Milli mála - 01.01.2013, Blaðsíða 149
149
of Italy. Migratory currents followed traditional itineraries and were
well-known in every part of Italy. Internal migration (as well as
later emigration to the Americas) was mainly due to conditions of
overpopulation and rural poverty4, and meant that rural workers
frequently had to acquire new skills and adapt to new work situa-
tions and places. For instance, people from the Tuscan Apennines
did not only go to the Maremma for land reclamation, or to Corsica
to work in the charcoal mines; they even went to southern France.
Along the migratory line from Lunigiana (situated between Tuscany
and Liguria) to the area around Brescia, seasonal agricultural
labourers converted themselves from specialised workers in floricul-
ture into small merchants, mostly trading in books (Pizzorusso
2001: 14–15). Certainly, most of the people who periodically
moved from place to place belonged to mountain communities
(shepherds or fruit-pickers/harvesters) or rural communities (peas-
ants). In order to look at the probable origins of certain post-unifi-
cation prejudices concerning emigrants, it is worth noting that in a
strictly-graduated hierarchy of scorn, Italian society considered
these two very categories of citizens as being at the bottom of the
scale. In Italian, the offence implicit in the epithet “peasant” (It.
contadino) was slightly less derogatory than that implied in “moun-
tain man” (It. montanaro) – corresponding to “villain”, “pagan”,
“unsociable”, “rough”, in contrast with “civilised”, “courteous”,
“urban”.5 Before the great migration of the last two decades of the
nineteenth century, the increasing pressure on the rural classes
forced Italian peasants and mountain men to abandon the country
and to move abroad (mainly to other European countries, but also
to the United States), where some of them engaged in so-called
nomadic work in the grey area between vagrancy and mendicancy.
Organ grinders, figurine makers and beggars, as well as homeless
children were undoubtedly the advance guard of the great rural
Italian migration to Europe and to North America (Porcella 2001:
4 As late as the late nineteenth century, according to a mercantilist point of view, population growth
and well-being were coincident factors. In peace, under a good government, the population would
increase indefinitely. There were no reasons for emigration. The Malthusian model (war-famine-
plague) was interpreted by statisticians as a divine punishment brought on by human mistakes,
not as an inescapable consequence of demographic growth (Porcella 2001: 19).
5 Barberis 1997, quoted in Porcella (2001: 38, footnote 38).
STEFANO ROSATTI