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A Fireside Chat
This talk results from a recent illumination: I have a story which
must be told. The story of a long (millenary!) chapter of rural
history which has closed. My Sicilian husband Pino and I were most
fortunate to live a rural lifestyle which had been the backbone
of the Italian economy for a millenium and abruptly concluded in
1977: rural life based on a feudal system of farming called mezzadria
(sharecropping).
We of course did not realize that we were living a way of life which
was about to conclude - or I would have photographed, kept a diary.
I did not take photos in the spring when
we women washed our sheep's wool down in the creek in preparation
for carding which was in preparation for the quilt-making and pillow-making
(but then, have you ever photgraphed yourself doing loading the
washing machine?). Nor did I photograph us hunting the wild mushrooms,
on the trail of the wild asparagus, picking and cleaning wild greens
to cook for dinner (but then, have you ever photographed yourself
at the grocery store?).
No photos taken of preparing the bedwarmers to slide into the icy
sheets in the winter (no heat in our homes), nor of the cleaning
of chickens, rabbits to cook for dinner, nor of chopping wood for
the woodstove, nor of scything grasses for the rabbits with the
huge arc-bladed scythes, nor of the oxen being hitched up to plow.
No photos when my neighbor Chiara taught me to make pasta, roll
out gnocchi.
We simply lived our days on the land as people had lived for centuries.
And then it ended: in 1977, the Italian government abolished the
mezzadria laws. Those mezzadri working the land for landowners
could continue to do so as long as they wished but no new mezzadria
contracts could be undertaken. Mezzo = "half". Our farm
neighbors were nearly all mezzadri, working small plots of land
(10 - 30 acres of non-irrigable hillside land) for landowners. The
landowners actually received "only" 47 % of the yield
of the land and the farmers received a walloping 53% of the yield.
Imagine an extended family of 8-10 people living off 53% of the
yield of 18 acres of hillside land!?
They did. The lived a subsistence level of life which exhibited
l'arte di arrangiarsi ("creative inventiveness")
innate to all Italians: selling wild mushrooms in the fall to buy
the tangerines for Christmas dinners, making the brooms to clean
out the stalls out of the ginestra (Scotch broom), slaughtering
a pig or two in December and turning it into capocollo, salami,
sausages, bacon, prosciutto, lard (the main meat source for all
the family and which could also feed the extra hands who helped
at harvest times).
We were not mezzadri as Pino and I rented our farmhouse and the
surrounding 8 acres of land, supplemented our farmwork with outside
labor (I, teaching, Pino, restoration of medieval architecture)
- and then bought. But - from 1975 to 1982 - we lived as our mezzadri
neighbors did as they were quite simply our only roll models! We
were privileged to live through the wind-up of a millenary period
of history.
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