(Cutline)
Kaurice Rowdon
A Juscan Vaigper
Outlue
145 EAST S2ND STREET
NEW YORK, N.Y. 10022
PLAZA 3-5785


AN OUTLINE
I1 A TUSCAN VILLAGE"
Maurice Rowdon
GEORGES BORCHARDT, INC.
LITERARY AGENCY
145 EAST 52ND STREET
NEWYORK, N.Y. 10022
PLAZA 3-5785


A TUSCAN VILLAGE
Contents
INTRODUCTION.
THE VILLAGE.
3. THE YEARS OF ANGER.
THE NEW MORALITY.
5. CIVIL WAR.
CONCLUSION.
LENGTH OF BOOK, ILLUSTRATIONS.
ROUGH CHAPTER BREAK-DOWN.


A TUSCAN VILLAGE
MAURICE ROWDON
1. INTRODUCTION.
The last War abruptly ended a mediaeval state of affairs
in the Italian countryside.
'Mediaeval' here is not an
emotional description: it refers to an at-one-time sound
agricultural system of mezzadria by which the landowner
was responsible for paying the taxes and for the upkeep of
his holding while sharing the produce 50/50 with the
peasant family living under one of his roofs.
In the
heyday of mezzadria families contained three and sometimes
four generations, eleven and twelve children were usual,
four and five heads to a bedroom (or a bed).
This meant
a strong labour force concentrated in a small area, and
producing the basic necessities of life from grain to olive
oil. The women ground their meal and baked their own
bread. The earth was manured from the stables on the
ground floor, the cattle (their warmth heating the upstairs
rooms in the winter) were fed from the pasture and meal
grown outside the door.
The vines were planted at spacious
intervals to aid their deep- and wide-travelling roots
that searched for water when the upper soil was baked to
cracking, and they leaned for support on young trees.
The olive trees were carefully pruned, usually by one of
the village experts on the subject who made his rounds,
and the earth round the trunks was turned thoroughly and
deeply each year. There was wheat, barley, rye, and grass
for the cattle in the fallow fields.
Beans and maize,
grown among the vines, were especially beneficial for the
earth between them, and the human sewage (today harmful
because it emerges from the pozzi neri or 'black wells'
mixed with kitchen detergent) was eacn year, on two or
three smelly days in the spring, carted round the vineyards
to give the embryonic grapes their most powerful boost of
all.
The weather, apart from fearful dogdays just at the
time of the arduous grain harvest (scything and sheathing were
by hand until ten years ago), was helpful. Indeed, the rich


soil and the rich climate with its mostly clement and
precisely-timed rainfalls combined to make crops spring to
life at the touch of a hand.
The entire peninsula consisted of tiny farming enclaves
of this kind, not too happy in an obvious way but not too
desperate either.
There was health and long life, but on
rather an animal level of existence.
The hospitals were,
not crowded as they are today, there were not the sudden
heart failures and the unexplained early deaths by cancer
(this village has the highest rate in the Sienese area).
In Tuscany, more than elsewhere in the peninsula,
these little enclaves were rich in produce.
The hilly land
was hard to work, for its boulders as well as its slopes,
but.it produced the finest wine in the land and the finest
olive oil.
Today Chianti-region oil (and this applies to
both the 'classical' area and the so-called 'Sienese hills')
fetches nearly twice the price of the sluggieh oil produced
in the Neapolitan area, while the wine sometimes attains an
alcohol content of 13 degrees without 'loading' by sugar or
chemical additives.
After the last War a movement towards the towns began,
gathering pace through the Fifties and encouraged tacitly
by governments obsessed by their industrialisation policies.
Market prices fell, the labour force dwindled further, and
by 1960 it looked as if the bottom would drop out of the
country's agricultural life, at a time when Italy still had
more people working on the land than any other country in
Europe, including France. That was when the mezzadria
system ceased to work and the padrone or proprietor ceased
to derive enough from his 50% to pay the taxes and give
himself an adequate unearned income.
Trade union pressure
from 1960 onwards pushed the peasant's share up to 53% and
more, and then the system was abolished, indeed forbidden
as a relic of the bad old days.
With it went memories of
maltreatment by arrogant agents or fattori, the landowners'
stooges, who did nothing about leaky farmhouses and consider-
ed electricity and running water luxuries.
A few miles
from the village a young woman had plunged to her death down
a well when the brick rim collapsed: the fattore had been


promising to repair it for five years ar more.
The old
order died with bitterness and recrimination.
It was the biggest change since ancient times.
Med-
iaeval Christendom differed less from life under imperial
Rome than this new Italy did from its immediate predecessor,
which only ten years before had seemed set to stay for as
long as people wanted to eat pasta and drink wine. Between
1960 and 1965 landowners sold up their holdings in droves.
The peasants became landworkers on an eight-hour day, living
in shiny apartments with the Box and the Fridge in the kitchen
(the latter put back in its original plastic wrapping for the
winter months).
The transition from a happy dog's life to
a nervous and problematic modern one meant an upheaval to
which few Italians have given more than a passing thought,
though notice it they certainly did.
Everything seemed to
aid it, even the weather.
Between 1960 and 1970, explain it
how you like, the classical Italian weather collapsed, the
seasons went haywire.
There were a series of desperately
wet and even cold summers, which made the land even less
desirable to work than before.
It was no doubt part of a
global weather-switch, but particularly drastic in Italy
because of the soundness and benign regularity of the old
climate, warmed by hot blasts from the Sahara oven, cooled
from the west by the Atlantic, in a well-nigh perfect balance.
In the old days the sun would come up like a great mellow
gong in the morning and go down in a resplendently clear blue
sky of a night.
In Roman apartment houses the central
heating came on at dawn on November 17 and went off on March
17, and that seemed right to the day.
The air had a
marvellous élan in the old days which was in the people too.
The unfailing sun provoked them to a certains sensuous
arrogance.
All that has gone.
Italy became a northern
country.


2. THE VILLAGE.
As for the Italian peasant, his life had differed little in
1950 from what it had been even in Etruscan times when his
plough (used nowadays only for the tricky bends the tractor
can't manage) was first designed. It was he who during those
centuries between turned Italy into Europe's loveliest
garden. With the change in his habits has come a change of
mind, and naturally enough the 'garden' has altered too.
In fact, it has disappeared.
Except in the daydreans
package-tour visitors bring with them.
To anyone interested
in the quick shifts of Italian society it is revealing to
see a foreign tourist humouring and patronising a peasant
who exists only in wishful tourist thinking (after all why
shouldn't he have the holiday he paid for?), and even attempt-
ing 'warm' gesticulations which to the cool and sophisticated
Italian mind, living on the dividends of an enormous Greek,
Roman and Florentine heritage, look completely and endearingly
mad.
SAN GIMIGNANO figures high in the package-tour lists.
It is something to see, this 'little Manhattan' with its
cluster of towers---this untouched jewel of mediaeval arch-
timed te
itecture that dozed from the/ducal Medici, when it gave up
all claim to independence, to that of the Panzer Grenadier
division that lodged in its surrounding fields in 1943.
It is a typically and exclusively rural village in the
province of Siena, without even a railway station much less
a modern highway.
It perches on a volcanic hill about
four hundred metres above sea level, looking much the
same inside its massive walls as it did in the fourteenth
century, only cleaner and altogether less real.
It has
twelve towers (thirteen have been counted but this is an
unlucky number) instead of the seventy-two of its mediaeval
heyday.
The missing sixty fell down in the course of the
centuries in earthquakes, war and above all internecine
argument between one tower and another.
The people of
San Gimignano have always been known as an obstreperous
lot---who settled local scores with boiling oil and boulders.
Their neighbours in Colle val d'Elsa will tell you that


this is why they declined from the prominence of a pros-
perous market town to a pretty satellite of first Volterra
and then Florence. Dante harangued the people, as well
he might, from the balcony of the town hall which is still
there today.
Ghirlandaio, Barna da Siena, Benozzo Gozzoli,
Bartolo di Fredi---these were some of the painters who found
the village solvent enough to take on commissions there.
The cathedral alone, approached by a vast outdoor staircase
that provides a gallery for the open-air opera performances
of today, testifies to its pride.
The main square has a
tall fountain in its centre---though not so much in its
centre as to be unsympathetic: the curling sidelanes and
crooked squarelets show a mediaeval distaste for symmetry.
The houses bustling round the main square give no sign of
any life later than the sixteenth century, except for the
glassy eye of the first-class hotel in one of its corners
where a pet raven with clipped wings used to walk and talk.
Now the hotel parking lot hides him.
There is one main
street rising from the Etruscan gate on the south of
Poggibonsi side to the 'square of the fountain' and dropping
down to the north or Certaldo gate on the other side.
If you take the other lane out of the square, between some
of the village's most imposing façades, at one time frescoed,
you get to the prison, which houses murderers and other
confirmed criminals who must pass many years 'at the univer-
sity', as Italianssay. Until a couple of years ago it
became quite a usual thing for Sicilian convicts there to
alam
break loose in twos and threes and seare the local farms.
Then the Sicilian governor was shifted somewhere else.
Like many other hilltop towns San Gimignano came into
being during the Roman decline as an escape from malaria
and brigands in the plains.
It had a much earlier life--
hence the Etruscan gates---and was probably a fortress in
Roman times, like Todi in Umbria. But the intimate shape
of the San Gimignano we know, its sidelanes hugged between
cavernous small-windowed houses with workshops and cellars
on their ground floors, argue the post-Roman yearning for
security.
The village had no river, unlike Colle val


d'Elsa, and it was off any usual military line of advance
(which blessing did a lot to preserve the entire province).
That was how the village's air of detachment and vague use-
lessness came into being: as early as the sixteenth century
it became a place where landowners liked to relax in the
summer months, cooled by the 'traitor' as San Gimignano's
evening breeze, bringing rheumatic twinges to unsuspecting
bare shoulders, is called.
Today in the summer months tourist buses arrive dis-
gorging between 500 and 1000 tourists a day, which in a
village with a population of under 10,000 is quite a hand-
ful.
They tell the shopkeepers in all languages (even in
Italian now that tourism has hit the peninsula, together
with other consumer attitudes) that this is a paradise on
earth :
The shopkeepers---who want to stay in business--
have learned to stomach their astonishment and clar a sour
ane lime ald the
smile on their faces. Ar EE EmeTr tourists were foreign-
ers, and foreigners were considered mad anyway.
Now the
Italians---driving over from Modena and Trento and Milan
and Apuglia---have gone mad too.
Well, from dogs to
cristiani (meaning 'human beings') in under twenty years--
it's enough to drive any nation crazy. The villagers look
on the new world with more money in their pockets than ever
before---and less sense of security.
This book is mainly about the people it happened to--
the peasants in the surrounding fields who before the last
War were laughed out of the village as scarecrows if they
put their noses inside and it wasn't market day.
There is
Dino Pasticcini, nicknamed 'Ganga' by his workmates,
'Bongini' in town and 'Pasticcio' (mess) by his younger
relatives.
He looks like an Etruscan, gay and erect and
wdetherbeaten, in his working clothes, and an English county
gentleman in his Sunday best.
There is Guido Agnarelli
('Il Brigante') who fought in the Albanian war and had a
chip on his shoulder long before it came into fashion.
There is benign and softly-spoken Bruno Masi who keeps
pictures of Lenin and Stalin on the wall where a madonnina
should be, and his son whose face is out of Botticelli and
whe has smashed up two or three motor scooters.
There is


Bruno Rossi who always leaves his shirt hanging out of
a hole in his trousers when he walks to the village of an
evening and, like his brother before him, dead now, puts
the words compagnta bella at the end of nearly all his
sentences, meaning 'lovely female company' but on his lips
something like 'and all that rot'.
There is the young
shepherd who married a Sicilian girl and milked so hard
to make money that his neighbours called him 'il filisteo'.
There is Pietro who as a boy twelve years back painted
delicate little devotional pictures and threw his truck-
driver's licence into the pig trough so that he couldn't
work.
He found a job in Germany and came back 'a prince',
as everyone said, with money enough in his pocket to buy
his mother, widowed in the war, a small farm of her own.
She is tiny and bent almost double and toothless, and her
three sons love her so much that none of them has married.
Now Pietro is a smart chauffeur in Florence, and eats with
his elderly employers because his talk amuses them so.
His brother Gianni found work in Germany too, following his
example, but he returned after two weeks saying that they
had no spaghetti there. Not one of these is any more in
a tied farmhouse---except Bruno Masi, the most deeply and
intelligently convinced communist of them all, and he still
abides by the old system of mezzadria, just to keep life
asymmetrical!
All of them remember the old order with nausea and
are doing well in the new. Even now they seem unable
quite to believe that their liberation came about.
Little
wonder that they wander into the village of an evening with
their hands in their pockets, just to watch---to absorb
and digest this unexpected variety. A busload of girls
from BynMawr or Mount Holyoke might be arriving for a
summer congress, or Zeffirelli's team might be setting the
cameras up for a scene with Valentina Cortese, or a huge
vintage Rolls might pull up outside the Fountain Hotel'
and awhole pop-group crawl. out like scraggy old witches
fresh from a mortuary.
A strange world to unfold #
Sidden- -and without the slightest effort on one's part.


For militant trade unionism never existed in Italy.
The people had always been most unrebellious and sweet-
tempered where politics were concerned: that was observed
by Giuseppe Baretti, one of Italy's greatest literary
lions (and so rebellious that Italian secret police pursued
him all over Europe) over two centuries ago.
Democracy
hit Italy all of a sudden, at the end of the last War,
together with its alter ego, industrial capitalism.
It was a foreign import.
The two great donors were the
USA and the USSR: the USA donated by way of investments,
while its Sixth Fleet patrolled the Mediterranean, and
the USSR donated a new morality.
The result was perhaps
the most immoral Italy since the decay of the Roman empire.
Oply the worst of the popes would have felt at home.
for the democracy, it was like the new morality---a hoax.
3. THE YEARS OF ANGER.
on a large Scale.
From 1960 on farmhouses began to be abandoned HE
E E
For a time they were to be bought for a song from landlords
unable to cope with the new world they saw coming.
A few
foreigners bought the damp, rooflessburrows and started
converting them---regarded as madmen locally for wanting
to live where only dogs had lived hitherto.
Then the
Italian middle class caught on, as city conditions proved
not to be such a joy as they expected.
There was a rush
to get weekend places, and the prices soared.
They came
from Milan, Rome, Florence, in that order chronologically.
A quiant volte face took place: a middle class which had
based its entire figura or image on being town-based,
visiting the country for brief and contemptuous glances
at the fattore's books, now occupied the farmhouses while
peasants sat with their feet up in dainty apartments
watching the latest pop festival on the Box.
And benefits rained down on the peasant faster than
even he thought quite sane.
Inside ten years he became
a land-worker with an eight-till-five job (with a two-hour


siesta in the shade for some) where before he had slaved
witt
from dawn till dusk-- ax
ad =
the cattle
to feed and bed down.
His Saturdays were now free.
His holidays were paid and even rainy days (latest concession
of all) were considered no fault of his.
There is a
national health scheme, partly to cope with the hypochondria
that set in with the E leisure.
Dino Pasticcini even
began to complain, 'We get too much money'.
He was not
used to being sought after. His labour had become precious.
He had to get used to feeling self-respect.
It wasn't
easy.
How did it happen?
It wasn't all pressure from the
formidable communist party (San Gimignano is very red,
but then the same is said of every village and market town
though Communiam
in the peninsula), EM did benefit enormously after the
last War from the disceediting of the owner class, after
its association with fascism.
Nor could any amount of
trade union pressure have revived a sagging agriculture.
The fact is that Tuscany was given a new injection of
blood by those middle-class people who bought up the farm-
houseshnd---only incidentally, it seemed at the time---the
land that went with them.
Business-men from Genoa and
Livorno as well as the great cities began to invest in
concentrated vineyards, now that the world was thirsty
for wine. The politicians went in for it too---Malagodi,
Chancellor of the Exchequer 19712, developed his vast
farm near Siena, Ofivetti bought up large holdings a stone's
throw from San Gimignano, one-time prime minister Fanfani
did the same. When both business men and politicians
want to do something badly in Italy it becames an act of
parliament.
So the state began pouring out vast subsidies
to help anyone who wished to help slake the world-thirst.
Help was also available if you wanted to rebuild outhouses,
or repair farmhouses (provided they were not for resigential
purposes).
If you wanted to live in the house and get a
grant as well you installed a few oxen in the empty cattle
shed for a day, during the inspector's visit.
(I myself
tried that one but the inspector arrived frefore the oxen).


Highly advantageous state loans were available for invest-
ment in new farming enterprises, and straight cash benefits
(up to 70% of the total cost) for any peasant who worked
'airect' (that is, owned his land) and wanted up-to-date
machinery.
There was a scramble to rip up the old vines
and flatten the slopes with bulldozers, to make vineyard-
maintenance easy and indeed mechanically possible; cement
poles sprang up everywhere, supporting wires; fresh young
plants began to peep up, with just room enough between the
rows for a hoeing tractor to pass.
With one hectare of
concentrated vineyard you can, after five years of careful
nursing, produce around ten thousand litres of wine a year:
One worker can manage a hectare comfortably, so long as he
has the right machinery for hoeing and copper-sulphate
spraying.
Against the market price of the wine has to
be put not only his labour but that of a squad brought in
for the harvest, together with machingery- and cellar-
maintenance, sulphur and copper sulphate and fertiliser,
and the minimal land-tax.
Even writing off the first
five years as capital-expenditure does not impede an early
proft margin.
And the more hectares you have the more
that margin is.
One Roman gentleman with a holding three
miles from the village got so enthusiastic about it all
that he ploughed up one hectare of land annually for a new
purpose CBCHE + Eme- from vineyard to olive grove to turkey
farm---and got a handsome subsidy each time.
They Et tumblad
him in the end: someone in the agricultural department
at Siena had been paid too little---and he was obliged
to pay back a portion of what he had filched, in bribes
of course, to keep the matter out of the courts.
It isn't so easy for the poor when they're in a fix.
As Bruno Masi found when his eldest son Marino was killed
by a truck on the perilous Poggibonsi-Certaldo four years
ago.
But then it is an understood thing that when something
like twenty million lire has to change hands in insurance-
money lawyers and other interested parties should step in
and take a fair lick of it.
If you are an unprotected
sort of individual you may end with just enough to pay


your personal expenses.
Masi stood his ground against a
false police report and a lawyer's suggestion that he settle
for a small sum out of court (the lawyer would have taken
his whack from the truck-firm).
But the lawsuit is still
pending.
In Italy the law has always tended fo work for
those with power, against those without.
The prisons are
packed with legally innocent people awaiting trial (in some
cases for years).
Yet the press is fairly outspoken on
occasion.
The 'poor' of today are rich men compared with
their grandfathers.
But this is due more to frg foreign
pressure than to Italian.
The communist party and the
trade unions thrived under this pressure, not from any
indigenous dynamic force.
So the law tends to operate as
it always did.
The new morality mitigates its operations
here and there.
But the old stark facts remain.
THE NEW MORALITY.
The Church was, in the old order, Italy's greatest balancer
and saboteur.
It provided a centre of interests for all
Italians, a kind of market of jobs and sinecures, not to say
influence.
It had holdings and tax-assessors in every part
of Europe.
This was a decisive factor operating against
any religious reform movement inside the country. It was
why Savanorola was burned at the stake and quickly forgotten
had seen
by masses of people who not ten years before/s him as the
greatest man in Italy. It meant that the Reformation, when
n Countnes
it happened, was a foreign movement: that is,L where Rome
was the revenue-collector and not the benefactor. Too
many Italians derived too much from Rome to want to alter
the Church on a mere matter of conscience.
And this unity
of interests cut through the different power-interests of the
various Italian states---Milan, Venice, Naples, Florence.
Yet it also made unity impossible.
More than any other
force in Italian life.it delayed political unification until
as late as 1860.
It produced in the Italian a contempt
towards any sort of idealism, and a corresponding attach-


ment to the current status quo, a fact which partly explains
the weakness of the communist party relative to its spectac-
ular membership e
Still today, despite the massive debunking
it has had over the past thirty years, from its own ranks too,
the Church wields a formidable internal influence: the world's
most powerful free-floating institution, with 500 million
devotees in every part of the world---there perhaps lies the
reason why there has been no communist takeover.
Historically, the Church made sure that it remained
Italy's only means of unification, its only true centre,
by steadily preventing great military states like Milan,
and empires like Venice, and the virtually foreign kingdom
of the Two Sicilies, from ever holding the field alone.
did this by embroiling them with each other, and by constant-
ly threatening to bring foreign armies down into the penin-
sula.
This policy of remaining in the ascendent at what-
ever cost to Italian life was the most disastrous single
blight on the country's history.
It meant that while he looked to Rome for advancement
the Italian bore a deep sense of hur t towards her.
Anti-
clericalism entered the blood, and is still today something
of a national tic. For the Church has never been an easy
opponent.
More than any other factor in Italian life it
one
brought peace from/end of the peninsula to the other: dur-
ing the eighteenth century" the"country slept in its arms
serenely while foreign armies went to and fro engaging eack
other in polite battles, near places that their officers
regarded as musts in the Grand Tour.
The gate at Citta
di Castello records how in 1860 the town at last 'awoke
from the sad rule of the popes' by throwing out papal
troops.
Life was sad, yes, but safe. The Church's
grandest achievement, the Italian family, an institution
which overides all other social loyalties and cuts through
business, friendship and politics, proved that Rome was
not just out for power in itself.
Her priests were often
barely literate, and sometimes plain bad men.
They in-
variably lived with a 'sister' (they still do), who rarely
looked anything like them.
This 'concubinage', as the
historians call it, was simply a recognition of human needs.


Even Don Dino---the nearest our village has ever got to
Luther, even in looks---lives with his 'sister'. He is
soft-spoken and pale.
He tried to get his 'niece' (she
does look like him) into a convent but she had an illegit-
imate child instead, and a marriage was hastily arranged.
He is our 'believing' priest, and the peasants feel a
grudging respect for him. The priest of the little hamlet
called Sciuscano is quite different.
He works the land
below his church and is bronzed like a chalice.
He was
once seen running across the fields with his skirts
tound
bunched up round his waist.
He had just beehgin bed with
somebody's wife---and jumped out of the window.
But then
he has no sister.
And he's a communist anyway---he
shouts at the top of his voice and bangs the table about
bishops like card-holders do about bosses.
Now for him
the peasants feel no respect at all.
Don Silvano, who
belongs to the cathedral and looks like a bank clerk,
tall and cleanshaven, has the habit of coming into the
food-store opposite the cathedral-steps every Friday
morning and making enquiries about the state of the frozen
fish, it being his fast-day.
Then he decides that the
fish isn't fresh, so it's got to be a lamb cutlet after
all. The young shopkeeper, one of his closest friends,
who has stomach cramps bacause he cannot bring himself to
believe in God, though he knows He exists, plays the game
with him to the end.
Now these peasant-priests talked to the peasants on
a level they understood.
They planted fear---when fear
of being overruled was in their own hearts.
And fear,
more than any other human emotion, rules---or did until
recently---the Italian mind.
The recent liberation of
the peasant class has above all been a liberation from
perpetual fear, dominating almost every desire and thought
that could not be squared with the platitudes taught by
the priests (emerging in cliches which are as fixed today
as they ever were.
Fear accompanied every lonely act from the sex act
to filling in a form.
It accounted for the fact that


incest was (and remains) the most practised form of love.
A dynamic thing like sex desire was best kept in the
family, especially as it burned fierce in the sweltering
summer months. Probably no country in the world has a
sex life so deeply hidden in the recesses of the home,
nor so universally perverted for that reason. A young
girl, unable to hold her desires under male importunation,
may 'have it behind' like a homosexual before marriage,
to stay a virgin.
For the importance of virginity is its
being a mark of differentiation from the prostitute.
Innocence, in Ee fact the whole experience of 'falling in
love' (with its origins in the Provencal troubadour's
idealisation of women, never strong in Italy) is rendered
impossible by a family life which monopolises all romance,
nostalgia, yearning and early erotic excitement, leaving
to the distant outside world prostitution.
It is why
une
Italians can behave with such ruthlessness towards eac
another,
OLTeE if they belong to different families, and why
collective conscience is minimal.
Before television came alonsthe veglia or evening
'wake', when peasants sat round each other's doorsteps
talking and joking into the late hours, there were two
great subjects of conversation---ghosts and the Devil.
All animals had a touch ofthe devil, especially black
ones. w A moving bush---ar'-triexpectrexpêcted light in the woods--
there were a hundred things in nature to terrify the human
heart and make people hug together in a mutual horror of
privacy.
After dark only the foolhardy stayed in a
house alone.
Fear accounted for the crowded bedrooms
(and beds) of the Italian home far more than shortage of
space. No one envied the charcoal burner's job in the
depths of the woods, over long silent nights with the owl
flying and the leaves whispering.
The loudness of Italian
conversation in the dead of night is an act of exorcisation.
Keeping the voice down sounds conspiratorial.
The
clichés of conversation, too, are a form of clinging to
the safe.
Only in the bosom of the family do you really
talk.


One creature was never made to fear, and never excited
fear: the child---the crown of Italian life---the one area of
unstinted delight, into which the peasant poured all the
happiness which might, given a world that did not thwart
him and tame him daily by intimidation, have gone into real
life.
The child learns early to delight in its sex parts.
And those who draw its attention to them have familiar
faces which he will know and trust all his life: the only
real faces he will ever perhaps recognise.
Little wonder
that the country's recent liberation caused perplexity--
yes, real unrest---when all H a suddenlythe outside world,
not only other villages but other countries, asked through
television and newspapers and highways that joined cities
in a few minutes, not to say jet planes, to have their
faces recognised as real too.
Yet the family remains the
only true area of action, as virginity retains its hold as
a guarantor of previously unhandled goods in the marriage
market.
The family means not parents and children but an
army of cousins and in-laws who owe their first loyalties
one another.
to encot - RE E
As for the friend, he is seen at the bar
or the cinema, and he is less likely to see into your home
than a complete stranger.
For the liberation, while quick, was not wild. It
was curbed and slowed down by the very men and women who
benefited from it.
The surface has changed.
Women can
earn now, as they can wear trousers and drive a car. But
the daughter may still be spied on in the most candid way,
by father and brother, and she may very likely condone this.
Liberation refers to the outer man, hardly at all to the
inner. For the Italian is perhaps the world's deepest
and most natural reactionary.
In the preparation of all this the Church played a
major part, probing deep into family life and ensuring,
with benign tact and forbearance, that hardly a private
thought passed through the peasant-mind without a self-
warning system---'run back to the fold'---flashing itself
on. Little wonder, then, that when the Church's social
hold finally cracked after the last war with the pope's
threat to excommunicate all communists, a substitute, as
authoritarian and patriarchal, had to be found. This
is il Partito.


hip.
Usually, this communist party headquattersk a cafe and a
large billiard hall.
There you will get the latest party
line, and personal advice if you need it, and help.
is the new area of integrity and moral authority, replacing
the priest.
You will hear, too, about the latest strike,
whether you are required to stay at home and work your own
plot of land or to 'strike' by not working somebody else's.
During the Hungarian rising you were told that Soviet tanks
had moved in because 'the Hugarians are so badly organised'.
In the recent Middle East war you were told why you must
transfer your loyalties from the Jews, whom you admired,
to the Arabs, whom you hated: it was because Israel had
become a tool of the grande borghesia, a magic phrase now
for the peasant-mind.
Like the Church, the communist party
has to be a comforter (and the impressive list of benefits
that brought the Italian peasant level with workers in
Northern Europe was due to constant communist pressure and
threat) and yet fearful too: a global institution capable
of dictating a way of life, with no quarter.
Today young communists for whom fascism is history and
the Church simply laughable are getting elected to town
councils and in many cases proving more efficient than their
predegcessors.
It has happened to San Gimignano and for
the first time farmhousesoutside-the village may soon be
gettinga adequate water-supplyawzoads and electricity.
There will even be a swimming pool like Colle val d'Elsa's,
erected at the Party's expense and looking rather bleak
like a pleasure park behind the Iron Curtain.
The town
council has negotiated the young Guicciardini out of the
Rocca or village castle, which his family has occupied for
centuries, by discovering in the archives that it was only
leased to the family by annual renewal.
Yes, Italy is
cleaning itself up at a remarkable rate under this new
morality, while simultaneously industry, on which the new
morality depends for its funds and indeed survival, is
turning the land into the vilest and most polluted cesspit
in the Mediterranean.
The cholera scare of 1973 woke the
world up to the real state of affairs in Europe's little
garden. And even that was only reported to the newspapers


by half, some say a quarter.
5. THE CIVIL WAR.
In Naples, they discovered during the epidemic, there
were eight rats in the sewers to every head of population.
The contents of the sewers (never before examined) were
found to contain enough cholera bacteria to infect the
entire peninsula.
These sewers were built in 1870, and
had never been modified. The entire Naples basin was
a breeding ground of disease.
Mussles, breeding on the
seabed and performing a needed function by absorbing the
impurities, absorbed the cholera as well.
Nor had anyone
thought to control industry.
Hundreds of cattle
had in the course of the previous ten years died in the
areas south of Naplesbecause of the poisoned state of the
canals leading from the city.
The figures of cholera-
victims were quoted in Naples and Bari at 100 or more,
but some say that thousands were involved, and that the
same had happened in previous years without it getting to
the press.
RAI, Italy's state television, failed to
cover the story with anything like thoroughness, and were
told so publicly in the columns of the Corriere della
Sera, Milan's hardhitting rightw ing newspaper; RAI
demanded the dismissal of the editor-in-chief and filed
a lawsuit for damages.
The government (after a long time)
generously came forward and offered to pay for the de-
pollution of the Naples basin, that is to tackle in one
small area a nation-wide problem it had not even begun to
recognise in its serioueness.
It was never as bad as that in Tuscany---though,
true, the Versilian coast has the highest rate of hepatitis
in the world apart from the New York coastline.
And
the cholera scare brought in some local reforms that filled
a few private pockets. For instance, you could no longer
buy fresh milk from the village's two milk shops.
It had
to come from a factory in Siena, pasteurised and packaged.


It cost slightly more to the consumer, and slightly less
to the farmer who produced it. As it was a convenient
arrangement for the shops, and appealed to the hunger for
modernity that hit the village with the liberation, it
stayed.
The provincial government tried to ban all local
fruits and vegetables but it didn't work.
You were told
in the' shops, 'We can't sell any local stuff but we've
got excellent local peaches, pears, grapes, and of course
all the usual vegetables.'
That was as far as the scare
touched the village---some ineffectual government rhetoric,
and much repetition of the old saw that there were two
Italys not one, the north. and the south.
But the situation in Naples was only that of Italy
writ large.
Laws on water-purification have operated in
countries north of the Alps since 1900.
In Italy they do
not yet exist.
A factory-owner who is fined for tipping
refuse into a river can stay laughing, since the fine is
an infinitesimal part (still about 60 dollars) of what
filtering machinery would cost.
The same with the atmos-
phere.
Anything can be belched into it: a reason why
a constant damp haze hangs summer and winter over the
rate,
fields of Tuscany, and clear days are i = phemsmenel.
A complete system for dealing with the problem was presented
to par.laiment in 1967---and promptly thrown out.
So was
any effort to repair- the imbalanee- between north and south.
More than 10,000 families are registered as 'poor' in
Naples, meaning below the subsistence line.
1000 families
are without a roof.
There are 300000 unemployed or under-
employed.
This was the root of the cholera plague, which
chose largely the poor for its victims.
It proved another
saw, a post-war one, that 'Italy has no government'.
But
better una democrazia marcia than la dittatura (a rotten
democracy is preferable to a dictatorship )-fhat is, tie an
agreement to exercise no authority in order to avoid the
only authority to which the Italian mind is accustomed,
Tule try fear,
namely ene-that ER
EVE
This is the stalemate
that produces something like civil war, as the two extremes,
namely the minority of militants on the left and the right,
get angrier.
A cafe in Lido di Camaiore is burned to the


ground---some vendetta involving the proprietor and two
youngsters selling Unità, the communist party newspaper.
A deputy finds his wife and children burned to 1 death in
his Rome apartment (lighted petrol was poured under the
A wealthy publisher is found dead at the foot of
a pylon outside Milan, one of his legs blown off and a
small truck full of explosives parked nearby.
A man
under interrogation for anarchist activities is thrown
to his death from a window in Milan.
A few years later
one of the policemen in the room with him at the time is
shot dead in the street.
The story goes on, month by
month, exciting little attention in the rest of the world.
Will the liberation be like all those other lesser ones
in Italian history---a short respite from tension?
a communist takeover a serious possibility, or only a
stimulant to fascism as it was in the early Twenties?
Have the Italian people woken up to the loveliness of the
garden they live in only because it is ceasing to be a
garden?
Will violence seep into their lives as the price
to be paid for benessere or prosperity?
Is it possible
to shake off one master without inheriting a new?
Is the disappearance of old fears simply a clearing of the
scene for new ones?
The villagers feel adequately paid
at last, but is this only because money has lost its value?
And, most deeply felt: HES t4
1 most Italian quest-
ion of all: are the people always destined to suffer, by
some eternal law? will they pay heavier for these benefits
than ever they paid for slavery? So, in the village,
floodlit at night, always buzzing with tourists, still
peaceful, with open-air concerts and operas and plays
every year, and an . art gallery or two, and every evidence
of an increasingly vivid local life, there is a new uneasiness
which makes the land-worker, the shopkeeper and the bank-clerk
a man under pressure quite as if he were living in the
middle of a great city, yet with silence all round him,
and scents that should heal, and fields that have barely
altered their aspect inkive centuries.
Not surprising
that his smile is sour when a day-tourist tells him it's


paradise.
For paradise, like hell, is inside.
CONCLUSION.
For a handful of years during Lorenzo de' Medici's
government of Florence in the fifteenth century Italy
was at peace.
It was felt to be an extraordinary thing.
A chronicler wrote that the only wars were 'between cats
and dogs and birds in the trees'.
It ended, suddenly,
with the assassination of the Duke of Milan. The
country returned to its customary upheav. als---state
against state, class against class.
Yet throughout it
all the Italian has retained a formidable balance.
Deep in his character lies a safety-valve: his eye is
firmly fixed on the question of survival.
However rich
today, he knows he may have his back to the wall tomorrow.
All his real concentration goes into that.
The rest is
froth---even the upheavals.
He is the world's finest
improvisor, and tightest spender.
It is why a valid
book on Italian life must be a personal one, about a part-
icular place, because otherwise the carefully chosen public
veils behind which he lives (including the veil of upheav-
al) cannot be pierced (1).
In a most paradoxical way Italy always succeeds in
being contemporary.
Behind her implacable wall of rhetoric
and hypocrisy a disabused intelligence is continually at
work, in the remotest village as in the city.
Mezzadria,
a plainly mediaeval system, survived only because it
worked.
The Church, or rather its headquarters in Rome,
survived because it paid.
In Italy there was never much
sentimentality towards the past, nor neurotic expectations
of an ideal future.
Old buildings were disregarded or
(1) Fascism was one of the great shared public veils.
No one was more mortified than Mussolini when 'that monk'
as he called Hitler, on the basis of his, Mussolini's,
ideas, smashed Europe to pieces!


despised.
Yet they weren't torn down.
The Italian
has other ways of being contemporary than by physical
demonstration.
And thepublic veils he chooses---that
of an apparently mediaeval system, or an apparently
liberated technological one---are only a few of the
many he could choose (including diabolical ones).
has always known how terrible it would be, for himself
and for the world, if he tore the veils down to reveal
HIMSELF!
As a festival-organiser in Assisi said to me
quietly on the eve of that town's magical Calendimaggio,
'If we ruled the world we'd behave unthinkably--
horrifyingly.
In his heart of hearts every Italian
knows that.'
It tips government continually towards
the authoritarian, and society towards the Mafia.
7. LENGTH OF BOOK AND ILLUSTRATIONS.
Length: 80,000 words.
Illustrations: 10 plates, 100 black and white, consisting
of photographs of the village and the surrounding country,
the old look of the land compared with the new look, the
local faces, the peasants at work in the old way and the
land-workers of today with tractors, and some reproductions
of landscapes by the Sienesermasters to show how little the
land has changed in 5 centuries.
The enclosed proofs are
by Bill Zimmermann, Rome.


ROUGH CHAPTER BREAK-DOWN
1. An introduction, as above: a description of the
great social change which came about in Italy from
1960, and the consequent change in attitudes.
The
greatest change since Roman times.
2. A description of the village, and some glances at
the Tuscan geography---Posgibonsi, Certaldo, Colle val
d'Elsa and the mother-town of the colline senese, Siena.
The village is situated in Chianti country but not
'classical'.
3. An introduction to the main characters in the book,
the local peasants: their looks, their nicknames, their
homes, their memories and forebodings.
4. The state of agriculture before 1960, and Tuscan
ferming traditions: the bull-oxen the chief means of
locomotion on the land, the cow for milk and breeding,
the offspring for cattle. No grazing land; grass cut
and taken to the cattle-shed for further cutting. The
crops; the styles of planting---vines, olive trees;
willows for tying back the pruned vine-shoots in the
spring. The grain-, wine- and oil-harvests; the
year's activities---spring pruning and hoeing, the
summer spraying, the cellar-work of the autumn. The
inherited knowledge of the seasons, when to plant, at
what stage of the moon etc.
5. The collapse of agriculture after the last war due
to the state's over-concentration on industrial policies,
designed to give Italy a new look as a modern state.
Yet Italy still had more workers on the land than any
other European state including grain-rich France.
6. The big liberation' that happened when the urban
middle class began moving into the cheap farmhouses and
converting them into weekend pleasure haunts.
Their
investment in new vineyerds and olive groves, with
heavy subsidisation from the state, which had woken up
to the lucrative possibilities of exploiting land-space
to the full instead of planting vinès according to the
*tree system' or on unmanageable slopes. The quality
of the wine went down, the price up; and the wine crooks
began to abound.
7. The rapid physical change the local landscape went
through, with slopes bulldozed and rationalised. It
wasas drastic as
the change in the peasant's life. He
becape a land-worker, starting work at eight and ending
at five, compared to dawn-to-dusk work of the old days.


And he now lives in a town apartment with his Box and
his Fridge, rather perplexed that the middle class should
have moved into the despised country. With difficulty
he gets used to self-respect. The fear in which he used
to live, and the Church's role in this.
Still today,
no one likes to talk about the Devil disrespectfully.
8. The role of the trade unions and the communist party.
They bring the peasant level with workers in the rest of
Europe, with a national health scheme, pensions, paid
holidays etc.
The communist party also prodided a new
centre of social life and moral guidance, displacing the
Church in this. A glance at the village's partito.
9. The unexpected nervous complications introduced by
prosperity and long leisure hours. 'People aren't so
friendly'. The high incidence of heart failure and
cancer. Car accidents claim local victims: all contrib-
ute to certain disillusion.
Violence felt to be approach-
ing the village.
Foreboding together with the sense of
freedom: 'we used to worry so much'.
The new village
organisation: young communists in charge.
But the old
status quo, like the old fascist laws and the old weighting
of the legal system towards the powerful are still there,
and the older ex-peasants are aware that none of this
liberation may be more than a passing recognition of
pressures from abroad.
10. The conclusion as above.
Neither the miseria
of the old world nor the benessere of the new shake the
formidable balance that the Italian has achieved through
the centuries.
He has been in too much trouble ever to
sit back and take it easy.
His new attitudes (including---
perhaps especially---his communism) are simply public
veils over a life led much as it always was, with the eye
firmly fixed on the question of survival, and day to day
practical realities.
Even the hidden 'civil war' in
which he finds himself, between extremists of the left
and the right, is only a continuation of the upheavals
that have rocked Italy since the decline of the Roman
empire: these upheavals too are in the end subsidiary,
as each man looks after himself and his own, and lets the
rest of the world go to that ever-present witness of
Italian affairs, the Devil.
This story of howthe liberation happened to San Gimignano
will unfold strictly in descriptions of people and their
homes, quoting conversations and incidents and many 'wakes'
over the last ten or twelve years, with the occasional
support of a wider glance at the whole of Italy, and some
history when necessary, a mention of what the newspapers
said, and some local statistics.


PREVIOUS BOOKS BY MAURICE ROWDON ON ITALIAN SUBJECTS
ITALIAN SKETCHES
(GOLLANCZ)
A ROMAN STREET
(GOLLANCZ)
COLLINS COMPANION GUIDE TO UMBRIA
THE FALL OF VENICE (WEIDENFELD/PRAEGER)
LORENZO THE MAGNIFICENT (WEIDENFELD/REGNERY)
FORTHCOMING
LEONARDO DA VINCI (WEIDENFELD GREAT LIVES)


DINO PASTICINNI, WHOSE NICKNAMES ARE GANGA, BONGINI
AND PASTICCIO, IN THAT ORDER OF IMPORTANOE.


TOBY, FOR LONG THOUGHI A DEVIL


Watching the sun go down in the aia or courtyard, once
used for threshing and the drying of maize, now for sun
bathing.
In the distance a new concentrated vineyard
on a formerly steep and rugged slope.


THE AUTHOR AT WORK UNDER HIS VINE PERGOLA