ABSTRACT
The South of Italy under the Liberal regime was an area of poverty and economic backwardness, but it did not provide perfect ground for the establishment of revolutionary peasant movements. The essential reason for the failure of stable peasant-based union and political movements was the extreme social ‘disaggregation’1 that characterized the region. In most of the Mezzogiorno there was no sociological foundation for a frontal confrontation between landlords and peasants. Property was fragmented across an entire spectrum that ranged from great latifondisti to landless labourers, with a broad range of intermediate strata. As a result, it was difficult for a clear sense of collective identity to emerge. The difficulty was then compounded by the plurality of economic roles that many peasants filled in the course of the agricultural year. It was common for men to combine bewilderingly the roles of dwarf proprietor, sharecropper and day labourer, with the result that the possibility of their recognizing a community of interests with other cultivators was small.
