I dealt with between 1930 and 32 preceded it. We were then going through that messianic and universalistic period of corporatism, promoted by the Pisa school.

The Ferrara congress established a parallel between corporatism and sovietism. This was the thesis: corporatism and sovietism represent the two typical means of Fascism and Bolshevism of dealing with the same social and economic problems. In contrast with other nations that endeavour in applying old theories and systems to new situations. Italy and Russia have created new theories and systems for new situations.

This attitude might have been fruitful and resulted in new situations: the gathering together of the post war revolutions, albeit on a sole common point, and put them against the states of the status quo. It might have determined new reactions: a concrete anti-capitalism. Fascism intended as a force of the left, which does not deny but instead fulfills the ideals of 1889.

An international policy for the people, by the people, against the ruling classes...

Nazism and Bolshevism, coming together for tactical and diplomatic reasons will end up with recognizing certain deep similarities and will therefore inaugurate a new international policy, bringing the class struggle from inside the state to the outside. A struggle between nations as a class struggle.

Count Ciano says: The problem, however, is that there are tens of hundreds of dead in Spain in the war against the reds. We shall wait and see. We shall enter the war when we want to. And we shall see on which side. If the Germans intend to bring into Europe their Bolshevik allies....

Mussolini: The French have no idea of how or where to carry out this war, which on the other hand they do not want. I gave them my advice in wiring Hitler has reconfirmed his directive: Germany has no claims on France, therefore it shall not go to war against her; at most it will defend itself. Now, one does not mobilise the French people to the attack of those who do not attack them. A paradox: aggression to punish a potential aggressor?

We observed together the cold determination of Britain in causing a war for imperial defense. This old Britain, that publicly offends Hitler….

SPRING 1939

I was born in April and war was declared in August, after Mr. Hitler had invaded Poland, but I didn't hear anything about it… till bombs fell on my house some five years later.

In the spring of 1939, life was plodding on as usual in Candeli; since 1922 nearly everyone in Candeli thought Mussolini was a genius and that Britain "La Perfida Albion" (Perfidious Albion) would get "la lezione che si merita" (the lesson it deserves) this time.

Tzeh! - The butcher of Candeli used to say - gli Inglesi? Mi fanno ride'ssu una parte! Son tutti finocchi, pederasti. Due settimane e gli si spezza le réne! Viva il Duce!

(Puah! the English? They make me laugh; they are all fags, paedophiles. Give us two weeks, and we shall break their back! Long live the Duce!)

All the customers in the shop would applaud most of them agreeing wholeheartedly, only a few out of fear.

My father would say:-Un sarà'ffacile! Non credere sia facile! Guarda quanto mondo gl'hanno conquistato! Ci mangian la pappa 'n capo come vogliano! (I won’t be easy! Don’t believe it so easy! Look at the amount of lands they have conquered! They will have us done any time!)

-Codesto gl'è disfattismo. Noi ci s'ha l'arma segreta! La si tira fora a i'mmomento giusto! - (That’s being defeatist! We have got the secret weapon!) Replied the butcher.

- E se'ppoi viene gl'Americani? (And what about the Americans?) Warned my father.

- Gl'Americani? Gl'Americani, ha, ha, ha, verranno a far l'americanate, ha ha ha! Gl'Americani son degli sbruffoni degl'esagerati e'bbasta! E ora hétati, t'ha detto troppo Casellino! (The Americans? The Americans, ha, ha, ha, they will come to show off their exaggerations, ha, ha, ha! The Americans are nothing but boasters, they are braggarts, that’s all! And now you shut your mouth, understand? You talk too much young Caselli!) Replied again the Butcher, adding:

-Perfida Albione! "Che Iddio stramaledica gli Inglesi!" (Perfidious Albion!, May God curse the English!) Which was to become the motto of all the Italians throughout the war.

I heard my father saying that we would have done better if we had joined them, instead of joining Hitler, a tragic-comic character, a dangerous fool, a lunatic, in my father's words.

-Guardahe la harta geografica (Look at a map) -he used to say- Guardate, sèmo noi, la Germania e i'Ggiappone, contro tutt'i'mmondo, tutto-il-mondo (Look, it is us, Germany and Japan, against the whole world) -he used to stress- Che speranze si pò avere? E'ppoi, oltre a'ttutto, s'ha anche torto, torto marcio. Non s'ha'cconvinzioni, siamo 'n guerra per la hausa sbagliata, una hausa che non esiste, la hausa di Mussolini! Quell'imbecille!- (What hope have we got? And on top of this we are also in the wrong. We have no convictions, we are at war for the wrong cause, a cause which does not exist, Mussolini’s cause! That imbecile!)

He used to come home, from the Circolo Ricreativo Combattenti di Candeli, a war veteran’s club, always enraged: -Son tutti hompagni! Tutti fascisti, signori e'ppoeri, istruiti o gnoranti, contadini, operai, impiegati, macellari o signori, spazzini e raccattamerde! Un se ne trova uno he ragioni! Accident'a Pionono! - (They are all the same! They are all fascists, rich and poor, the educated and the ignorant, contadini, clerks, butchers or lords, road sweepers and dung collectors. Not one capable of reasoning! Cursed be Pius IX!)

Our next-door neighbour was Mr. Procter, a British antique dealer, and my family saw no reason why such a civilized lot should get a "lesson" from some naive peasants. Instead, we had a great deal to learn from them. My family did, and I am grateful to heaven for that.

My father was called up and sent to Torino with the heavy artillery. A man with no children had volunteered for him and went to North Africa in his stead. That was lucky for all of us, as only few came back from el-Alamein. In fact, the youngest of my mother's brothers, my uncle Franco, died there.

In 1941, in civilized London, under German bombardments, a concerned writer was ranting and raving against Fascism, and most of all the capitalists who had allowed it to grow unchecked, much in the same terms as my father was doing…

“As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes”

“Io lascero’ come legato agli italiani il mio odio per gli inglesi”

In the reargard my father was quite safe and did what he could to rescue people from under the rubble of bombed houses around Torino's railway station. He was also allowed home on leave on occasions. Although my memories of that time are nebulous, I do indeed remember any special moments vividly and recall the rest as it was constantly repeated in the family for decades afterwards, having those unforgettable times become part of the family's ‘mythology’.

My earliest memories must surely go back to the spring 1940 or so my mother told me.

I remember my “discovery” of nature, my first picture book, and those strange foreign neigbours, so kind to their little snow-white dogs.

One day, in 1941 or 42, the Government requisitioned Villa la Massa, Mr. Procter’s house. The Villa was turned into a war prison for officers. The first to arrive were prisoners from Croatia, German soldiers guarded them.

ma dopo tu sorriderai…

Gerhard Berg was not one of those Germans who obeyed the law without asking questions first.

From the nearby villa-prison, where he was on duty, Gerard often came around to see us and taught me to sing “Lili Marlene”.

He fancied aunt Vittoria, blond and thick set, like a German peasant girl, but he was over polite about his feelings, which were apparent but not blatant.

Gerhard Berg was an artist and taught me how to draw a man’s profile. This manner of drawing a man’s profile has stayed with me all my life.

My mother was keen on this kind of training, she was nicknamed “Giotto” at her school at Mugnana, on account of her exceptional artistic ability.

Gerhard was a tall and blond German, the “Arian” type that Hitler liked, but his eyes betrayed a soft heart, a deep sadness at the events in which he had become involved. His eyes only brightened up when drawing for me and when helping me along to sing “Lili Marlene” in the Italian 1940 version:

Quando nel fango

Then one day, suddenly, Gerhard left. I could tell from the sad look on aunt Vittoria’s face.

But what he left behind was a legacy that was to affect the rest of my life; he also left his military green wooden suitcase, full of pencils, rulers, setsquares, paints and a precious brass compass in a leather case. I treasured these relics until the onset of the 1960s, when I went to Milan and all of that was dumped by my sister-in-law, who hardly knew me, together with many of my early drawings.

The Germans left Villa La Massa as the war front approached. One day, after the 8th of September 1943, two German SS came to knock at our gate with the butts of their rifles, they were looking for “ze fazer of zis child”. My mother and my grandfather denied that “the father of this child” (i.e. myself) was at home. “He is at war,” said my mother, “ he hasn’t come back”.

My father, my uncle Ardino and their friends were hiding with others in a cave on the banks of the river, 200 metres away from home.

The two SS took my grandfather away, but only to take him to nearby Candeli to dig trenches for booby traps.

I remember going to see him, to bring him his lunch, with my mother, while he was sweating in a 4-ft deep trench with a gun pointed to his head.

The booby-traps had their effect. As the Germans were on the run, and by now they were 6 or seven miles away from us, shells began to whistle over the roof of our house, to fall down with huge explosions seemingly where my father, my uncles and their friends spent the day in hiding. My mother ran down the road “No, no! Don’t go! You want to get killed!” shouted my aunt Vittoria. We all descended into the cellar, including uncle Ardino, but not my father who was in the hideout. A very loud bang shook us all; a great crushing noise overhead followed ad dust filtered through the cracks of the door of the cellar. “My god! We are buried alive!” someone shouted. Everybody screamed in the pitch-black darkness. Uncle Ardino was sick. He vomited and ‘pooed’ in his underwear. Aunt Vittoria was screaming; my grandfather and my mother were the only ones who kept cool. My mother was holding Franco; my brother and my father had his hands over my head. Grandfather pushed the door open, we heard further noise of rubble falling, and it was dusty. We could not see anything, but we were not buried alive. Indeed the house had been hit, but we were safe.

We climbed up the stair among blocks of rubble, and went into the kitchen. The roof had caved in and the dining table had been broken in half by a huge shell which lay there unexploded. “Get out! Quick get out! The shell may go off!” Shouted my grandfather, and we rushed outside the precinct of the house. Another shell was stuck into the window of the barn unexploded; yet another one had been caught in the chicken wire, which enclosed the small garden outside the house. We kept clear. I don’t remember where we slept that night, but it was constant shelling and blasts. Aircraft flying overhead were shot at by some anti-aircraft batteries, the location of which I could not tell. Little clouds of smoke would appear all around the aircraft, seemingly without ever hitting it. Flares everywhere lit the night up. Occasionally, groups of armed people would rush by.

The general commotion and upheaval seemed to last a long time. I remember we now had moved into an underground shelter, hastily dug up in the middle of our field. It was a big underground room excavated by my grandfather, my father and uncle. We had camp and bunk beds, clothes and a supply of food. The next morning I peeped out of the manhole of the shelter, at ground level and saw a mushroom cloud of gray smoke lifting fast over Candeli. The roar of the blast followed and cries of women shouting “Poero Candeli!” (Poor Candeli) were clearly heard.

Father rushed out while grandfather was saying “These are the booby traps, going off...I wonder whom I have killed!” “You have killed no one” My mother would reply.

My father returned from Candeli in great distress, covered in dust. “That poor boy...with his bowels out, what could I do? He cried, Mamma! Mamma! And his bowels were out. And poor Basilio, he was dead, hopeless...”

They were shocking days for us all. Only two or three days after I went out with my father. We walked through Candeli, and he showed me where “that boy” and Basilio had been killed.

I saw big gaping holes where grandfather had dug the trenches for the booby-traps, they had all gone off all right.

Several houses in Candeli were now reduced to messy heaps of rubble and broken furniture. We had to climb over the rubble to proceed. My father wanted to go to Rignalla where his sister Angela lived, to see if they were all safe, and the Montecchis, down by the Arno, were they all safe?

“Watch it! Walk in the middle of the road, as booby traps are always laid on the sides, apparently to get vehicles, but that’s where people walk!” warned my father. As we walked away from Candeli and through the woods, anti-tank bombs were laid in rows along the ruts made by vehicles on either side of the road. “See? I told you. Here they haven’t even had time to bury them! God! They must be in a hurry, it won’t be long before the Allies come”. The “Allies” I had no idea of who they might be. “The Allied Armies, the English and the Americans, the ‘Anglo-Americans’, they are”.

“Why are they taking so long? The Germans have gone, they must have reached well beyond Pontassieve by now”, I would say.

“ They are taking long because they want to make sure the Germans have all gone. This is not their country. They are here to rescue us, and they don’t want to waste any lives unnecessarily”

Behind a low wall, overlooking the river plain below, we met a group of armed men, squatting behind the wall. These were the Italian “partigiani” of the Corpo Volontari di Liberazione , attached to the British 10^th Brigade.

“Watch it!” They said to my father “ Shouldn’t take a small boy like that out like this, it’s dangerous”. My father replied that “We are only going up there to see my sister’. Do you know if they are all safe at Rignalla?” “ So far as I can guess there has been no trouble there” Replied one of the partisans.

My father went on asking “We’ve got three unexploded shells in and around the house. Is there anyone here who is capable of de-fusing them?” The partisans consulted one another and one replied:” Il Turco, we will send il Turco”, to which my father said “Oh yes, il Turco. We are friends. He knows the way. Tell him to come to the Caselli at La Massa, understood?”

We visited my very apprehensive aunt Angela, who lived near the church at Rignalla, but on a steep slope above the Arno, overlooking Vallina.

24 British volunteers of the 10^th Brigade had just been killed a few miles south, at San Donato in Collina, where the local people had reported the Einstein family to the SS.

Part of the Einstein family –a brother of the great scientist I believe- lived at San Donato, and were all killed after a chase across the fields, when the local inhabitants reported them to the retreating Gremans to save their own necks. Today a couple of local people who were killed for reprisal have been made heroes, but neither the Einsteins, nor the 24 British boys are remembred by anyone at San Donato in Collina.

As the Allied armies (the 4^th Army corps) approached Florence from the south, a trickle of wretched refugees began to pass by our house, searching for the ferry across the Arno.

People often coming from as far afield as Cassino, near Naples, would pass by on foot.

A man pulling a cart loaded with rags and bundles, followed by a wife and two young children, their footwear in tatters, emaciated and all covered in dust, would walk by like zombies. Sometimes one would ask for a “pezzo di pane” (a piece of bread) or “un piatto di minestra” (a bowl of soup) , which my mother would never fail to give.

One I was at the window, looking down at a skinny gentleman in dusty rags, eating a slice of bread with apparent great pleasure and voracity, while seated on the low wall of the bridge over the stream of Candeli. Having quickly gulped the slice of plain bread, the man started collecting the crumbs from the wall with great care and concentration. My father came to the widow, looked at what had attracted my attention and said: “See that man? See how carefully he picks up all the bread-crumbs from the wall? He is a count…. a ‘padrone’. Now he is eating the crumbs of the bread your mother gave him.”

One day an old and blind man, led by a young girl of about 7 passed by, and asked for a “piatto di minestra”. My mother invited them to our table, and they accepted after much prayer, as they were clearly embarrassed by the state of their clothes and by being dirty. They sat at the table and I could not fail noticing the state of their clothes and the smell they emanated.

I observed the man’s eyes, his eyelids appeared to be stuck together in places, while in others I could see the white of the eyeball beneath. They ate avidly and with apparent enormous pleasure. They told us they were coming from Gaeta and were directed to Milan. The girl was blond, with a pony tail and it struck me that she appeared to be moving and having the manners of an adult.

"YOU, STUPID LITTLE BOY…"

Pierino Sodini was my first friend. Loneliness was felt early on the farm by the river. Candeli was 500 m away, too far to wander to during my strolls in the outside world on my own. When I was taken to Candeli by my mother, my uncle or my aunt during shopping outings, I found the village semi-deserted, silent and dull. Sparse, old and strange men slowly ambled about their business. They saluted cordially, but seldom stopped my kin for a chat.

The grocer and wine bar, the butcher, the barber, the cobbler, the blacksmith; these were all the shops to be had at Candeli. At the top of an outcrop of rock were the church, the nunnery and the junior school. A long and wide series of easy steps led to it from the dusty main road whose stone was noisily grounded by cartwheels and reduced to talcum powder which the slightest gust of wind would raise and deposit everywhere. Everything was white within 20 metres from any road. Cypress trees, the grass, the hedges, were all constantly covered by a layer of dust which only rain would temporarely remove, rendering the scene stark clear.

In the wine bar several men were to be found talking and drinking the dark wine at all hours. The wireless, always on, silenced everyone during war news broadcasts.

Familiar smells of foodstuffs, fresh bread, salami, wine and Tuscan sigar smoke filled the air. Peasants, farm hands, manual workers, carters, boatmen and the odd rural warden were the regulars. Their faces and their voices became familiar to me together with their nicknames: Paccicce, Fagiolo, Stoppino, Fortuna, Birilli. But no children, these were a rare commodity. Casavecchia was a small village three hundred metres away on the short cut to Florence. Here no shops existed and most of the men in the Candeli wine bar came from Casavecchia. Pierino Sodini lived in Florence. He was one year older than myself and a town boy. Very alert, sharp, tall, fair skinned and freckled, with black, straight hair. His family occasionally took him to Casavecchia to stay with his grandparents, and sometimes he would come around to play with me. That was a treat indeed. The first few times we met, we didn’t speak at all, and we just stared at each other sideways while handling a toy or a stick of wood. We would wander around the haystacks, around the back of the house, searching for a lizard, a beetle, or better still the odd snake. If we found any of these we would aim a stone at them or tease them with a reed. Pierino’s clothes were always brisk clean, colourful and smart. His pinkish skin made him look even more colourful. My dull and dusty clothes, against my sallow skin were no match. However, I had blond hair and looked like a foreigner. I could also draw better than him and could model animals out of clay collected from the field on wet days.

Vasco Giunti, a third grade cousin about five years older than me, was another young occasional visitor to our house. He was the son of Ida and Beppino, who sportily arrived on their noisy motorbike with sidecar, from Florence.

What an amazing trio! Ida and Beppino were classic types of the fascist era, although I think they were Communists. Always cordial, happy jokers, ready with their fresh stories from the city. They would join for a Sunday meal and make the table very merry. After the meal Vasco and I would go behind the haystack where he would masturbate showing me how best to obtain maximum pleasure, and then play around throwing stones at birds, lizards and other moving targets such as hens, ducks and turkeys. I never copied him, I just observed. It didn’t occur to me to masturbate. I didn’t understand why he was doing it. It probably was a thing that people from Florence did after lunch as a matter of course.

Gino Caselli, my father’s cousin, occasionally arrived for a visit with his roaring Fiat “Balilla” car, bringing Roberto, my second cousin, only five months my junior. Roberto was smartly dressed, prim, proper and clever, an ideal child. My parents set him against me as an example of how I should be, instead of being the way I was.

Since there was no wireless that my family could afford, and the women of the house had to spend long winter hours stitching and mending clothes, I was taught to read very early on. My mother told me that by the age of four I was a good reader. I only remember my mother saying to me one day “why should I teach you to read? You know how to read already”. I was required to read aloud to the women and to my grandfather.

I remember reading the newspaper seated by the fireplace, or in the courtyard during the lunch break. It was 1944 and “La Nazione”, the Florentine daily newspaper which was occasionally obtained at the grocers by my mother. I remember reading about the murder in Florence, of Giovanni Gentile, the top philosopher of the Fascist regime, by “the Communists”.

I had learned to read on an English picture book, translated into Italian. This book concerned a boy who while boating up the river Nile met several animals such as a crocodile and a hippo.

I was soon required to go into serious stuff, and to leave aside childish booklets. I read “The life of Lorenzo de’ Medici” by William Roscoe, in an 18^th century edition which I still have, Then I passed on to “The Royals ot France”, “Guerrin Meschino” and “The Story of Genevieve”, regarded by sociologists as the “classics” of early 20^thC. rural Tuscany. I only ground to a halt when I was asked to tackle “The Modern Jesuit” by Vincenzo Gioberti, not even comparable to “Winnie the Poo”…..

My second children book must have been “Le Avventure di Pinocchio”, but later I was given a book, only second to Pinocchio in popularity at the time, called “Ciondolino”, the story of a boy who turns into an ant and discovers the world of ants and other insects. This book influenced the rest of my life, as I used to spend hours on end watching the whereabouts of a single ant that I might spot wandering around the flagstones of our threshing floor, and in the grass of the meadow.

My grandfather would show me and tell me the names of any insect found on a tree, or any larva found while digging the earth. Each had a specific name “gramignolo”, “dormiglione”, “ronza”, “paolina”, “ruzzolamerde”, etc. My grandfather was my tutor. He was my TV and was the only person who would praise me when I did a good drawing or a good figurine from a bit of the freshly dug soil.

On a hot day in August 1942, my grandmother died. I remember the small bedroom, lit by the mid-afternoon sun breaking through light net curtains. Only the buzzing of a blow-fly could be heard beyond the faint sobbing of my aunt Vittoria. The slight figure of my grandmother lay tidily on the high bed. No more praises from her, no more delicious slices of bread with olive oil and vinegar for my afternoon snacks. My grandmother had never fed herself properly for decades, and now that there was enough for everybody to eat, it was hard for her to break a long-standing habit. She died of physical exhaustion. She could not have weighed more than 40 Kg. My grandmother reminds me of the “mean man’s donkey” who having learned how to live without food, died soon after…

After my grandmother’s death, I was sent to sleep in the same bed as my grandfather. I slept with him in his high bed until he died of physical exhaustion at 74, when I was 12.

The impact with nursery school, at the nunnery in Candeli, was shocking for me. Strange ladies who hid themselves from head to toe under several layers of white linen and rough brown woolen cloth. They always had little images of desperate looking people, with eyes looking up, their hearts pierced by swords, riddled with arrows, and ladies whose eyes had been pulled off and put on a saucer. One had had her breasts cut off and put on a tray.

I wanted to get out of there. The place stank of incompetently cooked soups, of boiled cabbage, and other unknown smells. There were abuses and impositions too: “Do this!”, “No, you stupid little boy, this way, not that way!” . Instead of learning to write words we filled pages and pages with sticks that didn’t mean anything or make sense. Long before I went to nursery school I could read the newspaper and every evening I used to read books to my mother and aunts by the fireplace. I had read famous books such as “I Reali di Francia” (The Royalty of France), “Guerrin Meschino” (Simple Guerrino),“I Miserabili” (Les Miserables).

I remember filling the wide margins of each page of Il Gesuita Moderno (The Modern Jesuit) with drawings of chickens, piglets and other yard animals. I have no idea of how any of these books ever got into our house. At any rate this was then the entire Library of the household.

Then, when I was 6, I went to primary school. Both Saverio and myself were put in year 2 on account of the fact that we were born early in the year, and that we could read and write.

We were the youngest in the class. Our teacher was Mrs. Salvadori, whose head had been shaven clean by “the Communists”, a common punishment for a woman who had been a Fascist. She wore a scarf all the time.

The same treatment was reserved to the midwife; I remember her cycling around doing her business, with a similarly arranged headscarf.

Mrs. Salvadori began with abuses and impositions addressed to both myself and to Saverio.

I remember the smells of Arcadia, which have long vanished, largely replaced by the smells of petrol, diesel oil, burning plastics.... and dog shit.

Each contadino family had its own distinctive smell. Each of our relations had a distinctive family smell, which I detected on approaching their house, hundreds of yards away. Only my family didn't seem to have a smell, or so I thought.

My father didn't like the smell of peasants, no matter what kind of smell they produced, whether it was smell of flour, of maize, of freshly cut fodder, or manure, stable smell, or bog smell.

Father wanted to get out of the land. He wanted to dress like a "signore", from morning to night, from Monday till Sunday. He wanted to swap his spade for a fountain pen.

-Bisogna andà' vvia, leviamoci di quì. Aéte 'nteso babbo! vu 'vi dovete convincere, si sta meglio a pigione. - (We must quit, let us quit farming. Do you understand me, father? You must convince yourself that we would be better off if we paid rent.)

-Mah, a pigione.... lasciar la terra..... Io la terra la lascio mal volontieri. - (Pay rent, but.... quit farming.... I am not happy to quit farming...) was my grandfather's comment- Siamo stati sempre sulla terra, s'è mangiato poco, ma s'è sempre mangiato. (We have always farmed, we have eaten little, but we have always eaten.)

-Si, s'è mangiato, s'è mangiato cipolle, e poche anche di quelle - would reply my father -Guardate , quanti soldi v'avete 'n tasca. Quanto tempo gl'è che fate il contadino?

(Yes we have eaten, we have eaten onions, and even few of those at that - Look in your pockets. How much money is there? And how long has our family been farming?)

(Always. My grandfather was a contadino, and his grandfather too, and so on..)

(What are we waiting for then? cursed Pius IX. Let’s get out of here, we shall live like the others!)

-Ma se nun s'era a contadino, se s'era a pigione un se dava da mangiare a mezzo Candeli in tempo de guerra! (If we weren’t contadini, if we were rent-payers, we would not have fed half Candeli during the war!)

-Ora la guerra l'è'ffiniha, e anch'i'ffascismo gliè'ffiniho, son'attiri tempi. Basta co i'llavorà'lla terra degl'altri! (Well, now the war is over, Fascism is over too, times have changed, quit working on other people’s land!)

I remember my father handling a spade rarely, perhaps only on two occasions, both very exciting, in different ways.

C.V. OF A WORKING-CLASS INTELLECTUAL

Due to my uncle Giovanni’s untimely death my father had to leave primary school and join his parents, his brother and sisters in the work on the podere. It was only in 1936, at the age of 25, that my father obtained the primary school license.

He requested the following copy of his Primary School Certificate in 1947, when he applied for the post of ‘Guardia Comunale’ at the commune of Bagno a Ripoli, the year after leving the casa colonica of La Massa.

Visto il registro degli esami risulta che ENRICO CASELLI figlio di Ottavio e della Gennai Rosa, nato a Bagno a Ripoli il 14 giugno 1911, ha sostenuto le prove d’esame tenute nella sessione estiva oridinaria dell’anno scolastico 1936-37 presso la scuole elementari di CANDELI (Bagno a Ripoli) per conseguire il CERTIFICATO DI COMPIMENTO DEGLI STUDI ELEMENTARI - CORSO SUPERIORE (Classe quinta), riportando le seguenti qualifiche:

RELIGIONE - ............................................................................…......Buono

LETTURA E RECITAZIONE - ......................................................Buono

ARITMETICA e CONTABILITA’ - ..............................................Buono

GEOGRAFIA - ............................................................................….....Buono

STORIA - .................................................................................… ........Buono

SCIENZE e IGIENE - ................................................................... ......Buono

DIRITTO ed ECONOMIA - ..............................................................Buono

EDUCAZIONE FISICA - ..................................................................Buono

LAVORI MANUALI - ........................................................................Buono

IGIENE e PULIZIA - .................................................................…......Buono

Here below follows an official account of my father’s military service which he had to obtain and present to his employers (the civic authorities of Bagno a Ripoli) when his work-mates tried to deny that he had played any part in World War 2.

I must explain here that when several men from Candeli were awarded medals for their alleged contribution as partisans to the “liberation”, my father was among them but he alone refused to accept the medal offered to him. My father refused on the grounds that several fascists and sympathizers of Mussolini, who had turned against fascism only on September 9^th 1943, were also awarded medals.

This stand of my father’s upset both the Communists and the Catholics, among whom were the great majority of Mussolini supporters, who never liked my father’s liberal socialist ideas.

More than anything it was my father’s relentless display of agnosticism that upset most people.

The following document clearly shows the substantial contribution made by my father to the war effort. After the armistice of September 8th, 1943, my father went into hiding and co-operated in the civil defense, namely rescuing injured people and helping the hungry and the distressed. He never took part in any fighting during the resistance, in order to avoid -as he said- German retaliation.

He always maintained that the killing of retreating Germans by the partisans did much more harm than good during the resistance, and there is no doubt that history proves this to be the case. The people of Marzabotto and thousands of other like them, are first the victims of stupidity and thoughtlessness, and only second of Nazi violence.

Chiamato alle armi e giunto........................................................................................................li 9 Marzo 1933

Tale nella Scuola Centrale Artiglieria Civitavecchia ................................................................li 10 Marzo 1933

Caporale in detto....................................................................................................................li 31 Agosto 1933

Caporale maggiore in detto................................................................................................li 15 Febbraio 1934

Dichiarato idoneo al grado di sergente per deliberazione della commissione di avanzamento di primo grado N. 10 in data ................................................................................................................................3 Agosto 1934

Tale nel Distretto Militare di Firenze........................................................................................li 27 Agosto 1934

Chiamato alle armi per effetto della circ. 5670 del 25-4-1935 del Ministero della Guerra e giunto al Deposito 2 reggimento Artiglieria di Armata (Alessandria)

Sergente in detto con anziani (4) 11-4-1935 A consegna degli assegni dall 11-5-1935 a monte del detto 628/7/62 del 26-4-1935

Ordine del 10-5-1935 Art. 354 ...............................................................................................li 11 Maggio 1935

Inviato in licenza straordinaria in attesa di congedo a monte della circolare 40062 del 23-2-1936

……………................................................................................................................................li 11 Marzo 1936

Collocato in congedo illimitato, Circ, N.48690 del 26-6-1936.....................................................li 1 Luglio 1936

Tale nel Distretto Militare di Firenze...........................................................................................li 3 Luglio 1936

Richiamato per istruzione ai sensi della circ. 32800 del 2-9-1939 e giunto al 2 Reggimento Artiglieria d’Armata............................................................................................................................li 14-Settembre 1939

Concessa licenza agricola di giorni 60 (ord. 14-10-1939)......................................................li 15 Ottobre 1939

Inviato in licenza illimitata senza assegni a monte..............................................................li 15 Dicembre 1939

Richiamato alle armi in base alla circ.47440 del 5 Aprile 1941 dello Stato Maggiore Regio Esercito e giunto al 2 Reggimento Artiglieria Armata............................................................................................li 19 Aprile 1941

Ricollocamento in congedo illimitato ai sensi art. 50030 del 21-4-1941....................................li 25 Aprile 1941

Richiamato alle armi e giunto................................................................................................li 10 Gennaio 1942

Assegnato al Reggimento Artiglieri d’Armata.......................................................................li 10 Gennaio 1942

Tale assegnato al Distretto Militare di Torino.......................................................................li 19 Febbraio 1942

Sergente Maggiore in detto...................................................................................................li 1 Gennaio 1943

Trasferito al ....Reggimento Artiglieria d’Armata ed assegnato alla 1377 Batt. C.A...............li 28 Maggio 1943

Tale in forza del suddetto reparto........................................................................................li 8 Settembre 1943

Inviato in congedo illimitato..................................................................................................li 8 Settembre 1943

Tale nel Distretto Militare di Firenze....................................................................................li 8 Settembre 1943

(I have in my possession a Diploma with a silver medal, awarded to my father for winning the 100 metre race at Civitavecchia on the 8th of October 1933.)

“Il poppolo itagliano e’ il poppolo piu’ polittico del mondo!”

In 1945 my father became a civil servant, an employee of the commune of Bagno a Ripoli. His job was initially with the municipal police. He was given a navy blue uniform, a pair of shiny high boots, a revolver and a black heavy-duty bicycle. A shiny red ‘Guzzi’ motorcycle soon replaced the latter.

From morning to evening, from one year to the next, my father’s job was to police the whole borough, not only for traffic offenses, but also for all matters concerning trades, shops, rights of way, etc. Two of my father’s cousins had the same job in the commune of Florence, where they were better paid. These were Guido, the son of Pasquale and Angelo, the son of Marco.

These Caselli municipal policemen gained a good reputation and kept their jobs until retirement. During my father’s career as a municipal policeman, which lasted until 1955, we rented half of a huge house, formerly a laundry, by the stream of Rimaggio, known since the Middle Ages as the stream of launders. Here I spent the best years of my life, making many friends in the scattered village of Rimaggio.

My father was later given a clerical job at the abattoir, and during the latter part of his working life he became the janitor of the Town Hall. These jobs included free accommodation, so we had to move twice, and these moves disrupted our social life somewhat, as we had to change neighbours too often.

Although distances were not great, travel was not easy in those days of bicycles and scooters, so this meant losing friends and making new ones, but never for long enough a time to become really close. This state of affairs was a determining factor upon the course of my life.

Throughout his working life at the commune, my father cursed the day he got the job in the first place. He hated politicians for their hypocrisy, and for the fact that lying was a necessary and vital trait of a politician’s behaviour.

THE RELUCTANT ANARCH

The same is true of military conscription, which developed within the same context.

The anarch rejects both of them - just like obligatory vaccination and insurance of all kinds.

From 1945 to 1955 we lived in Rimaggio, a scatter of houses, almost all laundries, along a torrent of the same name, next to Candeli and within the same parish.

The laundries of Rimaggio had washed the dirty linen of the hotels of Florence for at least 500 years. The local launders, the Bini, Frizzi and Calosi families had lived in the same houses since the 15th century.

The house my father rented in 1946 was a dismissed laundry of the Calosi family. It was large, and it had a huge garden confined within a bend of the Rimaggio stream.

The garden was actually a vast meadow where linen was laid to dry in the sun, and the first job my grandfather, father and uncle did was to turn that meadow into a luscious orchard.

My grandfather, my uncle Ardino and my father spent much of their spare time, for the best part of three years, turning the vast laundry lawn (hitherto used to dry the washing in the sun) into a garden of delights. They produced the most luxuriant orchard and kitchen garden. They planted rows of peach-trees, cherry-trees, apple-trees, a vineyard, and dug canals to irrigate the most fertile vegetable patch I have ever seen. I watched the growth of all these trees; I learned how to graft any tree and how to prune it. I learned when and how to sow any seeds, how much watering they needed and when they would produce the crop or ripen. I learned how to harvest the grapes and make wine, how and when to pick the maize and how to dry it and make flour.

I even knew how to get rid of pests with natural remedies, and recognized any kind of fruit.

There were still many working laundries in the neighbourhood. Together with the linen there came to Rimaggio piles of magazines and books left behind by the tourists, which were handed over to the rag-and-bone man next door to us.

It was in Rimaggio that from the age of 8, I became the one of the greatest collectors of American weekly magazines and comic strips in Italy. My collection included the Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, Life magazine, and comic strips including Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon, Harold Foster’s Prince Valiant and Tarzan, Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon and Rip Kirby, Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, etc.

When in 1948 Reader’s Digest first appeared in Italian, I collected all the second hand copies I could lay my hands on and put marks against all the endearing illustrations.

I knew the texts stunk of CIA and of American propaganda -so my father said- but I loved the quality of the graphics. It was so un-Italian!

This material was like gold for me, I spent hours and days looking at the paintings of Norman Rockwell and of all the other artists, wondering about the mysterious captions, not a word of which I could then grasp.

This material undoubtedly affected my taste, making a great impact on my imagination. Nothing of the kind existed in Italian publishing.

Without the laundries of Rimaggio, and Adolfo, that wretched rag-and-bone man next door,

In April 1951, as I was cycling back home from school, someone shouted at me that my sister Sara was born.

“You’ve got a sister!” Letizia shouted, and I cringed, “a girl? Puah!”. The same summer my grandfather died regretting, as he confessed to me, that he would not be able to enjoy the sight of the little girl growing up. His heart gave up when he was 74; again, malnutrition in the prime of his life had marred his health. He lay on the settee in the drawing room and passed away next to me, while my mother was looking for a doctor and for my father, who came too late. My grandfather had been the only teacher and tutor I have ever had. Without him I would not have attained that ability to think and analyse which I have enjoyed and which has enabled me to live as a truly free man.

To thee the reed is as the oak…”

I was taught to read at the age of 4, but left school at 12, after agreeing with my parents, and with the local blacksmith, that if I was ever to learn anything it would not be by going to school but by taking up a trade in Florence.

As a consequence of this drastic decision I soon found myself in the position of ”apprentice without pay” in a leather goods factory in the centre of Florence.

In 1450 Leon Battista Alberti the great Florentine architect and intellectual wrote that in the Florence of his times..."no one who was poor would ever find it easy to acquire honour and fame by means of his virtues, as poverty threw virtue into the shadow and subjected it to a hidden and obscure misery"... In the Florence of the 1950s the situation had, if anything, deteriorated. I was aware of this inescapable reality, nevertheless, I wanted to try, or rather, I always felt that I was somehow ‘destined’ to something other than a day after day life of gray monotony, of “rows and rows of days, all gray and all the same”, until the day of deliverance.

I felt inevitably that I should turn to books, and decided to start by getting that secondary school certificate, which I had failed to get when I should have by leaving school at 12.

The decision to leave school and to learn a trade was a vital one. I heard my father talking about it with Baldino, the blacksmith of Candeli:

“Look at me” - said Baldino - “I have never been to school and yet, here I am. If you are industrious you will make your way in life, school or no school!” My father asked his cousin Guido, whether he could find a good job for me in Florence. Some good trade in the field of Florentine crafts perhaps.

It did not take long before Guido came up with the right job: an artistic leather goods factory had a vacancy for a ‘bardotto’ (literally a mule), which is a boy for donkey work.

A black smock, a bicycle, a lunch-bag hanging from the bicycle frame. Rain or shine, every morning up at six, a quick breakfast of bread soaked in milk, and down all the stony and dusty way to Florence, to this home-factory, only to be abused, humiliated, undermined, affronted, and exploited. Since I was learning a trade there was no pay. I was an “apprendista senza paga” (apprentice without pay).

According to law an apprentice without pay should be someone who practically sits around watching, and slowly and carefully, every now and then, does a bit of this and a bit of that. Not so here. Masi Leather-works, was a place of abuses, impositions, affronts and exploitations, edging on the criminal.

Grown men were driven to tears, women in their fifties were broken. Young ladies in their twenties were continually sexually abused.

I was put in charge of a gas-heated heavy duty embossing press, and after two years I was physically and mentally exhausted.

“For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my bedside light, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say, “I’m going to sleep”. And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me. I would try to put away the book which, I imagined was still in my hands, and to switch off the light. I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book”: a distant archipelago, a tropical forest, the rivalry between two civilised planet in Alpha Centauri…

Then, when these thoughts would fade away I would feel like plunging down into a chasm of infinite void and darkness, until panic and terror would take hold of me, the terror of eternal nothingness, the fear of the dark, which is death.

The immanence would suddenly befall me in the darkness and utter stillness of the night. Everybody seemed happily asleep, unaware. Not a sound would come from the dimly lighted streets, not a rustle from the tender leaves of the lime trees, not a screech from Athena’s owl, nothing, only the void at the end of awareness. I would then shout aloud, and my mother would rush into the bedroom, asking what the matter was. Returning to reality -or was it reality? - I would say to my mother “A dream, a bad dream, not to worry, I am asleep”. Every night I had to cope with the horror of 'immanence', with the terrifying awareness of my ego and the certainty of all eventually coming to an end, coming to nothing one day, any day, perhaps now, if my heart beat was to stop its beat, its obsessive beat, now or in eighty year’s time. It’ wouldn’t matter whether it would be now or in eighty year’s time. At the moment of the end it would be here and now, no matter how far into the future, at the end of time. Time does not exist. It is 'our' illusion.

I would listen to my heart beat and....perhaps not feeling it for a moment I would shout again, and again my mother would rush in “What’s the matter, dear?” “Oh, nothing, mother, my heart...I thought it had stopped... I thought....”, “Don’t be silly, it won’t stop, relax, calm down, go to sleep, don’t worry child....”

Then it began happening in the daytime. I would walk with my friends, and in a moment of silence, I would feel my heart beat stop, I would feel faint, dizzy, and I would shout. “What’s the matter?” my friends would ask, “Nothing, just the heart...a jump in the heart beat, the fluttering of a butterfly in my chest...bad digestion, perhaps”. This would go on for days and, worse, for nights on end, until I could not cope, I could not go to work, I stayed at home, with my mother worrying, for as long as six months.

In 1955, we moved away from Rimaggio, the village where I had spent the most splendid ten years of my life, away from my friends, from the familiar places, the launderer’s meadows, the friendly stream, the outline of the familiar hills beyond. But the new house was beautiful, a gentleman’s house, with running tap water, tiles on the floor, shuttered and louvered windows, a bathroom and a separate flushing toilet. But even Luigi, our cat, walked back to Rimaggio, 7 Km away, as I did at every opportunity. Fortunately I now possessed a thoroughly weathered scooter, passed on to me by my father, which made my journeys easier.

It was thanks to the scooter that between the ages of 16 and 19, I could frequently visit my uncles and cousins, the Montecchis, and learn a great deal about farming and about the ‘mentality’ of the contadini. This has been the most valuable fieldwork experience I have had, and if I have any knowledge about the mezzadria that knowledge derives from that experience.

The house had been awarded to my father, after much struggle and antagonism, with his new job as custodian and clerk of the municipal slaughterhouse.

It was a turn of the century villa, shaded by lime trees with sweet scented foliage, and graciously tended fields of red ploughed soil. The reddish-brown soil, the blue sky, the puffed-up clouds, the pink blossoms of the peach trees, the tender green of the vine rows, the pale ochre houses with the terra-cotta roofs beyond, all against the dark blue backdrop of mount Poggio di Firenze.

Having completed the move, after a hard day’s work, we all sat around steamy dishes of pasta, in a ‘proper’ dining room, at last a decent dwelling, a decent job, after how many generations? Endless generations of blood and sweat and extreme hardship, but not...my father put a hand to his chest, cried aloud.... Excruciating pain: The heart, the heart! A heart attack. It’s dark, it’s eight o’clock in the evening, and there is no telephone, my father is now lying on the floor in agony, we children terrified.

My mother rushes out, takes the bicycle: “Mario, I am going to call my cousin Mario at Ponte a Ema, you wait here with your father!”. Time goes by, seconds like hours, father still in agony, his eyes rolled back, he is dying, or perhaps he will live...why is mother not coming back? Bruna comes rushing in, my mother’s cousin: “Your mother! My good Lord, your mother fell from the bicycle! She broke an arm! My poor Enrico! My dear children, what a misadventure!”

My father is now in hospital, he has been diagnosed with a massive heart attack, perhaps he will die, perhaps he will live. At any rate he will have to remain in hospital for at least six months...

Oh, my god, why, why this to us? What have we done? We are not lucky after all; we are still cursed by bad luck, like all our ancestors, right back to the beginning of time.

The nightmares would then come back every night, my mother coping with my nightmares, with trips to the faraway hospital, long bus journeys, preparing meals, washing, cleaning, three children 16, 13, 7 years of age, hopeless. Will they take the house away from us? Will father lose his job? Will his salary be paid?

This boy must see a psychiatrist, said my mother, who will accompany him? I cannot, I am too busy, and I am crucified. Uncle Irio will take him; he will take him all right. He is a bit dumb, but it he will do. Go to San Salvi, the nut house, go, go quick...

On the bus, myself and uncle Irio, a long, anxious journey, in silence, I look at my uncle’s face, my dear, funny uncle, the witty storyteller, the entertainer of my early youth. I somehow perceive the shadow of death on his face “No! It cannot be! I seem to know that my uncle is near death, but how can it be? Just a feeling, a premonition, or an irrational feeling, he is alright, look, his light blue eyes, his blond curls, his pink skin, he is alright...

The doctor sees me. “Nothing wrong with you, my boy, just growing too fast, the age of transition from puberty to adulthood, a sensitive child, he is a little lymphatic, he needs a few good meals, perhaps horse’s meat, nothing else, he’ll be alright”.

After a few days uncle Irio is in hospital, the same hospital as my father’s, he dies after a couple of days. Liver tumour, cirrhosis, nobody suspected that, he had never complained.

He was 44 years of age. Poor aunt Vittoria, she loved him so much, she wanted to marry him against the will of grandfather, and she won in the end, she married him, but here we are, he is now dead, she will mourn him for many years, long years.... I visited my father, while uncle was diagnosed with a terminal illness. My aunt Vittoria told me “ Remember your friend Cesarino? He is in this hospital, he is ill with leukaemia, he won’t live long, would you like to go and visit him”.

Cesarino, how many mischievous adventures together, in the stream, in the woods, how many lizards crucified and shot at with our arrows, how many practical jokes on the old people of Rimaggio. Then we were young, now, here we are, factory workers, on the brink of adulthood. ”How old are you now?” asked Cesarino, with faint whisper, his lips cracked and whitish, his complexion the colour of death, “Sixteen”, “Sixteen, you are only sixteen. I am eighteen. Remember when my mother died? Now it’s my turn. Too early, isn’t it? What do you think? Or is it better so? Perhaps it is better so”, “No, Cesarino, we must live, live and change the world, remember?” “Perhaps you will, I shall leave it to you and wish you good luck, with all your talents...” Good bye Cesarino, I shall never see you again. Or perhaps I shall...perhaps we shall run again together on those emerald green meadows...if there are any up there in Heaven....

Again I returned to Masi Leather factory. Again I was abused, imposed upon, affronted.

During the lunch break I would get a pen and draw scenes from the latest American Western movie on large milk-white sheets of thick cardboard, used in the factory as support for leather album covers. “How gifted this boy is!” “Ma guarda che talento!”, were the remarks “E’ un dono di natura!” (It is a gift of nature), “He should go to art school” people began to say.

My father went to the “Istituto d’Arte di Porta Romana” and showed my drawings done with a ball-pen on card, and the intelligent tutor -no idea who he was, may God bless his soul- said “This boy is too talented to send to art school, he should be sent to an artist’s studio”.

In 1953 my father bought me my first automatic pencil and my first gouache set at Rigacci art shop in Via dei Servi, Florence, and I started painting with a brush for the first time.

My father was given the address of a prominent Florentine illustrator, Remo Squillantini, and advised to talk to him to see whether he would be prepared to give me private lessons.

Squillantini accepted and during the lunch break, every day, I used to rush from Via de' Pandolfini, where I was working, to nearby Via della Pegola where the artist’s studio was located.

From 1953, I started training as a book illustrator with Remo Squillantini. This man, then in his early thirties, had originally trained as an aircraft designer, and had no artistic training or knowledge. As an illustrator he was about fifth in line of a series of much better artists who were active in Florence at the time. He was, however, the only one available as a teacher, and there was no other choice. Notwithstanding the fact that I learned nothing from Squillantini, as he made sure that I would not learn anything, I nevertheless picked up a lot about the profession itself. Last but not least, the fact that such profession existed.

The following dialogue may give an insight on the character of Squillantini’s lessons:

-Well, well, well, so, you think it is easy to become an illustrator. Not so. It takes years. Years and years of hard work and sacrifices to become an illustrator. It isn’t as easy as you believe.

- The costumes? All here, all in the head. You must learn how to draw all costumes in history and of all countries by heart. And you think it’s easy? Ask me when you want to know what an 18^th century costume looks like, and I’ll draw it for you off the cuff.

- And you must never copy. Everything from memory. You must learn how to draw everything by heart, without copying anything. Too easy otherwise!

Now you shall copy from this anatomy book. You will start with the skeleton, then the muscles, the complete persons, as human anatomy is the first thing you should learn, and that you must copy, but once you have learned where the muscles and bones are, you must do it all by heart.

-It is “The Human Figure” by Rubins, David K. Rubins, anatomy for artist’s. An American artist, and a great talent.

- You must start very slowly, being very patient, and learning the whole book by heart. Then, slowly slowly, if you show talent, you might start working on actual work for publication. But that time is a long way away... Look at me, I am thirty, only now I am beginning to get some steady commissions for work to be published.

THE SENSE OF BEAUTY

AND THE AESTHETIC QUESTION

THE WHOLE QUESTION OF ART IS AN ENTIRELY DIALECTICAL ONE, THERE IS NOTHING OBJECTIVE ABOUT ART, AS THERE IS NOTHING OBJECTIVE ABOUT AESTHETICS IN GENERAL.

The backside of a working cow or the newly cut runners of a sled-car may be very beautiful or very ugly even to the eye of the parvenu. To the eye of the peasant they may equally be beautiful or ugly but according to wholly different principles, standards and parameters.

Aesthetic appreciation is the result of a dialectical exercise, internal to each specific social group and culture, and which in no way and on no account may be understood or penetrated by outsiders.

In Florence, for example, Baroque art was in my times regarded as “ugly”, full stop. It was ugly chiefly because it was associated with the Counter Reformation, which in Florence was regarded as a drawback. Botticelli painted the Venus and the Primavera before the Counter Reformation, and painted his morbid and plainly ugly religious scenes after it.

The beauty of Tuscan Romanesque churches lay in the simplicity and purity of their form, the beauty of Florentine Renaissance architecture, such as for example the Church of San Lorenzo, or Palazzo Strozzi, rests in its sensitive recovery and interpretation of the classical.

Such products of Western dialectics would never be appreciated by a Japanese person, let alone by a Chinese one. They can rarely be fully appreciated by a non-Florentine.

In the conversations of my youth I remember hearing of “the mystic realism of Giotto”, or of “the Heavenly colours of Beato Agelico’s skies”, of the “the solidity of Paolo Uccello’s figures”, of “the perfect composition and sensitive colours of Piero della Francesca”, of “the drawing skills of Botticelli”, of “the astounding beauty of Della Robbia’s figures”, of “the angelical perfection of Donatello’s children”, of “the Paradisiacal beauty of Benedetto da Maiano’s Madonnas”.

Whereas of Andrea del Sarto one might admire “the expressionistic strength” but did not appreciate the themes. One often heard of “quei goffi angiolacci barocchi” (those awkward Baroque angels) they were believed to “disfigure the purity of Romanesque essentiality”, and were often hacked out mercilessly by the hammer and chisel of 1960’s Belle Arti restorers.

The spirit –or the ‘method’- behind the art criticism of those days was a transposition of the peasant’s sense of beauty from the country to the city. First, something is beautiful if it is ‘right’, second, there can be no art for art’s sake and there is no beauty standing alone, or beauty for beauty’s sake.

In the perception of that “stoic” culture the rump of a cow can offer beautiful lines with hues of pink and cream in its shades, on an early spring morning, particularly if the air is fresh and there is a caressing breeze from a north easterly direction.

A red sunset is beautiful if rain is felt needed on a summer evening, and the flickering of the leaves of the “populus tremula” may be pleasant to the eye if the breeze will soon reach a sweaty brow.

A beautiful thing is a good and a useful one. There is no beauty in the futile or the unnecessary; certainly there is no beauty in something bad and immoral.

Beauty and art have a place in the usefulness of their contexts. There no justification for an artist not to do “any other useful work”. Actually one may prove to be an “artist” in the course of the “useful jobs one does”. The work he produces may be regarded as a work of art, but it never will be art for art’s sake, even if it is a false window painted on the façade of a house.

A fine artist is not regarded as a “proper” person in this culture. He has no practical role, he is an individualist pursuing an individualistic goal. He may not exist and the world would go on the same.

One thing is a fresco in a church, a Madonna on the roadside, another is a canvas to hang on the wall of a salotto. A picture hung on the wall of a salotto may be “bellina” (pretty) but it is never “bella” (beautiful).

The way my uncles Montecchi looked at my paintings was a mixture of mild curiosity and a sense of dismay at my wasting time which might otherwise have been employed in a more useful pursuit.

TRIVIAL PURSUITS…

After changing jobs, in 1955, I studied calligraphy and learned lithography from Signor Guidarelli in his old Florentine workshops of Via Ricasoli.

I also worked for a summer in Villa Medici of Careggi, at the restoration of 15th century frescoes, under the guidance of Maestro Aiazzi.

On the same site my uncle Ardino was a bricklayer with the building firm which was carrying out the restoration, and I remember having lunch breaks together. It was so nice.

Uncle Ardino was a bit of a simpleton, short and slender, a balding blond, blue eyed, almost Dutch looking. A strange creature, the offspring of an ill-nourished mother. I heard my grandfather complaining about his lack of courage and initiative. He was always on odd jobs, never lasting very long and never well paid. He married a suitable woman at forty who looked after him with great love for the whole of ten years he spent on a wheel chair, where a stroke confined him from 1970.

The job at the Villa Medici, where Marsilio Ficino, Angelo Poliziano, Pico della Mirandola and Lorenzo de’ Medici invented “Neoplatonism” and gave birth to the Renaissance, did not last long though, and I was soon working again in another leather goods factory.

Meanwhile I did some free lance work for advertising companies, and funny cartoons for a Florentine magazine. Signor Franci, a neighbour of the slaughterhouse, gave this, my first printed work, to me.

It was from 1955 that I started experimenting with gouache and water-colour. I enjoyed illustrating the books I was reading, or anything that came to mind.

In 1956, I obtained my secondary school certificate by doing the exams at the School of Agriculture of Antella, after studying the curriculum for three months with Signor Calosci, a colleague of my father’s in the administration of the slaughterhouse. He often complimented the quality of my writing, which he compared to the writings of Renato Fucini, a Socialist anticlerical Tuscan writer at the turn of the century. This boosted my ego a great deal.

A depressed person -such as I then was- may sometimes be cured by such casual remarks, which may even change his life. I think this one did that.

Thanks to my certificate, I was able, in 1957, to join a large printing firm (Zincografica Fiorentina) as an apprentice photogravure operator. My pay was 14.000 Lire per month; it all went into second-hand non-fiction books. Without any guidance or even the possibility of discussing anything with anyone, I read works by Nietzcke, Confucius, Descartes, Einstein, Jung, the biography of Charles Darwin, Franz Kafka’s “Diaries”, and “Metamorphosis”, R. W. Emerson’s “Essays”, some Thomas Mann, and many others I cannot recall. I have no idea of how I came to chose these authors I had never heard of any of the authors I read with the possible exception of Einstein, due to the Atom Bomb. I did read some Hemingway and quite a lot of John Steinbeck, but I came to know them through the cinema.

My work mates of Zincografica advised me to read Mikhail Sholokov’s "The Placid Don", which had become very popular at the time, but I paid no attention to such suggestion, as it smelt of demagogy. I am glad I did not take advice from the trade unionists of Zicografica, I might have read Lenin’s Complete Works instead! These I was to read only seventeen years later, in the English Language.

The Soviets had then invaded Hungary, and my father was furious, while my work-mates wanted me to believe that in Hungary there was a "Fascist counter-revolution", and the Soviets "had to do it". I thought Fascism was an Italian phenomenon, not a Hungarian one...

The Soviets launched the first satellite, and that was a boost for the more hesitant among the propagandists of the Soviet Union. I insisted that that was an exercise in "propaganda" and not in "science", and that the Americans were far ahead of the Soviets in any field of science or the humanities.

"And how do you know that?" -I was asked. "I just sense it, it is a question of style, a question of...taste". I was laughed at, but I was also listened to at times...

It was then that the idea matured in my mind that I should dedicate my life to teaching, in my own way. My work mates, who daily listened to my informal lectures, strongly backed that idea. My father bought me a Rolleicord camera and I started taking photographs at this time under the tuition of Galeno Gialli the chief photographer and my mentor at Zincografica.

In 1957 I illustrated the book La vita quotidiana dei romani (The daily life of the Romans) by Ugo Enrico Paoli (Giunti Marzocco 1958) a job passed on to me by Remo Squillantini.

In 1959, both Sig. Del Moro, the general manager of Zincografica, and myself agreed that I was in the wrong job as photogravure operator, and we decided that I should become a free-lance book illustrator.

At Zincografica I had met at least two good cinema poster artists, and fine artists such as Pietro Annigoni. I was also handling a great number of original works, such as canvasses by Tuscan impressionists.

I also experienced the world of trade unions and political dialectics on the factory floor. The workers of Zincografica were rather an elite, being all highly skilled and provided with secondary school certificates, rare in those days.

As a free-lance book illustrator, I still got only work passed on to me by senior illustrators such as Remo Squillantini and Carlo Galleni, but I was also using all my spare time training in the kind of illustration which was most likely to find me a job. At that time nature became my main interest.

I liked fiction too, and I read good American novelists, I liked thrillers and science fiction, but more often read books about science. With my brother and friends I launched several rockets, some were three-stage missiles containing insects. We used to be called the “NASA of Candeli”!

And I experimented in trendy figure work. I also trained by illustrating the diaries, which I kept, concerning events surrounding the Candeli Worker’s Club between 1957 and 1960.

From 1958, I shared a studio with a comic-strip artist Enzo Carretti, in Via dei Serragli, in Florence, on the south side of Ponte Vecchio. My mother had found his ad in the daily paper, and this is the way I met him.

I was not fully aware that 1959 was to be my last year entirely spent at home. Since then, and to this day, my visits to my family have been sporadic. My visits to the friends of Candeli even more so.

My old school mates, whom I used to meet at the Worker’s Club, became more and more drawn towards football and away from ‘culture’ and from my scientific experiments and conversations. I watched them gradually drifting towards the abyss of a proletarian condition.

In 1957 I was the first teenager elected to the Council of the Worker’s Club, a post often held by my father in previous years. I was responsible for “cultural activities’ and brought into Candeli good opera shows, stage plays, American movies and…the first Juke-box.

But I felt more and more isolated as the drift between myself and my old schoolmates grew wider and wider.

“PIATTI TRAVERSI”

I have spoken of the Tuscan peasant’s continuous quest for quality. The quest for quality indeed is, or was, the endeavour of my culture.

I express a doubt in saying “is” and would rather say “was” because having individual taste deteriorated so dramatically, largely replaced by standard taste, the quest for quality is no longer every man’s pursuit, but a matter of collective habits.

It is an accepted notion that food in Tuscany is simple but good. Dishes were good for the excellence of their basic ingredients and the manner in which they were handled when cooking, not for the sophistication of the recipe.

Whereas in Malta the best of chefs thinks good food should stink, and will ruin an excellent fresh fish by mishandling the ingredients, a Tuscan one is convinced that good food should make you mouth water at a distance. He will for example make an excellent meal out of a piece of ancient stockfish. You do not believe me? Then try “baccala’ alla livornese” at any cheap “trattoria” in Florence. On the other hand, when I tried fresh swordfish in an ostentatious restaurant Malta I went off fish for six months.

I regard cookery as an art in its own right, and as any other art it requires a gifted person and a lot of training to exercise it. Only people endowed by nature with an unusual degree of aesthetic sense will make good chefs.

One may say that such a notion applies to a broad range of human activities. This is true, but, whereas I do not care about a bank manager in gray, wearing a yellow tie and black translucent socks, if I see a cook dressed in such bad taste I eat elsewhere. If I see an artist wearing the wrong clothes, I avoid visiting his exhibition.

Of course good taste may be acquired with hard work, but I am sure it is easier to lose it that to acquire it. Most of my people have lost their taste along with their general aesthetic sense. Bombarded daily by blatant aggressive vulgarity they have succumbed to it.

Giuseppe Mazzon, my artist friend was a good colourist, a mediocre post-impressionist, a downright bad draftsman but an excellent cook. Born in Treviso in 1912, he had lived in Florence since 1935. He had also been trained in French finesse during the “resistance”, when he fought shoulder to shoulder with François Mitterrand.

A mixture of Tuscan, Venetian and French taste had made him a superior chef. His sauces were sheer poetry; they were as good as the colours on his canvases, if not better.

Emily, the mother of my boys, is an excellent draftsman, a superior colourist, a natural art critic, no wonder her recipes are captivating, her pastas sheer experiences of paradise. My woman and my best friend only met very briefly, divided by generations, yet they had so much in common.

My mother was potentially an artist. The social position of women in her generation and class prevented her from expressing her wide-ranging exceptional abilities. She did however, spoil my palate, but not in the way one would think.

I have never had any problems with my appetite, and never a thought was wasted on my weight. At 25 I was 1.83m tall and 69 kg in weight; at 45 things had only marginally changed.

During the 20 odd years I have lived with my parents meals were meager. We were poor and that was neither a time when people did not express their status by showing off they was eating, as had happened in earlier times. During the War we seemed to have enough for ourselves and for the best part of starved out Candeli. In the 1950s we all lived on my father’s tiny salary. We always had plenty of ‘minestra’, this was obtained by boiling a handful of beans, and savouring vegetables such as red onions, a carrot and celery till they were disintegrated. A pinch of salt, one of pepper and a “comma” of olive oil (as mother used to call it). The liquid thus obtained was sometimes enriched with two handfuls of very fine pasta, often in the shape of little stars.

When we had a chicken, the feet, the neck and head and the wings were boiled to give more flavour and make a more substantial stock. That would however only occur on Sundays.

Minestra di pane consisted of practically the same liquid with bread soaking in it. Pappa was obtained by adding a bit of tomato preserve and by slightly toasting the bread cut in small cubes. To all these soups we would add grated “pecorino” cheese.

Pasta was made at home and consisted in the main of tagliatelle, lasagne (twice the breadth), and tortellini. Tortellini was eaten only at Christmas and Easter.

The sauce for such pasta was in the best of cases, made of rabbit’s meat with a bit of vegetarian sauce. The latter, the most common was obtained by cooking a beaker of peeled tomatoes, with plenty of finely chopped garlic, equally finely chopped carrot, celery and perhaps nutmeg, with olive oil and water. When the garlic was cooked and the sauce had simmered down it would be poured on the pasta still inside the boiling pot and stirred, then served ready to be sprinkled with “pecorino romano” or “parmigiano” cheeses on the plate. I cannot stand soggy pasta being served white on the plate and then the sauce added on top. This is incompetent cooking.

Of course there was also “pasta al burro e formaggio”, or “pasta all’aglio e olio”, but even these simpler dishes require competence and good taste, as many Maltese experiences have made me realize.

Meat was scarce. I remember eating “lonze” or cow’s muzzle, “parahore” or cow’s lung, “frattaglie”, or cows odd cuts.

We ate chicken’s carcasses, necks and lower legs, which were sold by butchers who also sold entrails, pig’s trotters, and unmentionable bits. I remember eating pig’s, lamb’s, and chicken’s entrails, all deliciously fried in the frying pan, only with sage, garlic and olive oil.

My mother always complained that I only seemed to like “piatti traversi” (odd dishes). When we had a whole chicken, a duck, a turkey or a goose, I would only eat the head, neck, feet and wings. I would only have the head, the front legs and rib cage of the rabbit.

I hated boiled or cooked vegetables and especially cabbage. I loved only baked or fried potatoes but only so long as they had been cooking with meat next to them in the pan.

I loved all kinds of wild and raw vegetables, which I used to dip in oil and salt.

I used to gulp bowls of wild winter lettuces with loaves of bread. I had raw fennel, raw artichokes, raw celery, raw spring onions and leeks, all with loaves of bread.

I always loved boiled pork and salami and ham, definitely as winter foods. Today we seem no longer to make seasonal considerations when it comes to food, yet the important point about food and health is largely a matter of when you eat it.

In Malta, a country that seems to have learned everything it knows from northern English sailors, people commit suicide in summer by eating large dishes of chips cooked in ancient pseudo-oil, and accompanied by fried sausages, fried eggs, and undressed tomato and cucumber salads. Also they have barbecues in summer and cook their sausages and meat on diesel oil imbued coal. Perhaps this goes along with the local notion that good food stinks.

On hind sight I can say with all confidence that my diet has kept the doctor away for well over 60 years, and has produced exceptional fertility, great physical strength and resilience, long lasting good skin, and flowing hair.

For long years I have practically been a vegetarian, I have hardly ever drunk more than two glasses of wine a day and never outside meals. People who drink wine outside meals do not know what wine is about, and are liable to become drunks, as my grandfather rightfully said.

Equally, people who are surprised to see me mixing wine with water a meals do not know that wine was ‘invented’ to be drunk that way. This is not erudition, on the contrary, it is peasant culture.

“THE BOOT”

“Io non son della solita vacchetta…’

The great majority of the people of Candeli had embraced Fascism and loved Mussolini. Like all neigbouring communities, Candeli has managed to a shameful past.

First World War veterans of Candeli had set up a social club in rented accommodation at the foot of the staircase leading up to the church. I remember being taken to the Circolo Ricreativo Combattenti Candeli by my father on occasions when he was on leave.

Such social clubs were the “cells” of fascist Italy as fascism sprung up from the grievances of First Work War veterans. It was there that both my father and my uncle Aldino were abused an even attacked on the slightest pretext by Candelesi who later turned to Communism.

On May 19^th 1945 the members of the club, now joined by Second World War Veterans, had a meeting to establish on what basis the club should operate under the democratic regime.

A new chairman was elected and it was decided that the new club should provide refreshments, entertainment and cultural events for the benefit of all the people of Candeli.

The inventory, which was registered then, gives an idea of the size and magnitude of this establishment:

About one year after it was felt by the administration that a new and more spacious club was needed if the intentions of the founding members were to be carried out.

The members decided to ask for a lease on a plot of land on the right side of the road from Florence at the spot where booby trap bombs had killed four citizens of Candeli in 1944, and whose remains were mercifully collected by my father.

The landowner, Marquis Ruffo Della Scaletta agreed to lease the requested plot of land ‘to the people of Candeli on condition that it should be used to erect a worker’s club’.

The club was to be a memorial to the martyrs of Candeli, who had lost their lives by treading on the booby-traps set up by the withdrawing German armies. Ironically, the booby traps that my grandfather had dug the holes for at gun point…

I remember my father and his friend, Aldo Monducci, choosing a name for the club, they called it “Lo Stivale” (The Boot).

The name derives from the title of a poem by a 19^th Cent. Tuscan anticlerical socialist writer Giuseppe Giusti, which was a metaphor for Italy. Such a name might be interpreted as having a patriotic connotation, not popular in those post-fascist days. At any rate, my father and Aldo Monducci bluffed their way into setting up a ‘socialist club’.

I remember a huge hall, with few adjoining utility rooms and a bar, being built on the design of the local architect of Bagno a Ripoli. Since there was no money for bricks, the decision was made to fetch every stone from the ruined houses of Candeli which had been blown up by the Germans to block the road through Candeli. Pebbles were also collected from the riverbank at Villa La Massa. I remember my uncle Ardino among score of others, carrying loads of round pebbles the shape and size of a bread loaf.

Meanwhile the sand diggers were busy loading their barges with sand scooped out from the river bottom by means of giant ladles, as was traditional in those days. Wheelbarrows and the occasional horse and cart brought tons of building material from the riverbed at Villa la Massa to the centre of Candeli, 6-700 metres away.

I remember the “renaioli” (sand diggers) of Candeli, with their typical heavy black boats, which they skillfully maneuvered with a long pole. Their shiny, red-bronze muscular bodies would balance on the side of the boat, handling a giant metal scoop at the end of a long wooden handle. With this they would scoop up the sand from the river bottom and strenuously pull it up onto the boat. The sand was then sieved through different meshes to separate it from pebbles and dirt, and then divided into heaps of different degrees of coarseness. Their names: Fortuna, Nandino, Birilli, il Lontra are stuck in my mind.

The huge hall of Lo Stivale was conceived both as a film-theatre and as a dancing hall. The lofty stage to the west opened both to the inside and to the outside, where a Greek style theatre was built for summer open-air shows.

As soon as the enormous roof was covered with the last tile, rows of propped up builders’ planks were arranged in neat rows before the stage. I remember watching the first film show when the floor was still rough concrete and beaten earth.

An elected council led by a chairman ran the club. Candeli had its own general election day. Every year the new Club Council had to be elected. The Council was molded along the lines of a town council. There was a chairman, an administrator, a councillor for culture and entertainment, a councillor for sport and leisure, a councillor for works, a coucillor for the running of the coffee bar etc.

My father was for many years either the administrator or the chairman. The archives of Lo Stivale preserve files and files of records styled in my father’s elegant hand.

My father and I remained members of the worker’s club even when we moved to the abattoir, 7-Km away. I remember riding my scooter to the club almost every evening.

In 1956 my father fell ill and no longer frequented the club. I replaced him by taking part in the 1957’s elections were I came second. I was the first teenager ever to be elected to any such position so far as anyone could tell.

I became councillor for culture and entertainment, and besides choosing American films of my liking, I introduced to Candeli the first Juke Box, slot machines and “flippers”. So long as I was in charge not a single Italian song was to be heard from the jukebox. I insured that there would plenty of Paul Anka, Harry Belafonte, Bobby Darin, Pat Boone, Neil Sedaka, the Beach Boys, Elvis Prisley, Connie Francis, and also some Frankie Lane and Dean Martin.

In 1957, I painted a great backdrop for the stage with a night view of New York. This canvas measured 4 metres by 6 metres and well suited the live band, called “Swing Harlem”, when on Saturday and Sunday nights the cinema turned into a dancing hall.

The following year, 1958, I painted another backdrop representing two rock dancers. The age of Rock and Roll had reached Candeli.

Every now and then we gave a live opera. I remember an excellent full-scale performance of the Barber of Seville; we gave plays of Pirandello and others in the Florentine vernacular.

But most of all I remember watching scores of third rate westerns interspersed with higher quality movies such “The mutiny of the Bounty”, “Sierra Madre”, “Casablanca” and “Gone with the wind”.

At “Lo Stivale” I first flirted with girls. There I was taught how to dance by a girl friend, and there in the dancing hall, in 1958, I met the woman I was to marry seven-year later.

Some of the friends even the closest, I hardly ever saw again. Milan changed me, or rather, I found myself there.

I had come very close to some of these friends. Very close to me were for example Paolo Ermini, son of the blacksmith, a bright boy with and enquiring mind, which unfortunately dulled out quickly after entering “Il Pignone” works. Vasco Donnini, a master mason’s son, also dulled out soon after joining “Il Pignone”. He spent most of time thinking and talking about football. I saw him at the age of 40 when he had contracted leukemia; all he was able to tell me was that he had spent every Sunday of the previous 20 years at the football grounds. He died very shortly after. My cousin Sergio Rontani, whose father had become a janitor after leaving the podere, began his career as sign writer. He then joined the railway works, thinking that it would be a more durable job. He was electrocuted and barely escaped death. He lost most of the fingers in both hands and lived as a cripple since. Gianpiero Martini, the son of a schoolteacher and of a farming estate administrator of Villa La Tana, became a telephone company engineer and travelled the world I remember he had been to Baghdad in the late 60s. Gianpiero however, belonged to a different class; his mother was a primary school teacher. He was allowed to drive his father’s Fiat 500, the glorious “ Topolino”, from 1957. In the way of transport I was given my father’s old scooter, a “Motom”, from the age of 14. I found it handy for going to work, until a truck that backed onto it, one day when I parked in front of a gate, flattened it.

Most of my friends of “Lo Stivale”, which included some of my cousins, remained manual workers. Most of those who belonged to families of sand diggers, bricklayers, blacksmiths, were employed in large engineering works such as “Il Pignone” or “Officine Galileo” or even “Fiat” works of Florence. Almost all those who came from peasant families became self-employed craftsmen. The few, such as myself, whose fathers were clerical workers, became accountants, or worked in the hotel industry.

Of all the Montecchis hardly any ever set foot at “Lo Stivale”. Rarely one might see Saverio or Vasco on a Sunday lurking around the dancing hall. The club was a worker’s club, and workers may enjoy spare time, peasants do not. Being a peasant is like being a priest, it is a vocation, a condition, and also a full-time job. Only the lazy and the half-witted among the peasants may be seen wasting time in wine bars or workers clubs.

Later, during the 1970 and 80s, once Saverio had become a house painter he was often elected the chairman of Lo Stivale, so much so that the acquired the nickname of “The President”.

To us “Lo Stivale” was the window on the world. There we saw the first American movies, there we saw the first opera and the first stage plays, or listened to the first live band. There we saw the first pair of jeans, the first “teddy-boys” and heard the songs of Frank Sinatra and Perry Como. There we first watched TV, wen it was first introduced in Italy, in 1953.

It all practically ended at the time when gradually, within the space of three years everyone was called up for service in the army. I was exempted on account of my bad eye, and went to Milan to learn my trade instead.

From 1953 onwards I had had a secret life. I was drawing and drawing and painting in my own bedroom, which my father had always insured that it would be also an artist’s studio.

I was particularly intrigued by American illustration. When in 1956 the Italian magazine “Epoca” made a deal with LIFE magazine, and started publishing a series of highly illustrated articles on the origins and evolution of life on earth, I became particularly fascinated by the illustrations of planets, dinosaurs and early men.

I struggled to copy the style of such illustrations on the one hand and of those of the Reader’s Digest on the other. This secret and solitary nightlife of mine went on for at least four years. Nothing of it was shared with my friends of Candeli or even with my brother, who frequented friends of a different age group.

After midnight, after coming home from “Lo Stivale”, I plunged upon my collection of pictures which I used to cut out from any magazines I could lay my hands on. I used to collect all the discarded movie posters I could obtain at “Lo Stivale” and made a great file of them.

I used to write a diary, poetry, and essays on the environment, on philosophy. I slept an average of three to four hours per night, no more. I remember many occasions in which I never went to bed at all and carried on the next day at work as if I had had a good night’s sleep.

My parents of course were aware of this life style and worried a lot. I was taken to a psychologist in 1957, and I remember him telling my parents there was nothing wrong with me, just a hyperactive mind….

The cure to all this came soon and almost unexpectedly. The first girlfriend cured all that.

I carried on as usual, drawing reading and writing, and no sleeping, but stopped worrying about it. In July 1960 I packed a cardboard suitcase, caught a train and went to Milan. Leaving girlfriend and all behind.

My parents were saddened by my departure, but did not try to stop me: “You must follow your own road” they said and gave me the little money they had for a week’s stay in the northern metropolis, as we then called Milan. If both my eyes had been good, god knows where I would have been sent for service, probably somewhere in Sicily or near the Yugoslav border in the north-east.

My colleague Enzo Carretti, six years my senior, was producing strip cartoons for BPC Amalgamated Press, London, through their Milan agent, Studio Creazioni D’Ami. I got in touch with Studio D’Ami and thus I left Florence, and my family, to seek better opportunities in Milan.

In the period between the two world wars Florence was the main publishing centre, and indeed the literary capital of Italy. By WW2 publishing in Florence had shrunk down to a handful of ailing literary houses, and what was once city of intellectuals gradually acquired the character of a little provincial town, run according to the petty interests of shopkeepers. It has never recovered since.

The day I arrived in Milan Rinaldo and Piero Dami invited me to work as a “studio assistant” with Studio Creazioni D’Ami. Rinaldo Dami, a comic-strip artist, known as Roy D’Ami, had spent some years in London working for Amalgamated Press. Piero was a financier and an entrepreneur. Studio Creazioni D’Ami was undoubtedly the top art and design agency in Italy at the time. I found appropriate lodging and stayed on.

At Studio D’Ami I found familiar things. Not only did I find stacks of those magazines that I had collected at Rimaggio, but also a collection of the National Geographic Magazine and one of the British comic’s magazine Eagle. All those English words beside the pictures, hitherto mysterious to me, began to speak...through my mentor’s words.

I began earning a living by adapting French comic strip cartoons to fit the format of Corriere dei Piccoli, the weekly children’s magazine of the house.

In 1961, I was assigned my own page in the most popular weekly in Italy. The editor, Giovanni Mosca, himself an artist, gave the job to me, and when journalist Gulgielmo Zucconi replaced Mr. Mosca, my job was confirmed.

I reluctantly started with a full page on football -a game I’ve always hated for reasons that went back to school days. I have seen too many potentially creative and intelligent children selling out their souls and abandoning their brains to football. I soon went on to what I really liked: a page on nature, where I illustrated and briefly described animals and their environment.

I remember Guglielmo Zucconi saying to his aids “Give that page to Caselli, who better than a peasant would know about animals!”

I also worked for the competition. I went on a trip to Rome, on D’Ami’s advice and got some work from author Mario Faustinelli, then the director of weekly children’s magazine “Bimbo e Bimba”, styled upon the British “Jack and Jill”.

Alas, these jobs did not last very long. Times were changing and weeklies such as the Corriere dei Piccoli were undergoing an economic and image crisis. Belgian and French comic -strip publishers were introducing a new taste with heroes such as "Lucky Luke", the "Stroumpfs" and "Tipiti". These did not fit the taste and style of existing Italian magazines. Meanwhile I was preparing illustrations with a view to producing a nature book with D’Ami.

Illustrated informative books were becoming more and more popular, and with Roy D’Ami, my mentor and boss, we decided to drop the much loved cartoon world, and turn to illustrated informative books.

Roy D’Ami, hitherto ignorant on the subject of nature, pushed aside his great passion for Rudjard Kipling and his Gunga-Din, and “militaria", and took up the study of natural history, then my main interest.

Before all this happened, I had already illustrated my first important book: Alberto Manzi’s “Gli Animali a Casa Loro”, Edizioni Artistiche Italiane (Mondadori) belatedly published in 1962.

Professor Aldo Gabrielli, a philologist and famous author of Italian dictionaries gave the job to me. It was Prof. Gabrielli who advised me not to tone down my Florentine accent, but be proud of it. “Don’t you dare adopt a ‘bastard’ Milanese accent!” he warned me.

I followed his advice and here I am to this day, proud of my Florentine way of speaking.... of writing..... of thinking.

Alberto Manzi, the author, was then a very popular TV personality, a teacher and a writer of educational books on science and history. Meeting him in Rome certainly put a number of ideas into my mind.

While my personal reference library was mushrooming, from 1960 to 1964, I worked as editor, art director and illustrator, with Studio Creazioni D’Ami, mostly for the production of the encyclopaedic work called “Cosa fanno gli Animali” (What animals do).

This was to be a work in 12 volumes; it was edited by no less a name than that of Sir Maurice Burton, then Director of the Natural History Museum of London, whom D’Ami and I hired on the spot during our trip there. What must have interested Sir Maurice in our work were its quality, and our enthusiasm.

This work was financed by Alberto Peruzzo “Publisher-cum-Ferrari”, and was eventually published in numerous editions in several languages from 1965.

The editorial board of the encyclopaedia was made up of an array of Anglo-American students and tourists passing through Milan, and whom D’Ami easily recruited for a small fee.

The artists who contributed to this ‘historical’ encyclopaedia were also a mixed bunch, among them were: Studio Battaglia, Sandro Biffignandi, Gian Battista Bertelli, Sergio Borella, Genni Buccheri, Ottavio Cencig, Svetozar Domic, Bruno Faganello, Natale Fedeli, Ivo Gattin, Ezio Giglioli, Cristina Greppi, Aldo Marcuzzi, Don J. Makela, Bruno Pennisi, Amedeo Petralia, Pham-Tang, Rudolph Sablic, Giorgio Scarato, Alberto Trincia, Emilio Uberti, Giancarlo Zucconelli, and several others. I praise them all and remember them with affection.

At this time I brought into the studio a London girl Joan Job, fresh from an Oxford where she read English literature. I met her one morning in the bathroom at my lodging place, she wanted to learn Italian and perhaps stay in Italy. I made D’Ami employ her as a researcher editor, which we badly needed, and we soon became good friends.

Mafalda, my Italian girlfriend back in Florence seemed to have been forgotten for a while. Only for a while though. After one year in Milan Mafalda decided to join me and I had to make a quick decision: was it to be Joan or Mafalda? In the event I choose Mafalda. My aesthetic sense prevailed, and that was –on hindsight- one of the gravest mistakes in my life.

Joan took that decision in her stride, producing a very stiff upper lip. She even became friendly with Mafalda, and once the three of us went to Florence to meet my family. Gradually, however, Joan’s presence at D’ami became intermittent and by 1963 she was all but gone. I think to settle in Rome. I regard this incident as one of the turning points in my life.

In 1963 I experienced my first business trips to the Frankfurt Book-fair and to the city of London. Only later did I realize that I had been a pioneer in this kind of thing.

The D’Ami brothers took me to Frankfurt in a Mercedes stuffed to capacity with folders full of original artwork. Incidentally, we had trouble in explaining to the Italian customs police what boxes marked as “mustelidae” actually contained.

Roy D’Ami took me to London in November, where I experienced lobster and caviar at the Cafe’ Royal, Piccadilly, and we went to a number of Christmas parties in Fleet Street, while staying at the Regent Hotel. I came into contact with a world which in time was to become as familiar as Candeli had been in the past.

Although I was now dealing with natural history, my favourite subject, at Studio Creazioni D’Ami I had had the opportunity of meeting the most illustrious cartoon-strip artists that Italy has ever produced, then practically all out of a job.

I frequently met, among many others, Gino D’Antonio, Antonio Canale and Dino Battaglia.

I shall never forget Dino Battaglia for his civilized manners, wit and intelligence, and Antonio Canale for his equally civilized Venetian sense of humour. Dino Battaglia’s work in comic strip design was no mere commercial work. It was complex ART.

I once catered for a famished and downtrodden Hugo Pratt, on the verge of creating his “Corto Maltese”, and with D'Ami, shared laughs and plates of spaghetti with many other artists who then, during the deepest crisis of comic-strip magazines, could no longer make ends meet.

Many of these artists and script-writers survived by occasionally joining us and drawing a Himalayan squirrel or a Siberian fox for our encyclopaedia, at 10.000 Lire a piece. Not bad fee for a couple of day’s work, considering that a dish of spaghetti at the local Trattoria da Mario then cost 500 Lire.

Danilo Forina, a scriptwriter, and a real character of a person, had been my hero when I used to read the popular boy's weekly "Il Vittorioso" in the late 1940s. Seeing him now half starved did not encourage me to become a cartoonist.

Hugo Pratt had “Corto Maltese” already in mind at the time, an idea that was to give him the fame and fortune, which he deserved.

My best friends at Studio D’Ami were Dino Busetto, a Friulan from Pordenone -who became, I now admit, the victim of numerous Tuscan practical jokes! - There was Giorgio Scarato, a well educated an talented Veronese, who read Jean-Paul Sartre and, I believe, identified too much with him. I shared a flat with him and gained a lot from our conversations. Giorgio, today a politician, was gradually drifting into “Maoism”; with him I occasionally took part in running rampaging riots through the centre of Milan. I never approved of such things though.

From 1962 to 1965 I worked with author Umberto Eco, then fresh out of University, after a successful thesis on St. Thomas Aquinas, and managing editor of Valentino Bompiani Editore. That was the first time I heard of St. Thomas Aquinas -I was bound to “hear” a lot more much later on...perhaps thanks to Eco.

The first job I did for Umberto Eco consisted of a series of pictorial historical maps.

It was through briefing sessions with the philosopher that I developed an interest in ancient history and archaeology.

I painted a series of six large paintings showing developments on the same site from prehistory to our days, for Umberto Eco’s three-volume history course. This was my first complex work; it was 1962. My knowledge of the natural sciences turned out handy when it came to painting scenes from the past.

The main task though was to produce a nature encyclopaedia called “La Natura e la Vita”, in three volumes (Bompiani 1966). Alberto Manzi, the author of my first book, was also the author of this three volume series, and it was he who had recommended me to Eco.

From this experience the great semiologist made no gain, neither did I, at least as far as semiology goes.

I was too unused to intellectual drawing-room jokes, especially when thrown at me with an affected squeaky voice garnished with a French “r”.

This work seemingly well beyond my capabilities, nevertheless gave me great satisfaction. The job was not devoid of complications and there were spells of serious aggravation -particularly from the financial point of view. Waiting for a cheque in the post was the order of the day for weeks on end.

I nevertheless felt fulfilled after the completion of each piece of artwork, and felt I had accomplished something that seemed unthinkable at the outset.

Eco, on his part, was too far removed from the peasant world to appreciate its philosophy or care for it.

At any rate, it was with this job that I obtained the security and the money that allowed me to return back to Florence in a kind of triumph, to marry, and eventually, to buy a Fiat car.

Eco’s witty chattering had transmitted to me an interest in history and archaeology, and I brought that too with me to Florence.

THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE…

It was a bit daunting to carry out this massive job single handedly, I was required to make all decisions on the scientific content of the illustrations, and research and design everything to my own liking.

Perhaps I became aware only at this time of the influence which Florentine art and architecture must have exercised on me as a child, simply by being there...and the awareness, which I had gained during my stay in Milan.

A visit to the Etruscan city of Sovana in August 1964, during my honeymoon, initiated a long love story between me and..... the Etruscans.

Whereas the studio environment in Milan was very exciting, stimulating, and interesting, (the best place to be for a career in the profession) I had missed the then green hills, the then good air, the fields and my cousins, the Montecchis, and generally the beauty of Florence.

The D’Ami experience was however beneficial to me, and probably to Studio Creazioni D’Ami and to a great number of otherwise unemployed and unemployable artists.

When my wife and I moved back to Florence illustrators Paolo Taglioli, Sergio Borella, and Aldo Marcuzzi soon followed us. All of us lived in the then remote village of Villamagna, an idyllic place in those days, and set up our ‘atelier’ among the peasants.

We did quite well, considering the total isolation (no Fax machines or telephones).

I illustrated a “Robinson Crusoe” on my own, and a “History of Medicine” with Sergio Borella, for Istituto Geografico De Agostini of Novara, under the direction of the writer and critic Ugo Dettore.

Ugo Dettore, once a great hope of Fascist literature, sometimes criticized me for drawing inspiration from Caravaggio! I used to reply to him "I’d rather copy Caravaggio than Walter Molino". All my friends agreed with me and did the same.

From 1964 to 1968 I was chief illustrator for the “Enciclopedia Medica De Agostini”, published first as a part work, and illustrated several volumes on science and history for De Agostini of Novara.

De Agostini’s Managing Editor Mario Nilo used to visit us regularly, and I often had to drive to Novara, Milan and Turin to communicate with the publisher's headquarters.

In 1967 I had re-established my own art studio at Bagno a Ripoli, and started taking in young Florentines as book illustrators. I still hosted the visiting artists from Milan, Venice and other places for long periods, as my studio was open to all –My father thought it was rather too open!

In October 1969 some of my artwork, which had been exhibited at the Bologna Book-fair in April, was sent to the International Exhibition of Book Illustration held in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia.

I took this opportunity to drive to Czechoslovakia and visit Prague, not so much for the sake of the Exhibition, but to see Prague after the Soviet intervention.

With colleague and friend Giorgio Masi, we visited Vienna, Bratislava, Brno and Prague. We then went on to Frankfurt in time to visit the International Book-fair.

The sight of Bratislava, Brno and Prague left us deeply depressed. We knew enough about Communist mindless stupidity but what we saw went well beyond our expectations.

It was to take decades before our friends at home realized the same.... That unbelievable regime existed and thrived by virtue of the prestige that it carried among the “intellectuals” and the “leisure class” in the West, it had no credibility at home.

“THE INVISIBLE ART”

It was in the early sixties, after settling down with my girlfriend and future wife, that I really discovered and began to appreciate music.

From American pop songs and early rock, my mentor Roy D’Ami soon led me to the appreciation of American musicals, such as Porgy and Bess, and Oklahoma. D’Ami would come into the studio every morning well groomed, perhaps wearing tweed jacket and exceedingly shiny British maroon shoes. He would irritatingly start tapping his foot and whistling while searching for artist’s references. This led to the acquisition of a record player for the studio, and to the listening of real music.

Step by step we went from Hendel to Bach to Beethoven to the Russian ‘impressionists’ and Tchaikowski. We painted and listened to D’Ami’s favourites, as such were the pieces we listened to.

I had been once or twice taken to Teatro Verdi in Florence by my parents in my early youth, and remember being struck speechless by the glowing stage and the sound of live music.

I had listened to “boogie woogey”, “fox trot” and “mazurque” at Candeli from around 1948.

I had also seen a fully-fledged performance of the “Barber of Seville” on the Candeli stage, perhaps in 1952. I had seen Norma and Aida at the cinema in the late fifties, but I don’t think I had ever really heard the sound of classical music till I was about 18, and even then very little.

The great majority generally avoided classical music like the singing of the Sirens in those days. There was a Florentine dislike of Verdi which equalled their dislike of the Baroque in architecture and art. The peasants of Emilia, who appreciated operatic music and Verdi’s in particular, were regarded as “simpletons, who are easily impressed by pomposity and exaggeration.” The Florentines were naturally more receptive to their own Luigi Boccherini.

Still, having said that, one might stumble across the odd peasant who would sing entire operas by heart surrounded by dead, ignorant silence. Almost no one would know anything about any type of music, outside the traditional popular songs and ballroom music.

While in Milan I remember walking the streets at night with Beethoven’s 9^th symphony ringing in my head obsessively. Bach’s “toccata and fugue in re minor” became popular in about 1960, probably due to its use in a successful movie, but I found the piece rather disappointing and almost a let down. I much preferred any Hendel. We came to appreciate Strauss thanks to the film “2001 a Space Odyssey”. Mozart was not popular in those days. Toscanini’s interpretations of Mozart sounded much like Beethoven’s pieces, as the wrong instruments were employed. Until Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s times, baroque music was largely misinterpreted and rarely performed.

Vivaldi came into fashion in 1966, as did rediscovered Renaissance Italian and English music.

At Villamagna our house always resounded of Vivaldi (four seasons), Hendel (messiah), Beethoven (6^th symphony pastoral), Bach’s cantatas, Tchaikovski (piano concerto No 1 and 6^th symphony pathetique), alternatively we had “Porgy and Bess” sang by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.

My father was taught to play the trumpet at primary school. Before the War music was in fact taught at Candeli. Alas, the War brought about a dramatic change in the school curriculum. Practically the teaching of any form of art was discontinued, along with physical exercises.

The deterioration had been so bad that the village band that accompanied the religious processions during the summer Corpus Domini festival was rather pathetic to listen to. We used to laugh and blow raspberries to the bands that accompanied religious procession in the summer. These performances were brought to an end by road traffic during the late sixties.

I my times “serious” music did not rate as one of the prominent interests of the working classes.

I am still not too keen on Verdi, Donizetti or Leoncavallo; I cannot stand Pavarotti and generally dislike the sight of grossly overweight operatic singers, though I may like their voices. I particularly remember not liking Beniamino Gigli, especially because his potbelly detracted credibility from the love scenes he was involved in.

I liked Rossini, though, and anything earlier. I liked Puccini, of course, especially for his ante literam post-modernism. And finally I confess having lived through Sir Michael Tippett’s “Priamus”, but only because I could no bring myself to walking out of the theatre…

I love Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, but the belated “discovery” of Henry Purcell has almost changed my attitude to music.

In Malta I bought 2000 old records (all 78s), which constitute a complete public library of Classical music of the late 1940s. They belonged to a local English Radio Company. This is a treasure trove which I cherish more than any finding of Etruscan remains.

“BUILDING A SOCIAL CONSCIENCE”

From 1964, I started studying Latin, the Classics and Classical Archaeology, and once back in Tuscany, I took active part in a somewhat vague programme of field research in the Province of Florence, under the auspices of the “Soprintendenza Archeologica della Toscana” (Archaeology Department for Tuscany).

I also contributed to the creation of the civic library at Bagno a Ripoli, which was to become the first and the model of all public libraries of the Florentine district for years to come.

My contribution to the catalogue consisted mostly in a fight to have less of Marx, Engels and Lenin and more of Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens and Joseph Conrad.

All this against strong opposition from people who today unashamedly describe themselves as “liberal-democrats”, and no longer work for the Soviet KGB only because it doesn’t exist any more.

I led groups of friends to the discovery of many Etruscan remains. We located the ruins of the Etruscan city of Artimino, the archaic settlement of Castellina in Chianti, the sanctuary of Poggio di Firenze, the Roman villas of Antella and Vicelli. We also located the first ‘station’ on the Roman Via Cassia from Florence to Rome, among numerous other relics, all hitherto unknown to the archaeologists.

Some of my archaeological ‘discoveries’ feature in the official academic publications of those times, such as the distinguished journal “Studi Etruschi”. I became one of the most promising among the free-lance archaeologists and environmentalists, operating at the edges of the academic world in Tuscany.

In those days, however, there were many people who involved themselves in such philanthropic activities, mostly on account of a sense of social responsibility, and not just for money or prestige. Although, admittedly, a minority did it with a political career in mind. But that was not my case.

Today people there -and alas, elsewhere too - pride themselves in being stupid and careless.

Gloria, my first child, was born in May 1968 in Florence while we were still living in Villamagna.

It was the birth of our first child which caused us to move back to Bagno a Ripoli, but we did not change our life-style. More than ever we spent all our spare time "in the wild”, looking for Etruscan ruins.

The events of 1968 in Italy prompted a decision which I feel should have taken years earlier, perhaps in 1963.

In Tuscany as whole, and in Bagno a Ripoli in particular, 98% of the population were active supporters of the Soviet Union and of Viet-nam, active enemies of Anglo-American politics, and –by contrast- the staunchest followers of the American way of life outside the USA.

Today Bagno a Ripoli is a Hedonist’s Paradise, I had almost predicted it, and I am glad I don’t have to be there now...

WHAT DOES MAKE ONE GO AWAY?

The Fascist/Catholic hatred for Anglo-American culture and civilization had remained intact among those supporters of Mussolini who had turned communists starting from the afternoon of September the 8^th, 1943.

What had happened to my old sound minded liberal/socialist agnostic peasants? Well they had become easy prey to communist/catholic propaganda upon leaving the land during the 1950s-60s. The culture to which I belonged, that had given me my philosophy of life, was dead. That’s what had happened. It was pathetic to see former agnostic, liberal-minded peasants turning into Gnostic communist/catholic civil servants, office cleaners, street sweepers, factory workers, free-lance plumbers, and decorators or upholsterers.

Unknowingly these representative of a highly privileged culture, had become the “subaltern class” envisaged by all demagogues.

Having been brought up in the spirit of enlightened anticlerical liberal-socialism of the Risorgimento, I believed in Jewish genius, in the American army, in American scientific research, and British efficiency and sense of humour, as the best safeguards against a looming new Dark Age.

In 1957 I wrote in my notebook that Stalinism and Maoism, accompanied by blind and irrational incipient American ‘consumerism’ might imminently bring about a new Dark Age. That’s what I thought whilst having no time for anti-American, Third World intellectualism, which was then spreading around me like the plague.

As an anarch - in the sense expressed by Ernst Junger- I was counting on the American Army to keep the Red Army at bay and on British sense of humour to keep the followers of Mussolini Hitler and Stalin out of Western culture. I regarded Western culture as the product of Greek Philosopy, Florentine Renaissance, French Enlightenment, and Anglo-Saxon Empiricism.

Ever since my father introduced me to liberal-socialism and to a way of reasoning close to that of George Orwell and of Karl Popper, I had been repeatedly told that the worst enemies of socialism were the socialists themselves.

I was aware of the impossibility of dissuading the peasants from leaving the land, and forsaking an ancient life-style, but I would have liked them to understand that our ‘wisdom’ and dignity should not be thrown away together with the plough, the spade and the ox-cart. We should not become the fodder of leisure class intellectuals.

It is now easy to say, in the light of experience, that mine was a sound position. It was very difficult in those days.

I didn’t change my “world view” when I first became a free-lance educator. I didn’t change it when I went to Milan, and I didn’t have to change my mind, my philosophy and my views entirely, once again, the day after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

All my dialectical opponents, and practically all the Italians I knew -including certain famous intellectuals, and millions of lesser, or petty demagogues- did change their philosophy and their views entirely in 1989, when they ‘lost’ the Soviet Union, and along with it, the much worshipped, preposterous, German Democratic Republic.

Today, Italy has put into a position of power exactly those short-sighted and opportunistic hypocrites who have been making stupid political assessments for the best part of 30 years -some for the past 50 years-.

The classical representatives of the Italian “Leisure Class”, the “conspicuous consumers”, who admired and worshipped Mao, Fidel Castro, Ceausescu, and Kim Il Sun, the IRA, hey now claim to be “liberal-democrats”, believers in Christ and in the Pope his Vicar. They only have the stomach to go on the media and show their faces because they are dealing with a society which is more tolerant that the one they would have wanted.

In 1970, I matured the idea of leaving Italy and the propagandists of the USSR for good, and of establishing myself my wife and daughter in Britain.

This was not a move dictated by economic necessity. It was a decision to go into self-exile, as I was doing extremely well in Italy with my work as a book designer and illustrator.

I simply believed that there was no reason for me to stay in Italy and keep complaining about Italian politics and social attitudes. The thing to do was to go where more like-minded people may be found: perhaps to England.

My parents, though saddened by my decision, agreed with my motives and did not try to discourage me, on the contrary. I remember my father saying: “Nature has given you everything, you are wasted here in such a country as this.” I had never heard my father praising me before; “Nature has given you everything” came out of the blue to me. Obviously Italy was a country unfit for me, in my father’s view.

At the close of 1970, with the blessing of my parents, I moved to England and established myself as a free-lance illustrator in Brighton. My parents missed me but were glad I had decided to leave.

My father used to say “On the morning of September the 9th, 1943, I was unable to find a single person who would admit ever having supported Mussolini. Should the Soviet Union fall, you will find no one here who would admit ever having supported it”.

No other Italian intellectual had as a clear vision of the character of Italy and of the Italian mentality as my father. As far as I can see, from all my readings and studies, I regard my father as by far the greatest political thinker Italy has had in the 20th century. I say this in all seriousness.

I was not mistaken. I had only been to England once, in 1963, when I was 24 and I liked what I saw, or rather, I was not surprised one way or the other by what I saw. England was as I expected. Of course I did not expect the English nation to eat dishes of pasta, use olive oil on their lettuce, or consume ‘cappuccino and brioche’ at the corner bar at breakfast (of course they all do this now).

I didn’t expect the weather to be good either. I never expected months of warm sunshine in summer. Neither I expect people to like me, as I was aware of being a “southerner” and an immigrant in the eyes of the British.

Since I did not expect any of these things, England pleasantly impressed me. Actually I was enthusiastic about it from the first day.

In England I found winter days exceedingly mild. Blossoming cherry trees and rose bushes in November, pleasantly cool summers, clean pavements in good repair, lack of architectural barriers, capable and conscientious car drivers. A neat and well-groomed countryside.

I discovered a lovely and cozy domestic architecture, good schools, good libraries, excellent higher education institutions, fantastic museums, efficient and active archaeological societies, etc., etc. Once in England, I studied English by reading archaeology and anthropology books, instead of wasting time at English classes, and by listening to the BBC World Service on radio every night, hours on end.

Because of this effort I acquired a good English accent, at least one that did not sound like a comic act.

I remember learning by heart the works of Gordon Childe and Stuart Piggott, and was well -informed about international affairs too. I read little fiction, but this was only because I felt my time was short.

I adapted to the new environment with the greatest ease; it was like letting a caged ferret out into the wild.

The day after my arrival I met the great nature artists Barry Driscoll and Barry Evans, who much admired my drawings of animals. They took me to Artist’s Partner, then the most important illustrator’s agency in London, and I got on their list.

At Artist Partners I also met Italian artist Gino D’Achille, whom I had previously met at Studio D’Ami back in '63. Gino had settled in London in 1967 and had made a name for himself.

I would never compare my work with Gino’s, primarily because my work is for me a vehicle, whereas his is an end in itself.

Two days after my arrival in England I found myself at a party at the American Ambassador’s house in Kensington, and on being asked to assess how genuine a bronze head he had just bought in Naples might be, I had to admit the head was a dud.

The third day I met Henry Williamson, the poet of Tarka the Otter, at the Savage Club, The poet gave me a wrapping around the knuckles about bird-shooting in Italy, while we were enjoying a delicious roast pheasant... shot pheasant.

On the fourth day I was in Soho at the York Minster, better known as the French Pub, meeting Penguin Books designer Germano Facetti, then the top designer in the London publishing world.

I walked out of that meeting with clearer ideas as to how to meet the right people and find the job for me. On the Saturday I hired a car and went to Wiltshire to see a bit of British prehistory live.

My letters home were not just over-enthusiastic; they were the letters of an over-excited, overwhelmed happy person, with a lot of hopes, expectations, and energy to fulfil them.

Both myself the illustrator and myself the archaeologist were always hard at work and wasted no time.

It was normal for me to sleep no more than four hours per night. Until my family reached me, in early 1971, I lodged in a loft in Florence Road, Brighton, a guest of book illustrator Bob Tyndall who very generously and without reward helped me in my first steps.

In spring 1971 I presented the results of my archaeological field research in Tuscany to Prof. Donald Strong of the Institute of Archaeology, University College, London, and became a member of the “Society for Roman Studies”, and was thus able to use the vast library there.

I very intensively studied Archaeology and Cultural and Economic Anthropology on English textbooks under the guidance of British academics with whom I frequent ly corresponded. In writing these letters I received much help from our neighbours, John and Jacqueline Morley, who were later to become the grandparents of my three boys.

My research on the origins of settlement communications and land transport put me in touch with distinguished scholars such as Prof. Stuart Piggott and Prof. Glyn Daniel.

In the same year I started my own field research campaign on Peasant Culture in Central Italy. All our holidays in Italy were spent interviewing the last remaining peasants and surveying their tools and implements. We used to go to Italy once or twice a year for long stays.

I was interested in analysing the roots of a paradoxical culture where the peasants are the sophisticated sector of society and the intellectuals the simpletons.

I was also developing a method for a philological study of functional design among the peasants, I felt that a method akin to that adopted in linguistic studies might be suitable.

I developed the notion that the peasants themselves, not aware of their cultural advantages, lured by publicity and demagogy, had left the land -and their near equal status with their masters as crop-sharers- to join factories, becoming the fodder of demagogues.

For the demagogues it was more convenient to have a populace as docile and as tame as possible, for their own political ends. An intellectual or a demagogue cannot cope with a listener who first demands that he drop his effeminate manners, his squeaky voice and his French “r”, and then speak.

With my research colleague Silvano Guerrini we achieved great popularity in the Italian press from 1975 onwards, and we published many pamphlets and papers.

My house in Brighton had now become a centre for research in Tuscan peasant culture. Brighton itself offered a conducive atmosphere for studying and working. Alas I soon had to leave to move to a London suburb. I had realised that it would be more convenient both for my work and for my studies to be in there.

In my own view I was an educator, an illustrator in the broadest sense; my duty towards society and social justice came before career and money. I would be a good illustrator, and eventually a good author, only if I learned and did the right things.

There was only one way of finding out what the “right things” might be, that was to go and find out.

In 1972, Peter Kindersley invited me to join Mitchell Beazley Publishing Ltd. of London, as a resident artist and creator of books, a position I held until the death of John Beazley in 1974.

There (1971-1974) I managed the production of the Medicine and Biology sections of the international encyclopaedia entitled “The Joy of Knowledge” (Mitchell Beazley Ltd. 1975)

In the same period I produced 12 large paintings of ‘Prehistoric Man’. These were published in the same encyclopaedia and also appeared in numerous other publications throughout the world. In 1972, I was elected a fellow of the “Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland”, on account of the original fieldwork carried out on peasant culture in Italy.

Meanwhile old mates Dino Busetto and Sergio Borella -the accompanied by his wife and children- joined me in London to work at Mitchell Beazley. They amazed everyone with their 'virtuoso' ability as illustrators. The great Florentine illustrator and fine artist Ugo Fontana came to work at MB for week or two. I remember the editors and the designers at Mitchell Beazley staring at my friends’ work in wonder.

Claudia, my second child, was born in "happy" April 1973 in London. That was our happiest time in England.

In March 1974, in the presence of Prof. John Evans and Dr. John Nandris, I gave my first public lecture in English to postgraduate students of the Institute of Archaeology, University College, of London. The subject was “Some Patterns of Settlement and Communications in Ancient Etruria”, which illustrated the results of my own field research in Tuscany.

In the same year I was invited to join the newly established book-packaging company called Dorling Kindersley Ltd., but I preferred to set myself up again as a free-lance book creator and illustrator.

I needed time for my academic research -and for my family- and I would not have had any - and perhaps taken to the bottle like most- had I joined the London publishing world again and become a permanent commuter. There might have been more money in that life-style, but I have seen a great deal of misery coming into the bargain with the money.

From 1974 to 1980 I conceived, designed and illustrated a number of books for Dorling Kindersley Ltd., Eurobook (Peter Lowe) Ltd. and Macdonald Educational Ltd. of London.

From 1975 I produced a series of paintings for “The Evolution of Early Man” by Prof. Bernard Wood, (Peter Lowe 1975). This work had me recognised as a specialist in this field by many palaeo-anthropologists throughout the world.

My painting of Neanderthal Man has been the most requested piece of artwork I have ever done

Copies of my paintings are still or have been on show in public and university museums, in England, USA, Wales, Kenya, Hong Kong, etc.

GODS, HEROES… AND MONSTERS

…"Punto non vo' che ti gravi,

ch'e' pur convien ch'io ti rimondi e lavi,

e farotti piú bianco che la neve;”…

(Folgore da San Gimignano, Umilta’)

In 1976, after having developed a form of worship for Robert Graves, I created and illustrated “Gods, Men and Monsters from the Greek Myths” upon the request of Eurobook Ltd.

This book was published in numerous editions, and it seems to have sold millions of copies.

The work, written after my illustrations by an excellent writer, Michael Gibson (whom I have never had the pleasure of meeting), is still in print and selling better than ever.

After dealing with Greek myths, I illustrated a book on Norse Myths, again extremely well written by the late Brian Branston. This book was also and still is a success.

When Eurobook Ltd. approached me and again asked me to illustrate a book, I asked for a fair share of royalties, as it was now clear that my illustrations were instrumental in the extraordinary success of the small publishing company. That was the last time I saw Eurobook Ltd. or heard about it.

I never knew whether to put this down as a case of masochism or sheer stupidity.

At the beginning of 1978 a very grave tragedy struck. My eldest daughter, Gloria, not yet ten, was run over and killed by a car. As my grandfather before me, I was to experience the unbearable. The hardest trial for a parent, or for anyone, is to experience the tragic death of his child and go through decades and decades of relentless sorrow.

I had already decided not ever to own a car again, and this event made my decision final.

Agreeing with historian A. J. P. Taylor, I kept repeating to myself and to those near me that “the internal combustion engine had been the most disastrous invention in the history of mankind”. The car enables people to commit murder and go unpunished. It kills more people than any single disease, and no one realizes or cares. The processes involved in the production of cars and of the fuels it requires pollute the environment in a dramatic and irreparable way. The car, the laws that regulate its use, both the written and the unwritten ones, along with the whole myth of the car as a status symbol, affect the majority of the population in a most disruptive way, thus undermining the very roots of civilization.

I believe this, even if I seem to be only person who does anything about it without hypocrisy.

In the same year, 1978, a specialized graphic art’s magazine “The Penrose Annual” published an extensive biographical feature on my life and work. A neighbour, the late Richard Souper, who has since become a good friend, wrote this article. At the same time I had ITV and BBC interviews on radio and TV. Numerous reviews and features concerning my work and me appeared in the national press in Britain and in the USA. I was invited to give numerous lectures and to take part in academic workshops etc.

Such success, never yearned for, came to me unexpectedly, together with a harsh reminder of our feeble nature and precariousness on this earth. Success did not interest me and I did not take any notice of it. When Harrods the mega-store of London assigned the best shop window to and exhibition of my illustrations from “Gods Men and Monsters from the Greek Myths”, I did not care to go and see it.

The way I was brought up provided the psychological fitness required for my survival after such tragedy. Having spent the earliest years of my life as a witness to frequent violent or natural deaths, I grew aware of the precariousness of our lives. I never developed the illusion that a state of happiness might be achieved by a thinking person, or that money could be taken into ones own grave at death…

I decided with greater determination than ever to follow my own inclinations and judgements absolutely and totally, and stick without compromise to the lessons of my own experience and of my own culture -of which, I might add, I was now the sole representative.

Indeed, looking around me, I seem to be the last survivor of a dead culture, and often feel the whole weight and the sadness of such responsibility.

More than ever I went on calling people and things with their own names, as I relentlessly do.

Had I been brought up differently I might have been able to use my abilities in a conventional way, and made money.

It was my father who made me realize that I had had no masters in all the things I was doing and which made me successful and admired. He said that all I ever learned I had done the hard way, often against tutors who tried to make life difficult for me instead of teaching me. I wouldn’t have made such a reflection by myself…

My many houses and studios –of Florence, of Brighton, of London, etc.- have always been open to all and never hid any secrets. What I know or have known is spread all over the place, and so are many of my books and possessions.

I have never possessed anything I haven’t shared, be these skills or knowledge. I have never asked for money to any of the numerous people I have trained and introduced to their career at my own expense, never have I expected gratitude from anyone.

THE TYRREHNIAN WAY

At this time I met writer and traveller John Hillaby, himself the victim of a recent tragedy, and went off with him, one bright May day, to walk from Bologna to Rome. That walk cured both a broken cartilage in my left knee, and my spirit.

In 1968, I discovered, through an enormous amount of field experience, that a ridge-way leading from Bologna to Rome, might be a very ancient route of the early populations of Italy.

Indeed this route might be responsible for Rome, Florence and Bologna to be located where they are. The route is in my opinion the most splendid and exhilarating footpath in the world; through woods, fields and meadows, always at a high altitude, it takes an experienced walker from Bologna to Rome in eight days. I called the ridge-way “Tyrrhenian Way”, and still hope it will be sign-posted and opened to the public in its entirety one day.

The exploration of the entire course of the Tyrrhenian Way proved very successful: there is indeed an ancient route -and it’s still largely there - that connects the Po Valley with Rome, and it was a greatly fulfilling experience to rediscover it.

The walk and various other surveys lasting well into the 1980s proved to my own satisfaction that my theory was right, and most researchers now agree that this ridge-way might well be the oldest road in Italy.

In June 1982, whilst passing by La Foce, the farm and residence of famous historian Iris Origo situated on the ridge-way, in the company of fellow walker Francesco Papafava, I had the good fortune of meeting the great woman, an old friend of Francesco’s father, homself once a distinguished historian.

I had very carefully read “The Merchant of Prato”, Iris Origo’s best known work, years earlier, and cherished the idea of turning it into an illustrated children’s edition. I thought this would be a unique chance to ask permission to the great lady.

Iris Origo, now well into her eighties, greeted us showing great interest in our undertaking and asked many questions about the ridge-way. I asked her permission to steal from her text material for a children’s version of “The Merchant of Prato”, and she warmly granted it.

In April 1986, I once again was a guest of Iris Origo, this time while I was accompanying Charles the Prince of Wales on his first tour of Tuscany. We had lunch with the great lady and I presented her with a copy of my “Merchant of Prato” which I had renamed “A Florentine Merchant”. Iris Origo was pleased, and I more than her.

The experience of walking the entire Tyrrhenian Way, and the friendship established with John Hillaby, put ideas into my mind: Wouldn’t it be exciting, as well as useful, to write cultural travel guides? Hillaby had been a Manchester Guardian journalist and a nature correspondent of the New York Times and of the New Scientist, so he was articulate and able to write. I had an uphill struggle before me, far harder than the Tyrrhenian Way.

John Hillaby was a less genuine walker than I had anticipated – he knew how to advertise himself and wrote his books for money – Often his ruck sack would be filled with old newsprint before facing the photographer. Nevertheless John was a great inspiration, and the idea of writing about ‘my roads’ stuck in my mind.

In 1979 my third daughter, Gloria Lisa Laura was born in Brighton. I decided that my answer to “death” was to be “life”…

In 1980, Philippa Stewart, then managing editor of Macdonald Educational invited me to create, as the author, a series of books about archaeology and history.

When Philippa asked me to write my own books I was surprised and argued that I was not a native English speaker, and that my English was poor. Her answer to that was: “Let the publisher judge your English”.

From that time to 1984, I wrote and illustrated the series known as “History of Every-day Things”, in 4 volumes. I owe to Jacqueline Morley much of the editing of these works. Jacqueline owes to me having become a writer… and, in the long run, the grandmother of my three boys.

This book series was followed in 1985 by another: “The Every-day Life of…” where the title “A Florentine Merchant” featured.

The “History of Every-day Things”, remain my best; it has been published in several editions, and is still in print. A new paperback edition appeared in New York in September 1998.

TOWER OF ATHENS

That from this Castalian hollow

I have never felt that physical contact with the subjects of my thoughts and inspirations would be necessary. I know I am right, as actual physical contact may spoil the dream. I know I am right in this. I have often walked by the Louvre but I have never felt the urge to going in.

Although I would not recommend others to do the same, I feel this way, and I know I am right. My walking around inside the Louvre, in the midst of a crowd of tourists, would add nothing positive to my feelings or to my perception. It is therefore unnecessary.

I might have never gone to Greece had I not met a poet, a distinguished retired British civil servant, resident in Athens. This gentleman belonged to a family boasting generations of civil servants for centuries serving abroad for the Empire. I am not a tourist or a member of the leisure class and therefore I would not go to Greece unless there was a “practical reason” for doing so.

Mr. Christotopher Tower of Weald Hall looked for me after coming across “Gods Men and Monsters from the Greek Myths”in a bookshop in Athens. He eventually traced me through his publishers Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Over the years I was to produce and illustrate four of his poetry books. One of them, “Chanson de l’Ouest”, was a prediction of the fall of the Soviet Empire.

I illustrated Christopher Tower’s books because I liked the poet more than his poetry, and also because I liked the opportunity of often going to Greece without being a “tourist” –I have never gone anywhere as a tourist and I never will.

He was an Etonian and I was a Candelese. An amazing similarity of attitude views and habits of mind united us. Should anybody ask why I would reply that the reason is that a “mezzadro” is brought up with the idea of being on equal terms with a “padrone”. In any case, anywhere, and I have proof to my own satisfaction that to think the opposite would be a great misconception.

At my friend's grand penthouse at the foothill of Mount Lycabettus –formerly the premises of the Canadian Embassy- I spent many relaxing days, enjoying stimulating conversations while admiring splendid pictures, furniture, books, all relics of a glorious era and of a defunct empire. Agatha Christie, Lawrence Durrell, Patrick Lee Fermore, Robert Liddell, and all the archaeologists of the British School at Athens had been guests there at one time or another, and I met some of them.

As Peter Fleming once wrote in his “Return to Tartary”, The trouble about journeys nowadays is that they are easy to make but difficult to justify”. I had good justifications for going to Greece.

With Pausanias in my pocket, I combed Argolis, and the rest of the eastern Peloponnese, learning a great deal about the country and its myths, both ancient and modern.

In 1985, I was elected a member of the “Institute of Archaeology of London” on the request of Dr. John Nandris an expert in pastoralism and Eastern European Neolithic, a lecturer at the same institute for many years.

In the same year Dorling Kindersley again opened their doors to me, and again I paid a deaf ear, but accepted to help Peter create a book series for children entitled “Windows on the World”.

It was in 1985 that I was again asked to create a series of popular history books for children, by Macdonald Educational Ltd. as I mentioned above.

The new series, in 16 volumes, designed in collaboration with Ted McCausland, was called “The Every-day Life of...”. This was also published in numerous editions, still available in the USA and in other countries such as Spain, Italy and France. The American editions of “History of Every-day Things” and “A History of Every-day Life” have been adopted in the curricula of “Social Sciences Studies” by secondary schools in some states in the USA, and in several European countries, in the Peter Bedrick editions.

At this time, stimulated by the works of Sir Mortimer Wheeler, and by research on the presence of Tartar slaves in medieval Florentine households, I became interested in discovering the extent of the contribution made by the nomad horsemen of Eurasia to our medieval European civilization.

This in my view was a fundamental theme in the cultural history of Europe, much overlooked by medieval historians and archaeologists to this day.

Various hints suggested then -and much more now- that scholars had unduly disregarded such a contribution.

The cause of this neglect is that the Arian myth of 19^th century German anthropologists, based on such realization, had a strong influence in building Hitler’s ideology, but it was far from being a “Nazi invention”.

Race has nothing to do with the matter, as races have convincingly been proven not to exist. The issue is ‘culture’, and European culture cannot be understood without exploring its place of origin. The institutional roots of medieval Europe are to be found in Asia, not in Europe itself. Europe is not a continent but a fringe of Asia, and without studying Asia one cannot understand its western fringe.

I had long perceived a link stretching from Devenish, (White Island, Ireland) to Dunhuang (Xinjiang, China). There is no relevant physical barrier from the Atlantic to the Baikal Sea and this vast tract of continent must be studied as a unit and not in parts. But more about this later.

Meanwhile in my “The Every-day Life of....” with the contribution of numerous keen editors, I told of the lives of Irish pilgrims travelling throughout Europe, carrying around the light –or the darkness, depending on views- of Christianity and Latinity. I told of the lives of Tartar slaves bringing pasta to the tables of medieval Florentine traders. All these largely unheard themes I brought into the limelight of international educational publishing.

If the Buddhist monks of Dunhuang and Turpan had ultimately brought monasticism to Ireland, Uighur slaves from the Taklamakan desert had ultimately brought tortellini to the Italian table. But, of course there were more than just mere curiosities to be discovered along those untrodden paths of history. Going to Central Asia ‘to take a look’ had become almost an obsession for me.

The idea was maturing in my own mind that Europe did not stop at the Urals. It went much further, even beyond Baikal. The traditional, conventional boundary between Asia and Europe only exists in people’s minds and in atlases.

What had been going on in those vast expanses of grassland, forests and mountains had a great deal to tell the archaeologist and the historian concerning the formation of modern Europe.

Were we the children of the horsemen of the steppes or the offspring of Greece and Rome?

The horsemen were, in my view, the carriers of the ‘progressive’ spirit of the modern age. The Greeks and the Romans belonged instead to the Mediterranean ‘static’ or settled civilizations, those civilizations that - like the Indian and the Chinese in Asia- look back at a past Golden Age rather than forward to a glorious Utopia.

There is astounding amount of overlooked evidence that backs this notion, and one can only conclude that such material has been ignored because of prejudice and convention.

By now I had several papers to my credit published by “Archeologia Medievale” Italy (1975 and 1976); “Ethologia Europaea” Germany (1981); “Mondo Archeologico” Italy (1975, 1976, 1977); “The Museum Ethnographer’s Group Bulletin” England (1978); “Proceedings of the Committee for the Ethnological Atlas of Europe and Neighbouring Countries” England (1979) and several others.

I was asked to speak about my own field research in Archaeology and Anthropology, at the Institute of Archaeology of London, the North West London Polytechnic, Brighton Polytechnic, the Ulster Folk Museum, the Lincoln Polytechnic, the Welsh Folk Museum, St. Fagans, and at several other venues. There I had numerous opportunities to test my ideas against all kinds of authoritative objections.

In 1985, I identified and explored in full, the route of Archbishop Sigeric from Canterbury to Rome (AD 990), known as “Via Francigena”. I charted the route, and published a guidebook and several articles about it (Giunti 1990). I was the first modern researcher to check this now popular route on the field. The Via Francigena is the second ancient route to be included among the most important historical itineraries of Europe by the European Commission.

In April 1986 I was asked to be the official guide to HRH Prince Charles on his first visit to Tuscany. This invitation came both on account of my knowledge of Tuscany and of my command of the English language.

In the same year a London publisher invited me to write a Cultural Guide to the Alps.

I walked along all the main alpine passes, and drove or walked, from Arles to Saltzburg, taking thousands of photographs. George Philip of London published “Ancient Pathways of the Alps” in 1987. The book was not appreciated as was expected by the public, but it was much praised by all those whose opinions mattered to me, and in this respect it was a great success.

FORWARD TO THE PAST

“Hic ego nec metas rerum, nec tempora pono”

Harassed by the VAT people, and by other bureaucratic trivialities, I decided in 1987, to leave England, and indeed I left.

I left my studio, my work, my clients and contacts to my young collaborator David Salariya. After I left, David copied all the Every-day Life titles in a new series of his own, and published it behind my back. Unaware of the theft, I was at the same time helping him to get good contracts with my own Italian publisher, Giunti. David’s successful career had such brilliant start.

Intending to remain in Italy only for a short period, I arrived just in time to see my father’s political forecasts come true almost exactly on the day of his death, and of the death of my mother. I refer to predictions concerning the likely attitudes of the Italian Communists and Catholics if confronted with the fall of Communism.

Back in Florence, the publishers Giunti Gruppo Editoriale offered me the position of ‘Creative Consultant’, a post I held for three years. For my father and mother this was the closing of the circle, and they serenely went away, the first in August, the second in November 1987.

In February 1988 I visited Egypt with Emily Morley, my new partner, and journeyed 3.000 miles along the Nile, from Cairo to Abu Simbel. Together we obtained an extensive photographic record, which in time would lead to the production of four books and a best-selling CD-ROM.

In Egypt we discovered nothing new and broke no record, but could now write with more confidence about it.

The main book which resulted from this experience “A Traveller’s Guide to the Nile”, written in English, was only published in Italy and in the Netherlands.

The Department of Egyptian Antiquities of the British Museum checked my script giving its approval. The American University of Cairo regarded the book the best guide of its kind to date.

Kenneth Enrico, my first son, was born on May the 6th, 1989 at Bagno a Ripoli, in the same hospital where my father died just over one year earlier.

Curiously enough the hospital was built during the 1960s next to the abattoir where we lived for a time.

In November 1989 Emily, Kenneth and I explored in full, and photographically recorded in detail, the Appian Way in its entirety, from Rome to Brindisi, and its variant, the “Via Traiana Nova”, from Brindisi to Benevento.

I turned out to be the first modern researcher to carry out such fieldwork since the 18th century. A Dutch antiquarian had walked the Appian Way before me but that was in 1777.

I stress such records, which in themselves may seem trivial, only to emphasize the shameful fact that most Italian researchers and writers of matters concerning roads, itineraries, pilgrim’s ways and the likes, may boast an abundance of knowledge, but have hardly ever walked one mile of the road they describe.

I may boast on a number of issues, but have written of no road that I haven’t walked in all its length.

Of course it is not the walking along a Roman road that makes one an expert, but let me say that writing about a road that one has never seen can only make an expert look like a fool.

FLORENCE, THEIR FLORENCE

"The mistakes of doctors are covered by earth, those of the rich by money"

(Old Proverb of Tuscany)

In 1990 the Belgian publisher Casterman (Paris office) invited me to write and illustrate with my own photographs a “Cultural Guide to the River Loire”.

With my daughter Claudia I travelled, in various ways, the entire length of the great French river, and brought home 2,000 colour slides.

The book, which I wrote, was well reviewed in the French press and was published in various editions.

In 1990 Giunti created a publishing company called “Giovanni Caselli Edizioni Internazionali” in Florence. This organization helped to renew Giunti’s publishing style, while creating and producing no less than 60 successful books for the international market.

The most successful of these works was “La Vetrina delle Civilta” (The Showcase of Civilizations), Giunti, Florence 1989-1993, a secondary school history course, now translated in numerous languages (I am still waiting to hear how many!).

At the same time, many young Italians were being trained in my studio in Florence, again at my own expenses, as illustrators, editors and designers.

To no benefit to myself whatsoever, I put all these in touch with all my British and French publishers, who kept them busy for years.

While working in Florence we lived in the hills, where we could afford to rent houses large enough to take in my library of 10.000 volumes and the picture reference library, which had followed me back from England.

Today several studios in Florence produce illustrated educational material for the national and international market. This new industry exists thanks to the great talents that Florence produces or attracts, but also to the time and the money, the sweat and tears I have personally spent to build it.

This industry that brings considerable financial benefits to the city’s revenue, also brings considerable wealth to all those who contributed to drive me out of Florence.

Yet, I was lucky, I got away. Some were not so lucky and had to succumb to the hyenas and the jackals that exist in my home-town alongside the many talents, and that ruthlessly exploit them.

Florence, once a great metropolis, is today a small provincial city, run by highly talented self-deceivers, swindlers, shopkeepers and “salottieri”.

JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE

THE EARTH

In April 1990 a telephone call from my friend and most distinguished scholar, Prof. Eugenio Turri, a geographer, brought forth the opportunity I had been awaiting for years.

I was invited to join what in his words was to be ‘the last great voyage of discovery of our times’: A journey along the Southern Silk Road, along the ‘forbidden route’ from Urumqi to Kashgar and Tashkurgan, in China.

We would have been the first Westerners to make the journey, after Peter Fleming and Kini Maillart in 1936. This is what I was told. Be that as it may, I did not hesitate in joining the expedition.

Professor Eugenio Turri, a Veronese geographer of repute, had been an author and editor of publisher De Agostini for decades when he came to Brighton to bring a great Atlas for me to design. Eugenio is the only man who is capable of writing beautiful poems about plate tectonics.

In August 1990, with a team of 15 geographers, medical doctors and their friends, Turri and I joined a Chinese team of geographers, Tungan guards and interpreters of the University of Xinjiang, Unrumqi, and embarked on several battered four-wheel drives heading due south.

This journey affected my life as no other experience had done before or has done since, and yet all I really seem to have discovered in the middle of the Taklamakan desert was the magic of the ruins of Miran and the goodness of Uighur...tortellini.

There appeared to be nothing else in Xinjiang, besides pasta and ruins of old cities buried in the sand, but others had already discovered most of this before me.

The ‘discovery’ that Uighur women flattened the dough with rolling pins on flat wooden boards, and then cut the thinned pastry into fettuccine, and lasagne, also producing tortellini and ravioli, carried enormous implications for the understanding of the history and the development of modern European culture.

Again some may argue here that they have always known tortellini came from China, but what did they do about it? Well, I myself have made a big meal of it.

This would be too long a story to tell here. Suffice to say that the ‘old wives’ story’ that Marco Polo brought pasta to Italy from his journey along this route, is only good for telling to children and to medieval historians, especially to those seated on easy chairs in universities throughout the Western World.

The experience of the journey along the Silk Road in China was to have a great influence on my thoughts for the following years. I would say that this journey was one of the most important experiences in my life, not so much for the time the journey itself lasted, but for the mental journey that it led to during the following decade.

I gave a paper to the Anthropology Society of the University of Malta about pastoralism and nomadism in 1997, where I made my discoveries public. This material became the subject matter of a course for first and second year students in Archaeology and Anthropology, at the University of Malta for the second semester of 2000.

I am satisfied that I have enough evidence to say that various waves of invasion by horsemen from northern Asia have shaped Western history in a way that has been completely overlooked by historians till the present day.

The discovery of 3000 years old buried bodies of blond Europeans in Siberia and China, the genetic analysis of their remains, together with tests and studies of the grave goods, accompanied by linguistic and ethnographic studies, lead to the rehabilitation of Asia as the homeland of the Indo-Europeans.

Facts lead to the conclusion that much of our modern civilization is the result of a blend between the classical civilizations of the Mediterranean and the culture of the horsemen of Central Asia, who ultimately belonged to the Iranian cultural sphere.

From kingship to monasticism, from chivalry to customary law, from Romanesque art to the Gothic, and to practically all aspects of our post Classical civilization, including the feudal system, the bill of exchange, spaghetti, tortellini and mozzarella, are ultimately due to those nomads. Horsemen who rode their palfreys across the Roman limes from the 5th century onwards, both to the north and to the south of the Mediterranean sea, changed the culture of Europe by blending eastern with western elements.

The roots, the seeds and the embryos of every one of such non-Classical aspects of our culture are to be found in Central Asia, within the Iranian sphere of influence.

It will be the task of the archaeologists, the anthropologists and the historians of the 3rd millennium to revolutionize old views born out of the preconceived ideas of mentally unfree men. The genesis of European civilization has yet to be written.

NOW, AT HARVEST TIME

Alas, I seemed to have forgotten I was in Italy, and that things of this kind are more easily said than done there, for more reasons than one.

To cut a long and painful story short, I had to face grave financial losses, total isolation and ostracism, and finally the sad decision to close the business and declare Italy unfit for honest and competent professionals.

I never intended my activity in Florence to be simply a money making business. It was rather intended to be a self-supporting training and production centre from which a new cultural industry might flourish, and from this point of view it was indeed a success.

If Italy has failed me; I certainly did not fail Italy. The facts are there for all to see.

I closed down “Giovanni Caselli Edizioni”, and went back to individual free-lance work, while leaving the whole business I had generated into the hands of what is best described as ‘my school’. To make the point clear, what I refer to as ‘my school’ is made of the people I had trained in Florence between 1987 and 1993 and the people they, themselves have trained since.

In 1993 De Agostini invited me to write the first complete “Guida alle antiche strade romane d’Italia” (Guide to the Ancient Roman Roads of Italy). This was the first such guide ever to appear in the Italian language. The work, which was a minor academic feat and a great commercial success, received excellent reviews in the national press.

The following year I wrote and illustrated, for the same De Agostini “Il Cammino delíUomo” (The Human Race) a book about human evolution.

I did this with the help of notes provided by students of Brian Fagan, a well-known British professor of archaeology and anthropology at a university in California, and also with a significant contribution from my Italian editor and dear friend, Renzo Rossi.

For Giunti I wrote and illustrated an “Atlante di mitologia classica” (Atlas of Classical Mythology), which is my own illustrated translation of Hesiod’s “Theogony”.

AWAY FROM IT ALL...?

“Heu! Fuge crudeles terras, fuge littus avarum!”

Towards the end of 1994, I decided to get out of what I believe to be a chronically sick country that “Mani Pulite” could not possibly cure, and I chose a suitable island in the sun, not too far from Italy, but indeed out of it.

Our choice turned out to be Malta, which is a small island but also an English speaking independent nation. In Malta there is an important university, and the educational system is akin to the British... and the postal service is efficient. Living in Malta is by no means like being hedonistically marooned on a Greek island.

In Malta I produced an illustrated edition of Bulfinch’s Mythology, for Macmillan of New York, and a series of archaeology books for secondary school level called “In search of...” for Franklin Watts of London. So far I have completed: In Search of Troy; In Search of Pompeii; In Search of Tutankhamun: In Search of Knossos.

In time I realized that in Malta foreigners are not really welcome. This is probably due to the historical fact that foreigners have never been of any help to the Maltese people.

In time I discovered that Malta is a country that conceals or denies its own cultural roots, and that wishes to be in Europe only to cover up if not obliterate its Semitic cultural background.

Having lived in Malta for the best part of seven years I have found it a suitable place of residence, and ideal for us and for the children, both on account of its climate and of the fact that it is safe.

This settlement, however, is always felt temporary, as our home is in Tuscany and eventually it is there that we will end up.

The day I will go back, however, will be a day when I will have grown blinder and deafer, and less sensitive to what I will see and hear.

If Malta has a synthetic and unsophisticated culture, and if aesthetic sense has no part in it, it is nevertheless a ‘harmless’ country, as crime is of a petty nature, and laws are not strictly enforced.

Whereas Italians –as they say- are wonderful people, they are clearly unable to give themselves good leaders or good governments.

Bad governments and bad leaders are an explanation for the reasons why it is impossible to understand most Italian laws. Italian laws seem to be designed to make life unnecessarily complicated. On the other hand Italians are among all Europeans the worst soldiers, and the best designers. They are the most gifted of all peoples for aesthetic perception, and their culture is complex and deeply rooted. Or at least this applies to the ‘cultural core’* of Italy.

These, I believe, are the things that matter in life. In spite of the drawbacks, I would like my children to grow up in such a rich and solid cultural environment.

* The “cultural core” of Italy consists of its geographical centre, i.e. Emilia, Tuscany, Umbria, Marche.

In the short and nebulous memory of even the best informed of Italian journalists 1968 seems to have been primarily an Italian phenomenon.

Few Italian writers clearly acknowledge the fact that it was instead an American one.

A movement of protest prompted by an opposition to the Vietnam War and a white support for the Civil Right’s Movement of the Afro-Americans.

At best, some Italian intellectuals admit a French participation, but for the majority1968 definitely saw “the Italian people coming close to the Socialist Revolution”.

Working people either ignored the unrest on Italian university campuses or resented it as a manifestation of “quei bighelloni della classe padronale”(those lazy bastards of the ruling class). This is not just my own opinion. This is an eyewitness account.

Pasolini published a poem the day after the Rome University riots. He stated that the police force was largely made up of illiterate youths from the hungry peasant class of the South, whereas the students were the children of ‘their exploiters’. That was absolutely true, and this greatly irritated the propagandists of the Soviet Union.

To my knowledge not a single worker took part in any of the protests and riots of 1968. I am sure my memory does not fail me yet.

Pasolini albeit not a Communist, cannot be doubted as being in any way a “right winger”! Pasolini was simply looking at the facts, as very few people did at the time.

Today all seem to agree with Pasolini’s views, which at the time were condemned as “fasciste” or “qualunquiste” (nihilist).

The glorification of the 1968 leisure class youth riots led to the outburst of terrorism of the 1970s, as indoctrinated, misinformed spoilt brats, found themselves hailed as working class heroes by the sectarian press.

Led by their lecturers, militant students formed groupings such as “Lotta Continua”, “Potere Operaio”, “Ordine Nuovo” and the notorious “Brigate Rosse”, to name but a few.

First these groupings restricted themselves to the publication of journals and pamphlets, and to demonstrations. Later some went underground and started kidnappings and assassinations at the expense of liberal journalists, magistrates and politicians.

The violent outbursts of the 1970s had nothing to do with the assumption that “violence is a symptom of a crisis of the capitalistic society, and of the hardship that results from unemployment and inflation”, as sectarian sociologists of the time had it. Neither was it true that riots were due to a crisis of industrialized society.

Indeed it would be so if the rioters had been factory workers, unemployed labourers or housewives. Since the protesters were “conspicuous consumers”, the children of the “leisure class”, if not of the very capitalists who owned Italy, the riots can only be described as a manifestation of the boredom of a spoilt generation who had had it too good. In the eyes of the workers, 1968 was just an example of ‘how spoilt brats may afford to have fun’.

One only has to read the books, which glorified those days, such as Mario Capanna’s “Formidabili quei giorni!” (Those formidable days) of 1988, to be unequivocally convinced of who exactly the individuals were behind the 1968 riots in Italy.

The reasons for grievances among the working classes were many. However, Giorgio Amendola, a member of Central Committee elite of PCI, said in those very days to the students that: ”Gli Italiani non sono mai stati tanto liberi come adesso e non hanno mai mangiato cosií bene come adesso” (The Italians have never before been as free, neither have they eaten as well as now) P. Melograni, Amendola, Intervista sull’antifascismo, Laterza 1976.

Prof. Franco Ferrarotti, an Italian sociologist of international repute, noted in 1978 that in Western Europe, namely parts of Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Portugal, youth violence has a political connotation, unlike youth violence in northern countries, in England and in America where it is mere hooliganism.

What began as “symbolic violence”: i. e. the attack on judges such as Sossi and De Gennaro, and on politicians such as Aldo Moro, became in a short time outright criminal violence.

With attacks on party headquarters, public buildings or factories, such as Mirafiori, “violence is no longer symbolic but plainly criminal”. This, of course was Ferrarotti’s opinion at the time.

Today Prof. Ferrarotti would agree that this distinction bears no weight as the attackers had no reason to exercise either “symbolic” or “criminal” violence, as no underprivileged or repressed Italian had authorized these privileged and unrepressed youths to act on their behalf. (F. Ferrarotti, Alle Radici della Violenza, Rizzoli, Milano, 1978)

If workers had wished to air their grievances, they would have taken to the streets themselves, as they had already done for a century, every time they wished, in spite of being fired at by the “Carabinieri”. The workers never needed proxies.

This brings us back to the utterly offensive premise that “workers need the assistance of the intellectuals to articulate their grievances”. This is plainly wrong, and even more so for 1968 and afterwards. By this time any worker would have been as good, if not better than any intellectual in articulating his own grievances or those of his class, not least because he would have had good knowledge of the grievances in question.

One remains speechless and bewildered when hearing the statements of Giorgio Napolitano when describing his early militancy: “our main commitment consisted of going to the school of the working class...learning the problems of the working class and of the labour movement so that we could become effective political cadres”. (Eric Hobsbawm, The Italian Road to Socialism, Lawrence Hill & Co. Connecticut, 1977).

Would it not be better, and certainly less confusing, if each section of society, or class, as the case may be, fought to resolve its own grievances, and not to resolve the grievances they caused for others?

Unless such grievances in question are materially, and not solely ideologically, shared, there is no way in which an exploiter can fight on behalf of his victim with any degree of credibility or chance of success.

History should have taught Mr. Napolitano’s admirers that he would have done a better job had he concerned himself with the problems of the Italian aristocracy, -his own class- and allowed the workers to concern themselves with the problems created for them by such an aristocracy.

It would be admirable to hear “Alright, I am an aristocrat, but I cannot help it. I feel that I must fight on behalf of the workers”. It would be admirable only if such statement did not come from people who kept several servants in their palace, who had four or five lavish villas by the sea and in the mountains, a luxury flat in Paris, one in London and one in New York, several sports cars, a yacht or two, and spent months of holidays in exotic places.

ON POLITICAL VIOLENCE

“La violenza non e’ forza ma debolezza, ne’ mai puo’ essere creatrice di cosa alcuna

It is difficult for any levelheaded person to accept that violence may be planned, coordinated from headquarters where a committee sits and acts according to tactical and strategic principles. It is even more difficult for someone who works for a living to grasp that such violence may be justified by an ideological design. An “ideological design” does not necessarily refer to Karl Marx or Karl Mannheim. It may more simply mean a set of ideas, which explain and motivate such actions as the murder of innocents.

There are two motives that may bring together opposite parties to resort to violence, and these were both at play in Italy in the 1970s. On one side there were unemployed youths, with dashed hopes, both by the inherent fact of widespread unemployment, and by the existence of a seemingly immovable corrupt political class. On the other side there were the privileged ones, the demagogic majority, of “conspicuous consumers”, who in fear of imminent revolution, made sure that they would be, in the event, leading it. This seemingly simplistic explanation is, I am afraid, the only one which withstands close scrutiny of the facts to which we were all witnesses, but which few of us seem to remember clearly.

It would be probably wrong to deny to rich students the right to show solidarity with a FIAT worker on the brink of unemployment, such as happened for example in the early 1980s, when new technologies made thousands of workers redundant. However one fails to understand what good this platonic solidarity would do. In fact, as it turned out it did no good.

There is no point in a single student, or in thousands of students, showing solidarity with workers who are made redundant due to technological change, by gathering at the factory gates. It would be better if these students protested against whomever encourages new technologies, knowing that these will cause the unemployment of manual workers.

Unemployment, when it is not due to a recession, is primarily the result of technological progress and of a refinement in the techniques employed by capitalists in making money.

In our age unemployment is largely due to the fast and massive introduction of automation and electronic technologies. This situation is here to stay, unless we all decide to return to the appreciation of manufactured goods, such as for example hand-made household goods.

But this is regarded as a utopian idea, and yet trade unionists believe it possible to reduce ‘conspicuous consumption’ and increase employment, without explaining how this might be achieved.

Few seem aware of an intrinsic dilemma which haunts left wing politics today. On the one hand we need to fight indiscriminate, mindless consumerism for both moral and cultural reasons. On the other we need ‘conspicuous consumption’, i.e. mindless and indiscriminate consumerism, in order to keep industry going and unemployment down.

A temporary solution has been sought in the shortening of the working week, but one wonders what people will do with an extension of boredom hours.

Presumably fewer working hours will lead to more mindless and indiscriminate consumerism.

Bored, empty headed people, have long been the majority in thriving industrial societies. They have created the problems which confront us, problems which are all direct and indirect consequences of widespread frivolity and sheer stupidity.

The only realistic solution to the dilemma: i.e. going back to making things by hand is, unfortunately, laughed at. One doesn’t quite know why. Could it be because of such widespread stupidity?

A GLIMPSE INTO MY 1968

"I believe this comes from using so little manure"

In 1968 I was working. I was also trying to fend off the attacks of the so-called developers who were now widespread among the total indifference of society in its entirety.

I remember one misty morning when I was digging for Etruscan remains on a high hill east of Bagno a Ripoli, where a ‘developer’ was threatening to build 13 villas.

He arrived panting, in the company of a friend: “Caselli, what are you doing on my property? . “I am afraid, Signor Papi, this might not be your property for long, there are Etruscan tombs here” I replied jubilant, showing broken pots and remains of old walls to Mr. ‘developer’. By lifting a bit of turf I had lost him a fortune. This is the kind of protest I was involved in, in 1968.

It was the spring of 1968 and the old road to Rome, 5 miles out of Florence was now reduced to a mere country lane. Washed away by the rainwater here, cut by drainage trenches there; for a long stretch mangled by the transit of heavy cement mixers, bringing the obnoxious material down to the new building site which was soon destined to turn the old hamlet of San Donato in Collina into a town.

The old Via Aretina was now being erased from the face of the earth, not only by the weather and lack of maintenance, but due to total lack of concern and among the acclaim of the local inhabitants.

A peasant, who must lose his culture in order that he may become mentally fit as a factory worker, only gains an empty head.

Trodden in its heydays by Michelangelo, Monsieur de Montaigne, Tobias Smollet, Goethe, popes, prelates, condottieri, tinkers and pilgrims to Rome, just to name a few at random. The Via Vecchia Postale Aretina, or Via Roma, the old road to Rome, hardly looked like the road it was, even a few decades earlier.

And here were a few of the paving stones, the very paving stones trodden over, for example, by Mrs. Tobias Smollet in 1766 who had to walk from here to Florence with his wife, due to the breakdown of the coach.

We photographed the stretches of paved road, knowing that in a few days nothing would be left of them. In a couple of decades even the memory of the paving stones would have vanished from the neighbourhood of San Donato. Perhaps only the extraordinary 17th Cent. bridge would last a little longer, only to fall due to willful neglect, to be replaced by a concrete bridge, worthy of the trucks which serve the local potteries.

The old local contadini -and sometimes my own father in his late years- would admire, glazed-eyed and in awe, the giant mechanical diggers, eating away their own past, which they now hated so much.

We were considered by them utter fools, or perfect idiots, when taking pictures of old stones, old bridges, stretches of an old paved road. We were unduly holding back progress with our actions. But our actions could hardly delay the plans of the new barbarians, as they clearly had widespread support.

At any rate, such a road could not survive without constant maintenance, being laid on clay soil and therefore having no solid support beneath. Several workers had lost their lives in the building of the Autostrada del Sole tunnel nearby during the early sixties.

The "argille scagliose" (shales) terrain of San Donato offer no safe support either to buildings or roads. Yet here, the barbarians are raising six storey blocks of flats. I wonder how long they will last.

"Yes, I do not regret leaving this place. I am looking forward to going to England for good. It is too painful, utterly unbearable, to see my country and all the things with which I identify myself, destroyed in this manner" I said to Enzo with a sigh - " I would indeed do the same if I could. As you know I was born down the valley, at Cellai" He agreed automatically, and as politely as usual.

Here the traveller, whether coming from or going to Florence, would be struck by the breathtaking sight of the city, and by the beauty of the Antiapennine mountains that act as a backdrop to the most splendid of all farmlands ever created by nature and by man's toil.

HERE IS GOETHE

It was 20 years later that I would read the English translation of Goethe's " Italian Journey", and was struck by it.

"The most striking thing about Tuscany is that all the public works, the roads and the bridges, look beautiful and imposing. They are at one and the same time efficient and neat, combining usefulness with grace, and everywhere one observes the care with which things are looked after, a refreshing contrast to the Papal States, which seem to keep alive only because the earth refuses to swallow them.

All that I recently said the Apennines might have been, Tuscany is, for it less so much lower, the ancient sea has done its duty and piled up a deep loamy soil. This is light yellow in colour and easy to work. The peasants plough deep furrows but still in the old-fashioned manner. Their plough has no wheels and the share is not movable. Hunched behind his oxen, the peasant pushes his plough into the earth to break it up. They plough up to five times a year and use only a little light manure, which they scatter with their hands. At sowing time they heap up small, narrow ridges with deep furrows between them in which the rainwater can run off. The wheat grows on top of the ridges, so that they can walk up and down the furrows when they weed. In a region where there is a danger of too much rain, this method would be very sensible, but why they do it in this wonderful climate, I cannot understand. I saw them doing this near Arezzo.

It would be difficult to find cleaner fields anywhere; one cannot see the smallest clod of earth; the soil is as clean as if it had been sifted. Wheat seems to find here all the conditions most favourable to its growth, and does very well. Every second year, they grow beans for the horses, which are not fed oats. The lupines are already green and will be ripe in March. The flax is coming up. It is left out all winter and the frost only makes it all the more hardy.

Olives are strange trees; they look almost like willows, for they lose their heartwood and their bark splits open, but they look sturdier. The wood grows slowly and is very fine-grained. The leaf is similar to a willow leaf, but there are fewer to a branch. Around Florence all the hill slopes are planted with olives and vines, and the soil between them is used for grain. Near Arezzo and further on, the fields are less cluttered. In my opinion they do not check the ivy enough; it does great damage to the olives and other trees, and it would be easy to destroy. There are no meadows anywhere. I was told that maize had exhausted the soil. Since it was introduced, agriculture has declined in other ways. I believe this comes from using so little manure." (Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Italian Journey, I, Perugia, 25th October 1786)

In 1968 this passage of Goethe was ignored as it is still today by the intellectuals who observed that the German genius was not struck by or interested in Florence, having an eye only for the "classical" and no time at all for the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. Instead, to those who comprehend, this passage from "Italian Journey" represents one the most brilliant and one of the most competently original observations in the whole book.

ANTONIOGRAMSCI

AND THE MISSING

After the fall of Marxism and Leninism, the last ditch of the more stubborn “romantic” Communists has remained Gramsci-ism.

Whereas Marx and Lenin postulated that a change in the economy would bring about a change in society, and they were wrong, Gramsci said that a change in society would bring about a change in the economy, and he was right. This is the greatest realization of “Gramsciism”.

It is a fact that the Soviets, the Chinese, the Koreans, the Cubans, the Vietnamese, the Cambodians and some of their allied nations, managed to change their economy, but failed to change the aspirations of their society.

Although it is possible to change society, it is unlikely that such a change will be brought about against the will of such a society.

Some might argue that society as such has no will, however. It is a fact that capitalism has managed to change society’s will, but I am not sure that it would have succeeded without society's consent or by using coercion or physical violence.

Capitalists have changed society by showing the working classes what they could obtain if they followed their advice. The Communists failed to show what the working classes would obtain if they followed theirs, as they had no example to offer: it is all too evident that they had nothing to show which might be of any interest to the working classes.

We all agree upon the fact that if the prevailing world-view were to change, this would bring about a change in the economy, if not for anything else, as a result of changed demands from the consumer. This is what Antonio Gramsci said in plain words, even if some would deny it.

The idea and the intention of changing the world-view of the majority can only exist in a warped mind, as it is either wishful thinking or dictatorial thinking.

Who is to decide that the world-view of the majority is “wrong” and “must” be changed? A person who does not believe that the majority is right, must surely act according to his own genuine beliefs, and hope he will be imitated, if he wants society to change in a democratic fashion.

Antonio Gramsci stated - in a much long-winded way - that ‘the intellectuals’ (presumably benevolent elements of the “classi egemoni” - i.e. counts, marquises, barons, chevaliers, fops, dandies, benestanti, agiati, nullafacenti, bankers, usurers, benevolent money lenders, affaristi, dealers in real estate, and the like) should study the world view of the working classes “classi subalterne” (e. i. factory workers, road sweepers, farm’s hands, peasants, carpenters joiners, blacksmiths, plumbers, greengrocers, butchers, small retailers, hawkers, tinkers, doughnuts and noughat sellers, window cleaners, and the like), elaborate and ‘intellectualise’ it, then return the whole, well laundered, back to the working class.

The latter will then effect a revolution, or take over the State, and apply this world-view to the whole of society and to the running of the State.

My conclusion is that both Antonio Gramsci, and his more modern followers, lacked the average amount of a sense of the ridiculous.

FAILED REVOLUTIONS

AND SUCCESSFUL ‘INVOLUTIONS’

I n 1968 the revolution failed to materialize, and another unsuspected revolution took place at the beginning of the 1970s.

As Pasolini wrote, the new hedonistic consumer’s order destroyed all the old traditional institutions, such as the family, culture or cultural diversity, language or languages, the Church as it had been for 2000 years.

While the old humanistic culture of the Enlightenment was being destroyed by the new mass culture by means of sophisticated technology which maneuvers production and consumption, the old bourgeoisie waned leaving the stage to the new which included the working class and eventually everyone, the whole of mankind.

During the early 1970s, as Pasolini noticed, the political left realized that it could not stop a process of transformation now well under way and decided to join it and annex it.

The totally unexpected fall of the Berlin Wall removed any hesitation and the left, everywhere, from Britain to China joined “New Capitalism”. Which had to be called “New” since so much manure had been unloaded on the “Old”.

Capitalism, however, has always been the same, it is its critics that have changed.

The U-turn of the left became complete within months, and new slogans were soon created such as: “the epochal change”, “the end of all utopias” etc.

The intellectuals, historians, philosophers, sociologists, quickly abandoned the “Marxist method” and began spending all their time in justifying their change of heart and mind.

The intellectuals of the right –if ever there were any- spent their time in hypocritically helping those of the left to join them.

Both sides presently began to agree with the views on Karl Popper, George Orwell, Theodor Adorno, etc. Every one played the game, all of them agreeing to cheat.

“Siamo un pese di santi, di poeti di artisti e di navigatori”

(“We are a country of saints, of poets, of artists and of navigators” Mussolini)

If culturally today‘s Italy is more or less united, and certainly not so diverse as to justify a partition of the country, its economy is as imbalanced as it was one hundred years ago. There is a northwest where economy and society are under the influence of FIAT and trade unions. This is a kind of post-proletarian, second generation-immigrant society, with allegiance to the Left.

There is a ‘nouveau rich’ in the northeast of small entrepreneurs in industry and farming, showing a strong separatist attitude, with allegiance to the separatist Lega Nord.

A solidly wealthy north-centre of small entrepreneurs, farmers and tourism operators, where public services and institutions work almost to perfection. This is the area of mezzadria, and the backbone of the Italian constitutional Left, with a staunchly anticlerical and internationalist tradition.

An agricultural southeast, potentially rich, but where corruption and crime prevent any form of steady development, with a strongly conservative political attitude.

A south-west -including Sicily and Sardinia - deeply Mediterranean, agricultural and touristic, but with an unbelievable 35 to 50% rate of unemployment (52% in Reggio Calabria in 1999), chronically stricken by organized crime, amazingly immature and opportunistic politically.

It must be borne in mind that southern Italy spoke predominantly Greek in the main cities, until well into the Middle Ages. Sicily spoke mostly Greek and Arabic until the 13th century. Sardinia still has its own ancient language, and its official language was Catalan until the middle of the 18th century. Most Sardinians still sound as if they spoke Italian as a foreign language.

It is difficult in the age of motorways and TV to grasp the degree of backwardness of the south previous to the unification in 1861.

Communication between towns was difficult, all wealth and civilization was restricted to a few large cities. Still in 1890 out of 1848 communes, 1621 were not connected by roads, but only by mule trails, archaic traditions survived as did forms of spoken Greek and Latin which have been dated back to the 3rd and the 2nd centuries BC! Not even Roman Imperial innovations ever reached most parts of rural southern Italy...

Rome is a cosmopolitan city but it functions in a middle-eastern way, in that it lacks the sense of discipline and organization of a European city, and its geo-political history makes it a region in its own right. Rome is surrounded by the Campagna, practically a desert, not by a lush contado such as is the case in Florence.

Since Rome houses both the Vatican and the Government is fundamentally a city of opportunists. It is also a city of civil servants, clergymen, politicians and media operators, with a strong right wing minority. Any statistics concerning Latium appear misleading and distorted when Rome is included.

In actual facts, Latium is a degraded, backward southern region, both in speech and culture, especially in the provinces south of the Tiber.

The unique culture of Rome derives from the fact that it is located in the south (until the 14th century the inhabitants of the city spoke a southern Italian dialect) but it had its territory -the Estate of St. Peter- stretching from the sea-coast of the Roman Campagna, all the way, due north-east, to the Adriatic at Ancona and Rimini, and up, due north west beyond Bologna, along the ancient Roman Roads “Via Flaminia” and “Via Aemilia”.

Influxes from very different cultural areas have moulded the character of Roman culture giving it a more northern complexion that it would otherwise have had.

Since Rome became the capital of Italy it has been influenced again by southern elements retaining only its Central Italian quasi-Tuscan speech.

Ungovernable, chronically unruly, thoroughly individualistic, creatively anarchic and self-reliant. In Naples, Byzantine Greek was the language of the populace until the 11th century- hopelessly backward, yet rich in scientific and cultural institutions, inherited from the centuries in which it was the capital of an imperial colony.

The centres of culture of modern Italy remain inexplicably removed from the areas, which shows a degree of economical social and political ‘normality’, such as the Venetia, Emilia and Tuscany

If this was planned with the idea that such institutions would bring benefit to the regions where they had been located, then the plan has failed, as it is clear that these cultural institutions have been corrupted by their location, and in more ways than one.

Although Italy appears to be a geographically well-defined country this cannot be said about its culture and language until well into the age of TV.

The country was politically united in 1870, with the war against the Pope, and the conquest of the State of the Church by the Italian army. It was however necessary to institute a ‘colonial style’ polices force, the Carabinieri, to keep it so. Such a police force, conceived as a colonial occupation police, still exists to this day.

The Carabinieri are still necessary to keep for example Sardinia and Sicily Italian, albeit without a great deal of success, as anyone can see.

Regions such as Val d’Aoste, South Tyrol, and Friuli are kept Italian through unfair and inexplicable tax privileges, which would be found intolerable in any other democratic European country.

Deceivers or incompetents state the opposite in recent histories of Italy (see for example the first volume in the much acclaimed Storia d’Italia Einaudi).

Cultural and linguistic differences within the Italian peninsula have been remarkable until well into the 20th century. When I was a child, I would have understood practically anything a person of Madrid might say but practically nothing of what an inhabitant of Calabria, Apulia, or Bergamo would say to me.

The speech of a Friulan or a Sardinian would have been to me as comprehensible as the speech of an inhabitant of Ulan Bator. A Corsican, on the other hand, would have sounded to me as clear as an inhabitant of Prato or Livorno.

In ancient times, at the dawn of history, we find that the languages of Italy were as many and as greatly varied as they have always been. The Alps and the Po valley were inhabited by Celto-Ligurians to the west, by Celts in the north and by Italics called Veneti in the east. Then as today the cultures on either side of the Alps were one and the same.

In Tuscany and in north Lazio, or between the Arno and the Tiber, Etruscan was the spoken and the written language of the first national state in history west of Greece. Etruscan was, like Basque today, a completely different language from any other known. Whereas the languages of the north and of the centre and south of Italy were related to Latin or shared part of their vocabulary with it, Etruscan was a totally alien language in Italy. When Latin became the official language of Roman Italy, with the exception of the Alps and of the adjacent pedemontane regions, all the peoples of the Peninsula easily adapted their existing speech to Latin or ‘Latinized’ it, whereas the Etruscans had to acquire an entirely new language. The result was that Etruria alone ended up with speaking Latin by the book. All the other nations ended up with speaking a Latin dialect.

The dialects of modern Italy, with some exceptions, represent in one way or another the evolution of the early languages of Italy, as linguistic areas have remained practically unchanged for 3.000 years.

Several linguists believe that the peculiar pronunciation of the Florentines is an Etruscan relic. The fact of the matter is that this pronunciation only exists in northern Tuscany, an area which remained cut off from the mainstream of commercial traffic for several centuries (from the Roman conquest, well into the early Middle Ages). It might well be that old linguistic habits survived along with other cultural features, some of which we have seen earlier.

All I can say on this matter is that the Florentine vernacular, as written down by early writers such as Dante, Boccaccio and other lesser known authors, is the very language I heard my grandfather speaking, and which died out with the introduction of TV.

Giacomo Devoto, one of the greatest Italian linguists and philologists of the 20th century, agreed with this view. Prof. Devoto told me, at the launch of his book

“Il linguaggio d’Italia” in Florence, that notwithstanding his 30 years of residency in Florence he still could not manage the tone he would have liked for his vowels, whereas I had no trouble at all in getting everything absolutely right. Prof. Devoto was a native of Genova.

It is impossible to ascertain whether Dante’s language was the common tongue of the people of Florence in the 13th-14th centuries, or whether the language of my grandfather (the vernacular of a Florentine marginal area, i.e. Sangodenzo) had been influenced by Dante’s writings. In my own opinion Dante’s language was the Florentine of his times.

Changes in language first occur in the cultural centre of a linguistic area, and spread out from it in a fashion similar to the ripples caused by a stone thrown into a pond. In the centuries before radio and TV changes in language spread extremely slowly, and it might have taken three to four hundred years for the language spoken in Florence at the time of Dante to reach Sangodenzo.

In Italy the Quistione della Lingua (Question of Language) began in the 16th century. Until then the use of Florentine or Tuscan by any serious writer was a matter of course. There was no argument about it or as to whether an Italian language should be found among the numerous idioms of Italy, which might be easier for all non Florentines to master.

Disputes lasted several centuries. Eventually an “Italian” language emerged, but since it was artificial, only a tiny minority of Italians would understand it, or feel that it might be their own. Language, however, is not merely ‘a way of expressing thoughts to others’, as it may seem to the parvenu, it is not merely “a prism through which we see the world” as Saussure once said, “language is all”...as Wittgenstein and others maintained.

The ‘leisure class’ has used language as another means to subjugate the ‘productive class’, and as a means for conditioning its way of thinking. The concept being that if one takes the confidence away from the speaker, by making him feel inadequate, or ashamed of the way he speaks, one has a powerful hold upon him.

When Umberto Eco allegedly says “one cannot explain semiotics with the language of a lorry driver from the Abruzzi”. I have no idea whether this sentence is apocryphal, and therefore I don’t know whether to feel sorry for Eco’s lack of understanding, or whether to regard him as a self-deceiver. Eco may be unable to explain semiotics in any other language than his own, but if this is the case it is only because he can master only one form of Italian.

I, for example, use three distinct levels of Italian, as I believe everyone should do in any nationality. One is the Italian I speak with my family and with my closest of kin. One is the Italian I speak with people I don’t know, and finally the Italian in which I write and address an audience with. Unfortunately - in Italian or in other languages - people today can only speak in one stereotyped way, whether they are in bed with their lovers or addressing an audience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They can only speak that way.

One feels sincerely sorry for these severely handicapped people, as they don’t know what they are missing, and for how limited they must feel.

It is difficult to say what Italy might be like today, had the ‘cultural core’ of the nation been allowed to shape and mould the culture of the entire nation, like France and England. Or what it would have been like if Italy had made the only literary language of the peninsula -i.e. Florentine- the national tongue.

Soon after unification, when Italy was looking up to, and modeling itself on France, the Mediterranean element, being numerically stronger and rearing nothing but civil servants, schoolteachers, policemen judges, immigrant workers, and Mafiosi, took the upper hand.

Aided by northern intellectuals with a big chip on their shoulders concerning the Florentine language (then the official tongue which they could not master), these civil servants took away the supremacy from the centre, re-housing all important cultural institutions (radio broadcasting, the cinema, the press) half to Milan and half to Rome.

In 1861, 90% of the population of Sardinia was classified as illiterate instead of ‘foreign’, as was the case. However, the average of illiteracy in Italy as whole was 75%, with the minimum of 54% in Piemonte, Lombardia and Liguria and a maximum of 86% in the South.

From Emilia to Lazio the average of illiteracy ranged between 68 and 83%. Veneto had a 65% rate of illiteracy, while Tuscany had 74%.

In 1911 the average of illiteracy in Italy as a whole was 40%. In Sardinia it had dropped to 58%, while in Calabria it was 70%, in Piemonte 11%, in Veneto 25% and in Tuscany 37%.

In 1951 the Italian average had dropped to 14% (about 11% today), 2-3% in the northwest, 7-8% in Emilia and Veneto, 10-11% in Tuscany and Lazio, from 32% of Calabria to 19% of the Abruzzi, in the South.

Fifty years ago 80% of the population of Italy spoke a vernacular, a dialect, or a language other than Italian. At the beginning of the 19th century the dialects of Italy were so diverse as to be reciprocally incomprehensible. Many regions, such as Sardinia and Friuli spoke their own languages. Most of Piemonte spoke a Provençal or a ‘Langue d’Oc’, and people there understood and spoke French rather than Italian -Cavour himself spoke in very broken Italian, and Garibaldi, a native of Nice, spoke a Provençal vernacular-.

Vittorio Alfieri wrote his earliest tragedies in French which was the language of the educated people in Piemonte in the 18^th-early 19^th centuries.

Corsica, on the other hand, spoke a Tuscan dialect on the eastern side and a Sardinian-related one on the remoter western side. Istria and Dalmatia spoke a Venetian dialect. The provinces of Trento and Bolzano (South Tirol) and large districts of the Verona province spoke archaic German dialects, whereas in Friuli and the rest of the northeast people spoke Friulan, Ladin, and Slovenian.

It is an unmentionable fact that all the languages spoken on the other side of the Alps reached the plains of northern Italy, from prehistory till one hundred years ago -The Alps have never been a linguistic barrier but a cultural unit. Classical sources are extremely clear about this; one only has to remember the campaigns of Augustus in the western Alps.

Early American ‘talkies’ were distributed silenced, supposedly in order that viewers should learn Italian before they heard English.

From the 1930s a thriving dubbing industry developed, and this was largely responsible for the great expansion of the Italian film industry under Mussolini and during the post war years.

Films were dubbed in an Italian ‘newspeak’ -a totally artificial sterile, inexpressive, dead-pan language- created both in order to serve and to please the non-Florentine speakers, and to prevent the superior culture of Tuscany from maintaining its supremacy.

Radio broadcasting followed the same pattern from the late 1920s. The new Italian was influenced, among others, by the writings of Gabriele Rapagnetta (better known as D’Annunzio) and of Benedetto Croce, both belonging to petty bourgeoisie of the Neapolitan dialect area. Their Italian, though clear, was not of the best quality as it was not the writers’ native language.

If this cannot be regarded as a bad influence, it is what it brought about which had a negative effect, as it undermined the confidence of Tuscan speakers. The worst influence came from radio broadcasting (early 1920s) and television, which came in 1953. Speakers on early television were poorly educated people either from Rome or from Milan. One may just mention Mike Bongiorno and ‘Corrado’. Both these men were notorious for their ‘minimalist’ vocabulary and schematic syntax.

Florentine language and culture which enriched the world with figures such as Boccaccio, Dante, Petrarch, Leonardo, Cosimo and Lorenzo de Medici, Alberti, Poliziano, Ficino, Michelangelo, Varchi, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Cellini, Vasari, Galileo, Redi, and also had Manzoni as an adopted child, was declared ‘unfit for the new Italy’ by the inarticulate intellectuals of the north and of the south, and the country underwent what amounted to an exercise of ‘cultural self-castration’.

I myself had a primary school teacher from Avellino, who constantly made fun of our ‘correct’ way of speaking, being herself unable to conjugate verbs correctly, and having a scanty knowledge of the Italian vocabulary.

This occurrence was neither unique nor accidental; it was the policy of the state and it applied everywhere.

Together with my schoolmates, I simply hated expressions such "tutti quanti" or "appresso", or “insieme con voi”, instead of “tutti”, “dopo”, “con voi”; I detested as I still do “debbo” instead of “devo” and find it hard to say “dobbiamo” instead of “si deve”.

During the 1950s Tuscan peasants experienced what amounted to the trimming and savage abridgment of their vocabulary.

Hearing ‘strange’ words on television, at the cinema and on radio, they gradually forgot 50% of their words. Yet these obsolete Tuscan words still inexplicably fill Italian dictionaries, only understood by Roberto Benigni and a few of his fans.

This is the time when my mother became self-conscious when calling "andito" the corridor, and "acquaio" the kitchen-sink, or "spera" the mirror; she now felt she had to say "corridoio", "lavello", and "specchio". She felt she could no longer call "armadio" the wardrobe, but use the French "guardaroba", utterly moronic ways of describing things which until then had their proper names.

Not only has the Tuscan language been destroyed, but similar attitudes have curbed the use of French in Val d’Aosta, German in South Tyrol, Ladin, Friulan and Slovenian in north-east Italy.

The entire region of South Tyrol has been flooded with southern Italian immigrants and military conscripts from the south. Northeastern Italy was also ‘militarized’ throughout the period of the Cold War, mostly with conscripts from the south.

Modern Italian has de facto the shortest dictionary among all important languages of Europe, but has recently acquired the largest number of misunderstood and misused English words of any other important European language.

The result is that Italian is extremely difficult to speak, as its spoken form is meant to match the spelling, and not the other way around as the case should be according to any rule in linguistics.

The ‘protean’ grammar and vocabulary of modern Italian make it impossible for any foreigner to master the language with any confidence. It is difficult enough to keep up with one’s own language if one has spent but a few years abroad!

The peculiarly affected speech of ‘orthodox’ Italian speakers makes these practically unable to pronounce other European languages such as English, French or German, without sounding comical.

Recently a ‘translation’ of Boccaccio was published by a northern Italian author (Aldo Busi: G.Boccaccio-A.Busi, "Decamerone da un italiano all’altro", 1990-1991 - Anonimo, "Il Novellino" (A.Busi & C.Covito), 1992).

His effort was taken seriously by the national press which praised this work as ‘a bold step in the right direction, that of making important Italian literary works accessible to the people of our age’. I believe the same author has also recently ‘translated’ Pinocchio! Presumably this translation was necessary as not many children today understand the meaning of the Italian word “babbo” (dad) - as used by Pinocchio- having had forced upon them the French “papa”.

My own children would not dare address me as “papa”... it is either “dad” or “babbo”.

Modern Italian children’s literature is scanty; the little that exists is either of no educational value because it is badly written and pretentious, or overtly Marxist, thus obsolete. One only has to remember many of the works of Gianni Rodari: say no more...

Italian children’s literature is generally unreadable, and certainly incomprehensible to a child, unless the child has been especially trained to grasp a very peculiar unspoken language.

Italian children read bad translations of Roal Dhal, awful but fashionable American ‘trash’ fantasy, mystery or thriller stories, then pass on to Stephen King as teenagers.

Who can blame them? Italian tradition cannot produce a single ‘Nursery Rhyme’ to entertain a child. Tuscan nursery rhymes were numerous -as probably they were in the many dialects and languages of Italy long ago. The ‘leisure class’ has got rid of this heritage, in order that children will have no other sing-song to resort to than those provided by TV adverts.

Practically no journalist, or writer under the age of forty, seems to be able to conjugate Italian verbs correctly; his syntax is ‘clumsy’ if not plainly wrong. All too often one hears or reads monstrosities such as “Mi pare che c’e’...” or “Credo che e’...” which would astound my grandfather! I shall not be intimidated into dropping my conditional tense.

The vocabulary concerning nature is strikingly poor, yet Italy was, until a few decades ago, a predominantly agricultural country.

In central Italy, for example, there was no general word for ‘tree’ as each tree had its own specific name, the same applies to ‘insect’, ‘fish’, ‘bird’ or ‘mushroom’, as practically each insect, fish, bird or mushroom, had its own specific name. Such names still feature in all modern Italian dictionaries, but it is unknown to practically all Italians.

Nothing strange in this, after all Eskimos do not have a general word for ‘snow’, but many words according to what kind of snow they refer to!

Very few modern Italians would be able to identify and name accurately any tree or any insect, fish, bird or mushroom, with their correct names. This is because there is no generally agreed Italian name, except in the dictionary, and also because no one cares. Excellent intellectuals refer to the Beatles, the pop band- as “gli scarafaggi”, which of course does not mean “beetles” (coleotteri), it means “cockroaches” in Italian!

Italian dictionaries, with no exception, are better described as a cultural swindle; they contain thousands of Florentine words which only some old Florentines peasants would understand today. If anyone dared using such words, he would be laughed at, or leave the listener or the reader, utterly bewildered.

LANGUAGE “A RISCHIO”

As we are all aware any living language continually alters its syntax, acquires new words, and borrows from the culturally dominant languages of the time. This has always happened and it is bound to happen faster from now on. But since language is the instrument of thought, then we must all be aware of the inevitable fact that the quality of a person’s language will affect his ability to think.

If it is true that fast changes in a language are signs of its vitality, the nature of such changes unveils the richness or the misery of a culture.

If this is the case, a language that has no word for “snail” or for “sink”, and which calls “footing” what is really “jogging”, that calls “ticket” what is really a “bill”, which calls “trekking” what is really “hiking”, which calls “gadget” what is really a “gift”, “trilling” what is a “thriller” and “flesh” a “flash” is the language of a confused culture. Recently I have realised the widespread use of “mobbing” and “mobbizzare” as the official legal words to mean “harassing” and “to harass”.

Another recent development in the Italian language is the use of adjectives as nouns and the creation of verbs from nouns, es. “il sacro”, “l’immaginario” etc. instead of “le cose sacre” and “l’immaginazione”, in the computer jargon we find the verb “scannerizzare”, “cliccare” from the English verbs “to scan” and “to click”, etc.

Stupid constructs such as "a rischio" have been invented to describe something "at risk" which in Italian would be "in pericolo". Think of the Italian word for "graffiti", which was...."graffiti", now it has become "writing" but pronounced in the Italian way as "vraitingh".

Recently I have heard monstrosities such as “ciattare”, presumably for “to chat” on the Internet, and the latest of all is the expression “linee guida” which has replaced the excellent Italian word “direttive”, which in English would be “guidelines”.

At any rate, an Italian who fails to understand the language of Dante and Boccaccio, of Carlo Collodi or of Alessandro Manzoni, and who adopts such 'idiotic' forms as above, is plainly a cultural eunuch, even if he thinks it unimportant to call a 'snail' a 'snail' and a 'sink' a 'sink'.

The result of this centuries’ old effort by the ‘leisure class’ in charge, to create a new language for all the Italian people, is that an orthodox Italian speaker -or writer- of the present day still has to resort to stupid short-lived neologisms, or to a comical form of English, in order to put life into a dead-pan, formal, clumsy, boring, colourless, and soporific form of speech.

Let us look at Pasolini’s description of the way Italian language was going in the 1970’s:

“questa lingua nazionale… .…si e proporzionalmente ristretta, riducendo la propria capacita’ espressiva a nulla. Chi parla esclude i sentimenti (soprattutto l'ingenuita, lo stupore, il rispetto, l'interesse).

On dialect: …“viene ancora parlato - da chi sappia parlare- il dialetto. Ma e anch’esso un dialetto grigio e puramente informativo, rimodellato sulla lingua. E’ poco piu che pronuncia. Esso ha perduto ogni espressivita, e sono cadute dai suoi rami stecchiti, come foglie secche, le parole del gergo. Se uno degli antichi fratelli- quelli vissuti fino a pochi anni prima, e di cui questi hanno rubato il posto - potesse, per un capriccio della storia, riapparire in mezzo, e parlare in un suo linguaggio, potrebbe essere capito solo con l'aiuto di un vocabolario corredato da un glossarietto specialistico sul gergo.”…

On today’s youth: “non sanno piu nemmeno parlare sic et simpliciter. Mugolano, si danno spintoni, articolano qualche suono gutturale: se devono esprimere meraviglia lanciano un urlo esageratamente forte, e esibizionisticamente atile (nell'imitare una pecora, una gallina, un cane, qualche bestia in cui si sono specializzati. Se devono esprimere allegria, alzano stridenti e offensive sghignazzate che finiscono in un grugnito o in un rantolo da epilettici, che non fa pena ma orrore”…

The fate of cultures is unpredictable. Although Pasolini had made extremely accurate predictions concerning Italian society and culture, one still finds it astonishing that the winning social model should have been that of Thorstein Veblen’s ‘leisure class’, instead of that of Karl Marx, and everyone made fun of old Thorstein!

One of the reasons for the triumph Veblen’s theory in Italy is due to the fact that The Theory of the Leisure Class was never translated into Italian - or if it was, it was never advertised- and this has turned out detrimental for Marxism, as well as for common sense and social progress.

To my knowledge The Theory of the Leisure Class first appeared in Italy in 1999, introduced by good old Prof. Ferrarotti.

Should a client ever ask you for a plate of “lumache”, you should serve it to him, the experience may yet induce a conspicuous consumer to learn Italian!

OF THE “HEDONISTIC CONSUMER”

In the old Tuscan tradition, I prefer to call things by their proper names, or with names that describe them as clearly as possible, being well aware of the fact that ubiquitous Derrida is watching us...or perhaps reading us?

The ‘leisure class’ is that social class whose fortune rests upon the robberies, rapes and pillages committed by its founders and forefathers. This class is traditionally labeled with several names: ‘aristocratic’, ‘noble’, ‘titled’, "high bourgeois". People continue to use these polite euphemisms.

I prefer to call them the ‘leisure class’ -in the sense intended by Veblen - that class of snobbish ‘conspicuous consumers’ whose forefathers were kings, princes, barons, counts, marquises, popes, cardinals, marauders, rapists and pillagers, warriors, landowners, property developer, investors, or at any rate those who lived on the back of the working classes, and who have left status and property to their offspring.

Many members of this class, particularly in central and southern Italy, have entered the political field with the aim of maintaining their illicitly acquired privileges in the new society. This is a society which, curiously enough, was staunchly opposed by the ancestors of those who belong to it. This society was known to them as the ‘democratic society’, and it grew out of the sweat and blood of their victims.

Interestingly enough, they have been allowed to perpetuate their rule without renouncing, forcefully or voluntarily, any of their illegitimately acquired privileges and sources of wealth. Even more curiously, these snobbish and often foppish hedonists, have not all joined the parties of the right, whose ideologies generally approve of the way their privileges have been acquired. Instead they have in great numbers joined the parties of the left, the extreme left, and have become the ‘intellectuals of the proletariat’; to use Gramsci’s own words.

They still hold on to all-important posts such as university chairs and chairs of all kinds, real or metaphorical, in diplomacy and in political, scientific and cultural institutions. The rushed funeral of the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano), which occurred a few months after the death of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, its paymaster, should not have come to anybody’s surprise.

These snobbish, and often foppish intellectuals, who had snobbishly and foppishly embraced the Philosophy of Praxis, snobbishly and foppishly resorted to Kierkegaard to justify their re-embrace of Roman Catholicism during the 1990s.

This is why Kierkegaard’s work came back into fashion among the most foppish of the intellectuals of the left.

One might rightly ask how these people could get away with it? Well, the answer is that they have good examples to refer to from the history of their own class.

In October 1786, Goethe travelled from Bologna through Tuscany in a coach, with a Vatican captain whom he described as "a perfect type of the average Italian". Not only had the landscape in Italy survived two hundred years of history, but the Italian type too, as it appears all too clearly from Goethe's letter from Perugia.

The sly Vatican official kept repeating to Goethe "Why do you think so much! A man should never think". Then he asked him about Protestantism, in exactly the same manner as people have, this century, asked me about it. He would listen to Goethe's explanations but without really hearing them. The same happened to me on several occasions on coming back from England during the 1970s and 1980s.

-They don't recognize the authority of the Pope. Otherwise Anglicans are the same as Catholics. They are in fact called Anglo-Catholics. They don't attach much importance to saints and do not worship sacred images.

-I don't think so. They are more tolerant towards other people's views on life. They don't claim to be the sole owners of the only true religion. And do not think anyone is infallible.

My aunt was not impressed, she thought the Pope was the Vicar of Christ on earth and his infallibility was not in question.

-Another point about Protestants is the way they interpret the Bible. It is mainly by virtue of this interpretation that they differ, in the way they do, from Catholics. They say, for example "do onto others what you would like done onto you" and not "do not do onto others what you would not like to be done onto you". I believe this difference to be fundamental.

-The Roman Catholic is satisfied by saying "I have done nothing wrong, I've hurt no one, I've kept myself to myself, I have no reason to believe I will be damned". But what about doing something? Did Christ command us to do nothing to gain the Kingdom of Heaven? Or did he say do something?

I was never able to convert my aunt with these arguments, nor has, to my knowledge, anyone else.

In the 1960s the number of churchgoers dwindled to about 10% of the population in Italy. Only where parish priests took a blatant left wing stand would mass be reasonably well attended.

Nowadays the number of churchgoers has increased by about 30%, and this is largely due to the stands taken by once left wing pop stars and famous personalities who have declared on the media that they had “rediscovered the sacred”.

Looking at those people flocking to church on Sunday morning, seeing them in their fur coats, fat and confident, parking their huge shiny cars in full view of the public, I cannot help thinking of the inscription Rabelais put upon the great gate of Theleme, and how appropriate it would be to have such an inscription put above the front door of every church.

"Here enter not vile bigots, hypocrites, externally devoted apes, base snites, puft up, wry-necked beasts, worse than the Huns, or Ostrogoths, forerunners of baboons: Cursed snakes, dissembling varlets, seeming sancts, slipshop caffards, beggars pretending wants, fat chuffcats, smell-feast knockers, doltish gulls, out-strouting cluster-fists, contentious bulls, fomenters of divisions and debates, elsewhere, not here, make sale of your deceits..."

This leads to some considerations concerning the very nature and tradition of Roman Catholicism. St. Thomas Aquinas was a rationalist; he endeavoured to give rational explanations to the irrational dogmatic teachings and to the embarrassingly outlandish “mysteries” of the Church.

For example, incest between brother and sister is forbidden, but why? Asked Thomas, “because if the love of husband and wife were combined with that of brother and sister, mutual attraction would be so strong as to cause unduly frequent intercourse” he answered himself, and I presume with a straight face, and also wrote it down.

Why should matrimony be indissoluble? Asked Thomas himself. Not merely because it is a sacrament, but more rationally “because the father is needed in the education of the children, both as more rational than the mother, and as having more physical strength when the beating of children for punishment is required” Thomas answered himself without laughing, and he wrote it down.

“Of course, not all carnal intercourse is sinful, since it is natural; but the married state is not as good as celibacy and continence”, thought Thomas, and he also wrote it down.

Someone may say that these statements of St. Thomas are not all what the Roman Catholic Church sustains. There are other things, more important things.

To my knowledge it is instead true that the Roman Catholic Church is obsessed by the idea that people have sex, much more than by the fact that people butcher each other for religious reasons, namely because of sectarianism and intolerance.

The Church lives with a dilemma and a contradiction. On one hand it finds sex sinful. On the other it rejects the idea of reproduction without sex, which, of course is perfectly possible and it occurs. Reproduction without sex would deal once and for all with the problem of “Original Sin”, one of the most outlandish of the Church’s mysteries.

Another dilemma of the religious and the dogmatic is the embarrassing fact that the same people who are against abortion, and join the movement "for life", are in favour of the death penalty.

This derives from the assumption that the dogmatic thinks he is in a position to judge and decide that a fetus is innocent while a grown person is a sinner, but why then do new born need baptizing? Because they are “guilty” of being born through a sinful act, i.e. sexual intercourse; they are, as the Roman Catholic tradition has it “an arm of Satan”. Everybody is therefore in sin.

The Church needs sex to be sinful in order that all men and women should be “in sin” at birth and therefore in urgent need to be purified by baptism, and once baptized they are irrevocably the property of the Church.

But what about a person born by artificial insemination? The baby born in such a condition would be without sin, not “a limb of the Devil”, and therefore it would not need to be baptized.

All “sins”, in the Roman Catholic view, are practically restricted to the sexual sphere, and seldom apply to serious matters such as dishonesty in money making, in the exploitation of working people, in the dilapidation of the environment for personal gain and profit, tax evasion etc. and generally money making without work, such as gambling on the lotto, etc.

The “mortal sins” committed daily by respectable bankers, usurers, investors, money lenders, insurers, are in the Roman Catholic view, nothing like as bad as the sins committed nightly by an honest, healthy, sexually active married couple.

There is no sin, for example, in the subjection of one’s wife, in the discouragement of women who wish to pursue intellectual goals, and the pressures brought to bear upon them to do all the cleaning and the cooking in the house. Nor is it a sin to prevent women from joining the clergy.

No, these are not sins at all; they are virtues, as a woman’s place is in the home.

A woman cannot be a Pope, or a minister of the Church as she is made “unclean” by her monthly cycle. She is a kind of scapegoat.

Indeed “a woman is an instrument of the devil as she is a temptress, inducing man into sin; a woman is deceitful in matters of sex, she cannot restrain herself. Man is always the victim of a lascivious woman, a man is 'a man' and cannot resist her temptation because of his God's given nature”. I know this to be in the thoughts of the most fervent believer.

Another dilemma of the Church is the absolute and unquestionable belief that God has already chosen who the elect people will be and who will be damned for all eternity, long before they were born.

So, one may rightly ask, what’s the point of being good if God has already decided who goes to Hell and who reaches him in Heaven? Presumably to avoid any disappointment on his part.

A Pope, for example, does not go to heaven by virtue of the fact that he has been chosen by mortals but only because God has already made such a choice beforehand. No matter whether a Pope is a saint, or a rapist, a murderer, a scoundrel, or whatever else, such as was for example Alexander VI. Is Alexander the VI assumed to be sitting beside God the father in heaven? This would seem a fair question.

This “mystery” was not “rationalized” by St. Thomas, as it could not possibly be rationalized under any circumstances.

I am no servant of two masters. I am a person whose life is entirely dedicated to the improvement of civil society, to the promotion of common sense, knowledge, reason and social justice. This is why I regard the Roman Catholic Church, and all the evil people which it protects, as a drawback.

Even if a deity existed, I would feel no obligation towards a God -or Goddess- who has landed mankind into this predicament. But even in case one felt such an obligation, namely those who see nothing wrong in the world as God created it, or in case one feels that something should be done about God - such as for example worship - what form should this worship take? And to what end should this worship be produced? I would not dare a suggestion.

Does believing in the existence of a God or Goddess mean that one must embrace one of the existing old religions, or one of the new?

The only useful question that comes to mind would be: ‘since our Western European culture is Christian, should we follow the teaching of Christ?’

If our Western European culture is Christian, which nobody can deny, then whether we like it or not, we are all Christians, and the form our worship should be chosen from one of the Christian sects.

To me this simply means that I should follow the tradition of the Enlightenment, which after all, is none other than a “non dogmatic movement” within the Christian tradition, a tradition that aims at building a New Jerusalem without divine assistance. As Richard Rorty says “what counts is originality and authenticity, rather than conformity to an antecedent standard”.

GOD AS A CONSUMER GOOD

The Church –said Pasolini- for the sake of survival has made a deal with Satan, which means a pact with the bourgeois state. There cannot be in social life two opposites as diverse as the Church and the Bourgeois State. On the one hand there is a wholly spiritual institution, on the other a wholly materialistic one.

This objective fact was already noticed by the so-called “red priests” of Tuscany in the late 1950s, and I became well aware of it myself even without the red priests telling me.

The Bourgeois State is in fact the antithesis of the Church, whereas for example the Monarchic State mirrored the Church. The Fascist State, as a regressive phenomenon of capitalism –and especially of state capitalism-, was less diabolical than the democratic state as far as the Church was concerned.

Fascism might have been regrettable but it did not undermine the Church from within. Fascism was in fact a “false new ideology”, but it was not new as it was a “regressive” phenomenon.

Fascism never threatened or harmed the Church whereas the New Capitalism, which emerged from the ruins of the last war, might destroy the Church.

If the acceptance of Fascism by the Church was a regrettable episode, the acceptance of Bourgeois Society and New Capitalism might turn out fatal, as it is an irreversible state of affairs.

The acceptance of the Bourgeois State, of New Capitalism and Consumerism cannot be looked upon as ‘regrettable episodes’. It is a vital and a fatal mistake which the Church will pay for either with its death or with a radical change that will amount to a death at any rate. This the ‘red priests’ knew very well.

The Church has failed to appreciate that the Bourgeois State represents or embodies a new spirit, which unlike the Fascist is competitive with the religious spirit and that will win over it, giving the people a total and unique vision of life, and making the Church redundant.

The future is in the hands of the “stock exchange brats”, which hold onto power by different means than the ‘classical’, which doesn’t need the Church.

This young bourgeoisie needs a population of uncritical consumers, endowed with a pragmatic and hedonistic spirit.

Pasolini envisaged a “technological” and a materialistic world where the cycle of production and consumption will carry on unhindered.

In such world there is no room for the Church, and religion becomes mere superstition being reduced to the level of astrology and clairvoyance.

The coalition between Church and New Capitalism in the struggle for the repression of any signs of non-conformity is nearly completed now.

The victory of this coalition will lead to the natural dissolution of the Church as we have known it, and religion will take its place along with astrology, clairvoyance, magic, tarots etc.

The success of the new “charismatic” movements are but the sign that this has already happened.

THE DAILY PRAYER

It became a common occurrence in the 1990s, and a rather tedious one at that, to hear on the Italian radio somber voices of intellectuals telling us things to this effect: “After the epochal changes which have rocked the world order here we are, searching for new values, new beliefs to cling on to.” “We have to rethink the way we look at sexual differences, cultural or ethnic differences, economic concepts, social concepts...” and so on.

This daily sermon, albeit not a uniquely Italian phenomenon, is preached far more in Italy than elsewhere.

What irritated me was that these “intellectuals” implied that these reflections were universal. They assumed that all thinking people of the world had changed their views ten minutes after the fall of the Berlin Wall, as they had done.

Not so, I cannot think of a single intelligent person whose views have been altered by the falling of the Berlin Wall. At least no one I know personally, and rate as a thinking person, has changed any of his views as a consequence of that event.

What is then the meaning of this daily sermon, which we had to put up with years after that event? Clearly enough it is a device aimed at putting across to the naive and the dim witted that all our heroes who have now turned “liberal” from having been the mouthpieces of the Soviet Union, have done so because we are all undergoing an epochal change.

Well, I disagree, I did not undergo any change, nor did the world undergo an epochal change, as far as I can see.

The world is now changing as it has always done, regardless of the fall of a wall, or the changing of flags, the changing of political sides and emblems by a bunch of Italian simpletons.

During previous transitional periods too simpletons were left “orphans” of their beliefs, and the same thing happened in the 1990s.

The extraordinary thing is that this “change of heart” took place across the political spectrum.

Curiously enough, Fascists, Catholics, Socialists and Communists all underwent a trauma. This shows that they were -and are still- all the same kind of people in the same game.

“The body of the future: where imperfection will be a thing of the past”

When I was very young and naive, I thought that, perhaps, in the not too distant future the human race would become taller, more handsome and more intelligent, mainly due to better diet and better life all round.

I would never have thought that intelligence would be improved artificially and that as a consequence of this improvement everyone will become shallower and downright stupid.

“You are about to enter the age of the super-body: fasten your faces, please.”

*Crooked noses and other ‘unsightly’ facial features will be corrected using permanent make-up

*Genetic engineering will be the ultimate legacy: parents will bequeath good looks to their offspring

Clearly scientific and technological progress has not been matched by equivalent progress in thought, and in people’s attitudes to society.

Progress in social institutions and law has been minimal, not to say negligible, since the times of Plato, our society is still a ‘platonic’ one.

The Enlightenment appears to have affected but a few, Socialism even fewer, and mainly in the West, as a consequence of the Capitalist fear of revolution.

Religions and creeds of all kinds have ensured that progress in thinking will not take place, and that war will have to remain the only solution to international misunderstandings, especially when war makes more money than peace.

Pasolini was right, and all the intellectuals of the PCI including Gramsci, were wrong.

Our world-view today, far from being a ‘proletarian’ one is, at its best, a ‘petty bourgeois’ view.

We have all become small time investors, small-time capitalists, and extremely petty bourgeois, foppish hedonists and narcissists, gamblers, and believers in horoscopes, in luck and fortune-tellers.

We are, at best, servants of two masters: of stereotyped religious or lay morality and of money. The two masters are kept well apart.

When it comes to money, there is really no religious or lay morality left to speak of, only fear of the law. The matters of this earth and the matters of God or conscience are conveniently kept separate in a kind of split personality syndrome.

As to what might be ‘the meaning of life’ it does not bother anyone any more. We all seem to have embraced existentialism. It is an obsolete subject.

The immanence of death is brushed under the carpet. We behave as if we were all to be here forever and never fall fatally ill or die. Should we die, we would certainly go to Heaven, as we can buy our way there with a prayer, a confession, and presence in Church.

We are not bothered by the problem of starvation in other countries or by the problem of leaving a better world for our children when we die, as we think that a better world is simply one with more money in the bank.

Nobody is seriously interested in ecumenism or in improving the way people interact with one another, or in improving the human condition all over the world, as this would imply the elimination of dogma and ‘business-religion’.

Antagonism and competition between individuals and nations are constantly encouraged and regarded as the prime motors of progress.

Prejudice, discrimination, exploitation are rife and growing. Nationalism of the most petty and blinkered kind is now widespread, but nobody really knows what a ‘nation’ is, nor are they interested in knowing what it might be. National heritages are being destroyed everywhere while bogus nationalistic concepts are spreading.

All essential services are disbanded by governments on the brink of bankruptcy, while state services, such as health-care, water supply or communications, are made ‘public’ and de facto handed over to gangs of crooks, the only social class with means. The fate of the Western world, and of most of the rest of it, is in the hands of hedonistic dim-wits, who hold the capital and who spend their time skiing, boating, driving cars, dressing up and getting a sun tan in the countries which they starve.

Book reading is declining, wherever there was any book reading at all. Cinema, television and all kinds of electronic entertainment are becoming more and more meaningless, shallow, superficial, or pure and simple exhibitions of violence.

Most people are convinced that ‘entertainment’ only means watching bloodshed, or someone being cut into pieces, or some child being raped and viciously murdered.

Mass murderers are the heroes of the popular media. They have become the idols of our time, and their houses have become pilgrimage sites. There are weekly magazines entirely dedicated to the glorification of crime and violence.

The Christian church has been reduced to an institution exclusively dedicated to the comforting of blatant hypocrites. If anyone followed Christ’s word to the letter, the Church itself would crucify him. The modern believer is one who thinks he can have the best life can offer on this earth and then sit beside the Father in the next life. He does not, however, reflect on the fact that if it were so, what would he say, for example, to St. Francis of Assisi, once he has become his neighbour? What would be the subject of their conversations in Heaven? What would an international financial magnate who has made his fortune by dealing in drugs and child pornography have to say in Paradise? Perhaps his only friend would be St. Thomas Aquinas with whom he could discuss matters such as ‘objective truth’ and ‘common sense’, and the ups and downs of the stock exchange.

…ANDTHE MORONIC INFERNO

I am a fan of the American army but regard the USA as Saul Bellow and Martin Amis do, using a phrase of Wyndham Lewis: ‘a moronic inferno’, yet I am not a right winger.

There, illiterate masses and lobotomized zombies are displacing the autonomous individual and the cultural tradition, as Alex Callincos wrote in 1989.

I agree with Callincos that the 1960s were the turning point. Things might have gone the opposite way. Unfortunately they went the way we all now see, but whose fault was it?

1968, as I predicted then, had this effect. The middle and upper class fops, invented and took over a "worker’s revolution" they had invented on university benches out of boredom, for fun, and they got us where we are now.

Towards the end of the century ‘simulation’ had replaced ‘representation’, and simulation need not bear a relationship with reality.

Evocations and reproductions of non-existent and totally unlikely realities are the norm.

Stupidity and brainlessness reproduce themselves indefinitely. They admire themselves in the mirror and keep on reproducing in an ever increasingly distorted manner.

The mass reproduction of cultural products, made possible by technological developments, has created this nightmare, as Callincos says. He does not say, however, that this mode of production was expected to lead to a Communist society.

Capital has fed upon the destruction of every referential, of every human goal. It has shattered every ideal distinction between true and false, good and evil, in order to establish a radical law of equivalence and exchange, the iron law of its power.

This utterly shallow world is the result of this process, which has totally muddled what were necessities with false needs. We no longer have a water supply not because it is a necessity, but because it is a source of income for the tax evaders and shady dealers who have money to invest.

We no longer have to buy cars because we need transport, but mainly because we must keep FIAT workers busy, or worse, to boost our hedonistic egos. This is the culture of the dim wits that are now our presidents or Prime ministers, and of the parties who support them.

The countries which are most exposed to this cultural breakdown are the third world countries on the one hand and the Americas on the other. This means all cultures with shallow roots. Third world cultures have shallow roots because they have been uprooted, and the culture, which they admire and want to join, is totally incomprehensible to them.

The USA and the Americas in general have no cultural depth. The countries whose cultures are hardest to destroy are those of Old Europe.

On the other hand it may be that this culture of the false of the vacuous, contains the secret of happiness. If the genius is a sad and somber figure, the simpleton is generally a jolly and happy one. If the hopes of the thinking man are dying out it may be they weren’t well placed and therefore doomed.

"LA FINE DI TUTTE LE UTOPIE"

In the Italian media of the 1990s one heard, again and again, that it is “la fine di tutte le utopie” (the end of all Utopias), that “siamo tutti disorientati” (we are all disoriented) that there is “il recupero del sacro” (we are rediscovering the sacred) that there is “il ritorno alla spiritualita” (a return to spirituality), that “credevamo tutti in qualcosa e adesso non abbiamo piuí sogni o credi” (we all believed in one thing or another and now -i.e. after the fall of the Berlin Wall- we no longer have dreams and beliefs), and so on and so forth.

This “litany” was no mere justification. It was -whether carefully planned or naturally born- a relentless brain-washing operation, well orchestrated by both the Left and the Right, in order that otherwise discredited political and intellectual figures would save face and remain in power.

This kind of propaganda was not merely an insult to all those “normal” people who had the courage of being Socialists, or Communists, without worshipping Stalin or the Soviet Union, let alone being on their pay-roll.

These attitudes were intolerably offensive to people who had always and coherently held a commonsensical position while being abused, offended, ostracized and humiliated.

Some old cronies of Italian political philosophy (such is Norberto Bobbio - his statement on TV, 3rd April 1998) after a life-long support of all Communist regimes, stated that “all Communist regimes in the world have been tyrannies equal to Nazism”.

If this statement was to be attributed to a form of… senility, to what should we attribute the general consensus that his statement caused among younger journalists, political thinkers, politicians, who were staunch supporters of the KGB and of all Communist regimes in the world until 1989? Undoubtedly due to reckless stupidity.

Michele Serra, a leisure class journalist of the DS (formerly PCI), stated on RAI 3 that “if you weren’t with us you were an idiot, no matter whether you have been now proven right, at the time it was right to be with us”.

Clearly this ubiquitous character has never been told that the world is not a playground for spoilt and bored brats. Thousands of honest democratic internationalists died in Stalin’s concentration camps, as we all now accept. Worse still in my view, there are people in Italy, who have been driven to insanity and even to death, simply because they refused, for example, to acknowledge as ‘democratic’ the defunct phony state that the simpleton called the “German Democratic Republic”.

Only few were fortunate enough to escape this deceitful new Italian dictatorship, as they could afford to go into self-exile.

I feel that there should be no whitewashing. All members of the leisure class, past and present, all those who were on the pay-roll of the defunct Soviets and their KGB, should be continuously and relentlessly exposed wherever and whenever they turn up. Only after they have all died, and only then, should Italy look forward to the future and perhaps forget its shameful past, as accounts would have been settled.

What can be said about those who remained faithful to Soviet Marxism? about those smooth recherche’ hedonists who wear Giorgio Armani clothes and still speak about ‘masses’ and of ‘proletariat’ from their hideouts of Cortina, Portofino, Capalbio, Porto Ercole, and the likes?

They sided with Milosevic, with Saddam Hussein, with Fidel Castro, with the hereditary monarchies of North Korea and Syria, and with all the scum the capitalistic world is capable of supporting in this day and age.

I believe they do so because they frequent the same coiffeurs, jewellers, tailors, designers, hotels, restaurants, etc.

Unfortunately, many of the people I refer to hold all power in Italy. They hold university chairs. They manage the news on all media. They run the central and the local government. The ordinary man also sees them in the flesh gathered in exclusive summer or winter resorts, congratulating each other, happy as ever.

The habitue of Capalbio, Portofino or Cortina –Veblen’s conspicuous consumer- is in power in Italy not because there is no one else to rely upon, or because his political opponents are mere crooks and Mafiosi. He is in power because the Italians who bother to vote identify with him.

I took to self inflicted exile because I never identified with or shared views with the Italian political and intellectual class, and found it difficult to even bear the sight of them.

Perhaps this is because I had read Thorstein Veblen, and as a consequence of that reading in particular, and of my own judgments in general, I cannot take seriously the kind of people that have run, run, or would like to run Italy.

Maybe it is simply because I possess a rare amount of common sense and sensibility, but this is not for me to judge.

After the fall of the wall, from the politicized, brainwashed FIAT worker, to the highest philosopher, the Italians have now discovered that private property is not theft. They have also, as they put it ‘rediscovered the sacred’, a hideous expression to mean ‘gone back to church’. There seems to be a common agreement, a general consensus, sometimes-called "buonismo", spanning from the Fascist to the die hard Communist.

COMMON GOALS AND DIFFERING METHODS

He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot, but don't let that fool you.

In the Italy of the late 1990s, both the Government and the Opposition publicly stated that they had common goals.

“We only differ” said Massimo D’Alema, the then leader of the largest party in power, and Prime Minister, “in the methods of achieving such aims”.

This is the clearest example of political stupidity I have encountered in recent years.

Surely it would make sense if both, Government and Opposition, agreed on the method of achieving their own different aims. If we assume that "the method" is the democratic process.

Whereas the aim of the right must surely be the establishment of a society where money has, for all intents and purposes, entirely replaced idealism and morality, the aim of the left must be to establish a society where morality and idealism have replaced money.

Or...perhaps, it is I who have misunderstood the whole meaning of political ideology, right from the 1950s.

Necessary evils

The majority of today’s problems, environmental, social, technical, are due to a widespread fashion and taste for blatant conspicuous consumerism and social irresponsibility, and can only be overcome by altering the way the manipulated masses think.

Adding more laws, and thus causing, as a direct consequence, yet more irresponsibility will not overcome them.

Altering the way the manipulated masses think involves first of all curbing the freedom of those social manipulators that have a vested interest in promoting and maintaining the general stupidity of the public at large. Namely the investors and the politicians their props.

I refer, of course, to politicians who promote betting and gambling, to politicians who cling to power by giving palliative incentives to people who do not want new cars, in order that they will want them. I refer to investors who want to privatize everything including prisons, and generally to international criminal organizations, drug dealers, speculators, profiteers, usurers and other tax evaders who want people to blindly buy anything they sell them.

It is largely a question of effectively counteracting the world view which criminal organizations, capitalists and social manipulators of all kinds are busily spreading among the general public, but how?

The disastrous problems caused by the indiscriminate and mindless abuse of the motorcar cannot be solved by producing “clean” fuels, but by re-educating those dim-wits who still regard the car as ‘status symbol’ or believe it to be a ‘necessary evil’.

It must sink into the mind of the dim-witted that the only ‘status symbol’ that matters is the ‘status of one’s mind’, and none other. And there is ample proof to show that calling the motorcar a “necessary evil” is pathologic, in a world that dies gasping because of the motorcar.

When the FIAT 500 was created in 1958 in Italy, everyone was absolutely convinced that the problems of pollution, traffic, circulation, excessive consumption of imported fuels, parking by the adoption of smaller and safer cars would, gradually solve the problem of death on the roads.

In this Italy had been a true pioneer. Only in 1963 did Great Britain create the Mini Minor, still a much more powerful car than the FIAT 500.

Well, in 1996 an allegedly very perceptive Italian Prime Minister solved the problem of the budget deficit by giving incentives to car fanatics to scrap their perfectly adequate and efficient ten-year-old car, and buy a new and possibly larger one.

The response to this outrageous proposition went beyond the most optimistic of forecasts, yet even a child of the 1960s would have seen how absolutely stupid, moronic and reckless this proposition was.

For example, medical problems cannot be seriously tackled so long as a healthier population would mean poorer doctors and poorer pharmacists.

In the society we have created since the 1960s, doctors and pharmacists must, if they are not to be made fun of, endeavour to keep people alive but constantly ill.

Common sense, intelligence and fairness would suggest that the primary task of a doctor should not be to prescribe drugs to a patient. He should tell him what made him ill in the first place, in order that the patient may avoid falling ill of the same disease again. But where, may I ask, does this leave the doctor’s income? (July 1996)

On RAI 3, (8th September 1997) I heard Professor Tomati, an eminent Italian researcher, stating that researchers in American Universities, and in most European University institutes, are paid by big pharmaceutical industries in order that they invent drugs which keep the patient happy but dependent and constantly ill. They also hamper and sabotage any research leading to the prevention or effective cure of disease. I was at the same time terrified and pleased by this confirmation.

Today we no longer have a telephone service because we need it. We have it in order that crooks, i.e. shareholders of the Telephone Company, may milk us. We no longer have an electricity supply because we need it, but in order that crooks, i.e. shareholders of the Electricity Board, may milk us. We no longer have a water supply because we need water but because crooks, i.e. shareholders of the Water Company, may enjoy the benefits of our money...

This applies to numerous other essential services. I call the tax-avoiders and tax evaders of the idle class with their own proper name. Tax avoidance may be legal but it is also irresponsible and I have no sympathy for it.

Although the Institute of Social Research known as the “Frankfurt School”, produced, as Karl Popper said, great bags of hot air, and wasted a lot of time, it is also true that it foresaw all that I have said above.

Members of the “Critical Theory”, both from the Frankfurt School and from other schools, (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and more recently Habermas) elaborated and articulated this idea better than I could ever dream of doing. I therefore paraphrase from various writings:

The “culture industry” hinders the development of independent, thinking individuals. It induces them into obedience and adjustment. People are diverted, distracted and made utterly passive. Serious high-level information, is thus “consumed” as the cultural component of the leisure industry. Habermas states that it is inadequate to rest with the idealist interpretative understanding of contextual meanings, and the analyst must move towards the explanation of systematically distorted communication.

The “Critical Theory” seeks a new enlightenment, an emancipation in which critical reason leads to liberation from all forces of domination and destruction. Lukacs says that the insight which leads to this liberation is that the structure of the social process, constrains, dominates and determines the social totality, including thought and consciousness.

Of course, all this was said by people who propped up the Berlin Wall and supported the KGB until the last day, but having said that, the facts observed by these “dishonest intellectuals” remain true. As to the remedies however, it is an entirely different kettle of fish.

I have a wish. I wish all the people who felt they had to change their views after the fall of the Soviet Union -no matter what their views might have been previously- would realise the poverty of their intellect, and take on some manual activity for the rest of their lives, sparing us from their opinions.

There is a great deal of incompetent and misleading work on the mezzadria. Particularly misleading are works that assume the system to have been invented in the 14th century.

For more sensible information on the mezzadria and its culture I suggest the following works:

Ildebrando Imberciadori, Mezzadria classica toscana. Con documentazione inedita dal IX al XIV sec. Accademia Economico Agraria dei Georgofili; Vallecchi, Firenze, 1951.

Giuseppe Lisi, La cultura sommersa, un documento sulla civilta’ contadina scomparsa sotto i nostri occhi, LEI, Firenze, 1973.

I. Fonnesu, C. Poggi, L. Rombai, Fattorie e mezzadria in Toscana. Evoluzione recente di alcune aziende agricole nelle campagne fiorentine. Atti dell’Istituto di Geografia, Universita’ di Firenze, Quaderno 7, 1979.

My own relevant works, and those of my close associates, on the culture of the Tuscan peasant are listed here below:

G. Caselli, S. Guerrini, La treggia, in Documentiamo Firenze e la Toscana; commune di Firenze, 1973, pp.86-90

G. Caselli, La treggia: nota preliminare per lo studio dei materiali delle culture non-urbane in Italia, in Archeologia Medievale, II-1975, Firenze CLUSF, 1975, pp. 440-454.

AA.VV., Cultura contadina: cultura di popolo. Note in margine a una mostra di fotografie e attrezzi agricoli, Antella, Circolo Ricreativo Culturale, 1975.

- Cultura contadina, in Le Gualchiere, Ricerche sull’agro fiorentino, II, 1976, Antella, CRCMT, 1976, pp. 39-58.

G. Caselli, S. Guerrini, Viaggio nella cultura contadina, in La Graticola, Firenze, 1976.

G. Caselli, Per uno studio tipologico dell’aratro con particolare riferimento alla regione Toscana, in Archeologia Medievale, IV-1977, Firenze, CLUSF, 1978, pp.281-296.

S. Guerrini, Cultura contadina: deposito di Antella. Primo inventario del materiale esistente, in Le Gualchiere. Ricerche sull’agro fiorentino, III-1977, Antella, CRCMT, 1977.

G. Caselli, A typology of peasant’s huts in Tuscany, in Ethnologia europaea, X-2, 1977-78, Gottingen, Verlag Otto Schwartz & Co., 1979, pp. 144-160.

S. Guerrini, Cultura contadina: un esempio di ricerca a Bagno a Ripoli, in Le Gualchiere. Ricerche sullíagro fiorentino, IV-1978, Antella, CRCMT, 1978.

- Inchiesta sulle tradizioni popolari, CRCMT -centro di vita popolare - Biblioteca comunale di Bagno a Ripoli, Bagno a Ripoli, 1978.

G. Caselli, Cultura contadina. Verso la riscoperta delle origini della cultura contadina sulle colline toscane, in Mondo archeologico, 35-36, Firenze, Corrado Tedeschi, 1979, pp.44-48.

S. Guerrini, Cultura materiale contadina: proposte di schedatura, in Proposte e ricerche, 3-4, Universita’ di Urbino, Urbino, 1979, pp. 33-38.

G. Caselli, La cultura della treggia, in Mondo archeologico, 41, Firenze, Corrado Tedeschi, 1980, pp. 42-46.

S. Guerrini, Attraverso le immagini, in Bagno a Ripoli. Economia e territorio, commune di Bagno a Ripoli, 1980, pp.51-60.

S. Guerrini, His various contributions in Cultura contadina in Toscana, vol. I, Il lavoro e l’uomo, Firenze, Bonechi, 1982. S. Guerrini was the leading author of this encyclopaedic work.

G. Caselli, Il ‘linguaggio’ degli attrezzi agricoli tradizionali. In D. Herlihy, R. Trexler, L’Impruneta, una pieve, un santuario, un comune rurale. Francesco Papafava Editore, Firenze, 1988.

As to general information about the predominant philosophy of present-day Italian society there are a great number of misleading works, I found that the most helpful information may still be obtained from the standard work:

Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, Dover Publications Inc. New York, 1994 Edition.

(see Charles Godfrey Leland, President of the Gypsy-lore Society at the end of the 19^th century, entitled “Etruscan Roman Remains in Popular Tradition”. This book was published by Fisher Unwin, London in 1892)

ìDuring the reign of our Lord Charles, most excellent man, King of the Franks, the Romans and the Longobards, in the thirty-first year of his reign in Italy in the name of God, after he entered the city of Pavia, and in the twenty-fourth year during the thirteenth indiction, of his son and our Lord Pepin, for the grace of God King of the Longobards, Bless You.

I Dardano, venerable priest, son of the late Basilio, guardian of the Church of the Most Holy Peter in this city of Pistoia, which is oratory of the late Guiprandís son, grant the leasehold and consign to you, Martin, son of the late John, a house and part of the property of the same Church in a place called Capezzana, which was inhabited by the ìmassarioî Petruccio, with the house and its buildings and land, the yard, the kitchen gardens, the vineyards, the woods, the olive groves, the cultivated and fallow fields, whatever the same Petruccio under the same terms had in hands and possessed, all this entirely to you Martin I grant under leasehold and consign, so that you and your heirs will inhabit, work, administrate and improve, and in return give to me and my successors on behalf of the same Church of Saint Peter from now on each year, the rent of half the wine and olives and perform half of the corvee duties (angarie); and when the acorns are ready in that place, you must give us a pig worth four ìtremissiî; and when the acxorns are not good you must give us an animal worth one ìtremisseî; and when we or our envoy should visit you, you must welcome us kindly and treat us well and come when we call you; and if you will fulfill all these things and (nevertheless) we wish to ask more of you or send you away, in that case I Dardano Priest or my successors promise to regulate things by giving to you the aforesaid Martin or to your heirs, by right of predetermined penalty, ten coins.

I, then, the aforesaid Martin assure and promise, on behalf of myself or my heirs, to adinistrate, improve and inhabit the aforesaid house and property, and to give to you Dardano aforesaid priest or to your successors the rent and to perform the corvee duties and all that contained above, from now on each year; and if we should not annually fulfill all that is estabilished above or if we should not inhabit the place or not come when you call us, then I Martin or my heirs promise to you Dardano Priest or to your successors on behalf of the same church, to pay the above written penalty of ten coins.

We then asked the notary Gauspert to write two contracts, but of the same contents for both of us.

This Act (deed) was stipulated at Pistoia on the sixteenth day of the month of December, reign and indiction, as above. God Bless You.

(signature) I Walpert, notary, requested by Dardano Presbyterian and by Martin, undersigned witness.

(signature) I Ermipert Presbyterian, requested by Dardano Presbyterian and Martin, undersigned witness

(Filippo Brunetti, Codice diplomatico toscano, P. II, t. I, pag. 381, n. LXXX, Firenze, 1833.)

The system of land tenure which is called mezzadria in Sicily is very complex, as it only applies to monocultures and therefore rules (patti) may vary from year to year according to the crop and to the system of crop rotation in each particular case.

a) Maisi netti (fallow) b) Ristucci prilavuri (deeply upturned fallow soil on which wheat is sown) or Tirreni a pruvenni (provigions i.e. barley, oats etc.) c) A pascolo (pasture) d) Tirreni a favata (broad beans or other legumes).

The leaseholder gives the peasant the land divided into spezzuni (fields) at the following conditions (these conditions are not the same everywhere but they are alike):

a) Maisi netti - The leaseholder is obliged to 1) Provide the heavy ploughs for the peasant to break the fallow soil in order sow the following year. 2) To provide the seed of wheat.

The Leaseholder has the right to 1) Get the seed back plus 30% of the produce, plus a refund for the cost of policing and guarding the fields and the granary, and for the fire insurance (the fire insurance premium is paid in kind for a value four times above the actual cost of the policy), plus other small expenses.

2) He has the right to three quarters of all other products. 3) He has the right to the greater part of the straw.

The peasant is obliged to cultivate the fields, i. e. to plough to sow etc. and has the right to one quarter of the produce, after the above named deductions, and to a cartload of straw.

b) Ristucci prilavuri - After the wheat has been harvested, the stubble is left on the soil and this is upturned by heavy ploughing and new wheat is sown again. The yield will be less than the previous which grew on the fallow and therefore got all the nourishment. The leaseholder gives the seed, the ploughs etc.; the peasant gives his work. At harvest only expenses are deducted and then the produce is divided, two thirds to the leaseholder and one third to the peasant. Where the soil is more fertile, five sevenths go to the leaseholder and two sevenths to the peasant..

When, for any reason it is impossible to sow wheat on the stubble, barley or oats is sown instead (tirreni a pruvenni) Conditions remain the same as with ristucci prilavuri, but before the produce is divided an amount equivalent to twice the seed is deducted, from which expenses are paid..

This is the Sicilian mezzadria as described by Luigi Sturzo at the beginning of the 20th century.

(Gabriele De Rosa , L’Utopia Politica di Luigi Sturzo, Morcelliana, Brescia 1975.)

(*)As a rule, ordinary people such as peasants did not have surnames in 14th century Tuscany, but I have to assume that "de Casella" was already an established surname, as were surnames all the 140 mentioned.

Taken in isolation this surname may be assumed simply to indicate the provenance of Iacopo ad Piero, this is to say that they might have lived in a house whose place-name was "la Casella", but I would exclude this possibility as it would be the only exception among all the surnames mentioned. Names such as Cione "da Castagno" or other people called "da Pontassieve", reefer to towns and not to hamlets or individual houses as a "Casella" would be.

It must be also borne in mind that up to my grandfather's times the members of my family were generally referred to as "il Casella" (Greek plural form) and not "il Caselli" (Latin genitive form) as now.

Tuscan surnames are as a rule Latin genitives, ours derives from the Latin "Casellius", as attested in an inscription at Pompeii and Caselli is a genitive which signifies "of Casellius". At any rate, the possibilities for the origin of the family are the following:

a) From a "Casellius" such as the one attested at Pompeii (CIL IV, 187 Via di Mercurio/ CIL IV, 3678).

b) From the castle of Caselle near Turin, where the local Longbard lords assumed the surname of Casellis (see: Giuseppe Sergi "Potere e territoriolungo la strada di Francia"Liguori, 1818).

c) The numerous Casellis of Sassuolo, near Canossa (Reggio Emilia), derived from the nobility of Ferrara, and say they were knights of Countess Matilde of Canossa (1046-1115). Countess Matilde was daughter of Boniface marquis of Tuscany, and of countess Beatrice of Lotharingia. This woman ruler was the staunchest supporter of the Pope in the dispute between the Papate and the Empire. Matilde's rule extended over Brescia, Bergamo, Mantova, Arezzo, Siena, Tarquinia, and the Conti Guidi of Casentino were her vassals.