From fascist rhetoric to roundabouts, Stefano Pivato recalls for the Mill a welfare initiative for children that reached its peak in the 1950s
It was like going a soldier: a farewell to home and dear habits, and forward in double file, he recalled in the book The tree with white flowers
Enzo Biagi, guest of the colony of the X Legio, in Rimini, in the early Thirties. The train carriages had wooden seats, the mothers on the sidewalks waved their handkerchiefs and cried. We were all in uniform and in the briefcase my mother had put the underwear with my initials embroidered with red thread: “Don’t lose it, everything you have”. The vigilantes commanded with energetic and spiteful ways: bathroom, sleep, walk, toilet, snack. Like in the barracks.
Born in the Bolognese Apennines, it was the first time he saw the sea: If I think back on it, I smell a sharp smell of gelatinous marmalade, in tubs. The snack among those sheds. With all that sand…. Meloncholy. One Sunday, I will write in a column in L’Espresso, his father Dario, a worker in a sugar factory, came to see him on the popular train: he was wearing a shirt, tie and jacket. He doesn’t even undo his collar. We sat in a corner, just the two of us. He had a bottle of beer tucked in his pocket. “Are you thirsty?” he asked me. I was a little ashamed, my companions were watching us; he was awkward, awkward, so un-seaside, and I said no. “Are you happy?” he asked me. “Are you having fun?”. I would have liked to go home, to go to Bologna with him, but he had paid 120 lire, the doctor had said it was a good cure for the throat, he said the salt water and iodine were good, and I told him that I had won the running competition. In the suitcase, I showed it to him, there was the medal, with the Duce wearing a helmet…
For hundreds of thousands of Italian children, the historian Stefano Pivato tells in the book Go for summer campsreleased for il Mulino, those first holidays without dad, mom, grandparents, family, all alone entrusted to educators invested by Benito Mussolini with the mission of collaborating in the formation of the new Italian, it was an obligatory rite of passage. The passionate work of the regime for the health of the children of the people knows no stops, thunders a film from Luce of 1935. In fact, systematically boys of both sexes are sent in echelons to the marine and mountain columns to restore the health of the body and that of the spirit . Here are groups of children who leave happy and festive from the Rome station. Puffs of steam, locomotive whistles, flags, mothers with handkerchiefs, choirs of children’s voices: Duce! Duce! Duce!
The first to theorize curative stays for children, writes Pivato, was the Florentine doctor Giuseppe Barellai, which in 1856 had opened its first hospice in Viareggio, in makeshift rooms, arguing that the then devastating scrofula, a tubercular infection that mainly affected malnourished and poorly hygienic children, could be cured thanks to marine cures. Thesis that had immediately convinced, among others, the presbyter and man of letters Giacomo Zanella, author in 1869 of the poem On marine hospices for scrofulous children where he pitied the sick little ones who To the wave, that bland / Sprinkles the banks / Commetton trembling / The limbs are ill alive; / To the waves from the frail / Their foot beaten / They ask for health …
The therapeutic option had gradually spread to various European countries, but what is striking in the twenty years, explains the historian, is that while the structures are erected elsewhere with criteria of spartan essentiality, such as tent cities or wooden barracks, in Italy we are witnessing a veritable monumentalisation of welfare for children. Big spaces, big buildings, big architects. Forced to a life confined to cramped domestic spaces, accustomed to a daily life in which there are no comforts and conveniences, the children experience first-hand the magnificence and generosity of the regime. The emotions experienced in the colony are often destined to produce unforgettable visions on a psychological level. It is no coincidence that the architecture magazines of the 1930s underlined that the aim of the designers was to give the young guests a memory of the structures “that would remain indelible in their memory”. The Le Navi colony in Cattolica, designed by Clemente Busiri Vici, a masterpiece of rationalist architecture built in 9 months, will remain imprinted in Mariangela’s mind: It was all a shining glass: how beautiful and big it was. It was just a ship surrounded by boats.
The numbers say it all: The children assisted by the organizations of the fascist regime increased from around 80,000 in 1927 to 772,000 in 1938. (…) Finally, in 1942, the regime declared the opening of 5,805 colonial settlements for 940,615 children. Almost five times that of neighboring France. Yet, after the war and the fall of fascism, the network of colonies (many destroyed, damaged, transformed into places of imprisonment for defeated Germans, into military hospitals or refugee camps such as a colony in the Bergamo foothills entrusted to the Jewish community to house survivors of the Shoah) is experiencing a season that is no less vital. The censuses will show that out of 247 complexes still existing in the 1980s, 1.2% had been built before 1915, 14.6% between 1915 and 1945, 84.2% after the war.
Inherited in large part from the Pontifical charity set up at the behest of Pius XII, the network already managed from 1946 to organize 995 camps for 256,000 children which in the mid-1950s would rise to 1,800,000. No more gatherings for the raising of the flag, nor enormous spaces for collective gymnastic exercises, nor disproportionate refectories. More roundabouts, more puppet shows, more masses and prayers and reflections in the community. And instead of Black veneer or of the colonial hymn (Wave the Tricolor / the Fascio concerns us / it is advisable that in every heart / a fire always burns) little songs like As soon as the d appears / iu cai d, iu cai d / its light awakens us, / iu cai d, iu cai d… With a few pin pricks like in Rimini at the neighboring lay-managed colonies: Look at the communist children… Say a prayer for them.
It was in the 1960s that the collective ritual of the holiday in the colony began to falter. The permanent job and paid holidays, writes Pivato, bring the family together and the children go to the sea and to the mountains together with their parents, gradually relegating their summer stay in the colony to the attic. And so that the colonies, generally built close to the beach and surrounded by vast green spaces, become the coveted prey of unprecedented building speculation. An assault with irreparable damage.
It would be a pity to forget at least two points in this story. The blatant imbalance of investments on the northern Tyrrhenian and Adriatic coasts compared to the southern ones (only seven colonies in Sicily, two in Sardinia) and the contribution of large private entrepreneurs. Immortal remains in the way the old Gaetano Marzotto explained to Indro Montanelli in 1949 why he was building a marine colony in Jesolo focusing on the performance of employees and workers once they have had a good rest on the beach: I go about ten thousand employees. Suppose you pay them an average of fifteen hundred lire a day each. No xe mal, as it pays. But if of these fifteen hundred lire they have to spend a thousand and four for food, because of misery. And if ghe xe misery ghe xe el communism. E se ghe xe el communism, ghe xe xe strikes and bad produsion. Moral: he could not solve the wage question without containing the costs of eating. For this he produced meat, butter, milk, potatoes and so on, industrializing agriculture. Making sure that the machines did everything: Man must not touch the manure, because the man who touches the manure stinks, and the man who stinks becomes a communist and vice versa. Oh God, maybe it wasn’t quite like that. For…
April 7, 2023 (change April 7, 2023 | 21:59)
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