ABSTRACT

This chapter concentrates on a few general themes as they emerge in the ethnography of southern Tuscany, as the mezzadria existed for a thousand years and developed many regional variations throughout Italy. It explores how the share-croppers’ interests were shaped by this and by their incorporation into the Communist Party, a crucial moment in twentieth century Italian politics, both locally and nationally. Share-cropping landlords were at the top of a hierarchy represented ideologically in organic terms: they were the head of the social body, distant from the hands who undertook manual labour. Mixed cultivation patterns, cultura promiscua, remained the rule, and even where the production of some crops was intensified and ‘rationalized’ for the market the share-cropping family was still expected to provision itself from the remainder of the land. By 1919 the situation was transformed and the share-croppers of Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna had become a major component of the two “red years” of massive unrest.