2023-08-19 21:43:06
by GIAN ANTONIO STELLA
Huge differences in income, access to food, housing. Seventy years ago a documentary, on the conditions denounced by the Parliamentary Commission, was presented at the Venice Film Festival. Come back now restored
In the valleys of the Alps and the Apennines, and also in the plains, especially in Southern Italy, and even in some of the best cultivated provinces of Upper Italy, there are hovels where in a single smoky room devoid of air and light live together men, goats, pigs and poultry. And such hovels number perhaps in the hundreds of thousands. And here it is, the video of that dramatic denunciation of the Agrarian Inquiry on the conditions of the agricultural class conducted by a Parliamentary Council chaired by Stefano Jacini from 1877 to 1885. A woman with a cap on her head fills a bucket of water from a barrel: behind of her, in the same room, there are a donkey, a pig, three hens, a rabbit…
But how: a decade before the Lumire brothers projected the famous arrival of a train at La Ciotat station, i.e. the first documentary in history? This is the point: the filmed images of the extreme misery of those airless and lightless hovels are not from the end of the 19th century: they are from 1953. But they could have been filmed the same way, if the camera had already been invented, seven decades Before. Because nothing had changed, in so many decades, for a large part of Italian peasants, southern and beyond.
And this, with a series of data, memories and testimonies that our country wanted to erase from memory, the powerful impact of The Parliamentary Inquiry into Poverty, the documentary by the Istituto Luce which on 8 September (6.00 pm , Hotel Excelsior del Lido) will be shown at the Venice Film Festival seventy years after the first screening at the 14th International Film Festival in 1953. A real film report signed by the director Giorgio Ferroni to complete the activity of the Parliamentary Commission which between 1951 and 1954 investigated the living conditions in the Alpine mountain areas, the Po Delta, the Abruzzo mountains, the entire South, the suburbs of Milan, Rome, Naples.
A formidable and disturbing report that showed how, almost a hundred years after the Unification, Italy was split in three: a relatively contained poverty in the North (3.1% in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, 2.3 in Veneto, 1 .4 in Lombardy, 0.3 in Piedmont…), a heavy one in the Center (7.1% in Umbria, 10 in Lazio…) and a frightening one in the South: 22.7% of poverty in Sardinia, 22 8 in Campania, 23 in Abruzzo and Molise, 23.9 in Puglia, 25.2 in Sicily, 33.2 in Basilicata up to a stratospheric 37.7 in Calabria. Proven proof of how little had been done in a century, beyond the Savoyard and Mussolini propaganda, to make up for the age-old delays.
In truth, recognized the president of the commission, Elio Vigorelli, everyone knows that the problem of poverty exists, few know the most anguished manifestations recognizable in begging in filth, ignorance, prostitution, crime…. At this the parliamentary inquiry had to answer. And he answered this by comparing, among other things, the family budget (five people on average) of a skilled worker from the North and a miserable (textual definition) from the South or Polesine. The family of the former, the documentary explains by showing a wife and child calculating on a sheet of paper, could count on 60,000 lire a month (1,155 current euros, according to rivaluta.istat.it), that of the latter on 27,000, equal today to 519 euros. In five.
The differences in consumption say it all. Not only on bread (1.9 kilos a day for the family of the skilled worker, 1.6 for the poor) but on fruit and vegetables (3.4 the former, 1.2 the latter without ever fruit) and above all on meat: an average of 520 grams for the modest working class, less than a third (150 grams: five) for the mass of miserable people grappling with a very difficult post-war period. Poor who then represented 11.8 percent of the population: 6,186,000 people.
Just over half (3,459,964) could count on the help of the Ecas (municipal assistance bodies), 419,383 out of another 36,000 (sic!) various small or microscopic assistance bodies, 2,306,647 on nothing and nobody: totally abandoned to their destiny. And pushed to cross borders more or less legally (Over 50% of Italian workers who emigrated to France between 1945 and 1960 were illegal immigrants and 90% of family members who joined them emigrated illegally, historian Sandro Rinauro documents in his essay The path of hope, Einaudi, 2009) to seek a bit of luck elsewhere.
Even the hope of leaving was very expensive for those who lived in the hovels documented by the investigation into poverty. If the average index of crowding in the family of the skilled worker was 1.73 people per room: a house with three rooms and a kitchen, the dens of the most miserable had a more disheartening aspect: for every average family of five people, only one environment. Represented by a cave, a shack or other makeshift room that is already unhealthy in itself. 870,000 families find themselves in these conditions, which means almost 4 and a half million Italians.
It was desperate Italy like the village of Grassano, chosen by the parliamentary inquiry as a sample country. The same where less than twenty years earlier Carlo Levi had been sent into internal confinement, who had written in Christ Stopped at Eboli: Peasants’ houses are all the same, made up of a single room that serves as a kitchen, bedroom and almost always also as a stable for small animals, when there is not for this use, near the house, a hut which is called in dialect, with a Greek word, the catoico. On one side there is the fireplace, on which one cooks with a few sticks brought every day from the fields: the walls and ceiling are dark with smoke. The light comes from the door. The room is almost entirely filled by the enormous bed, much larger than a common double bed: the whole family must sleep in the bed, the father, the mother, and all the children. The youngest children, as long as they take the milk, that is until they are three or four years old, are instead kept in small cradles or wicker baskets, hung from the ceiling with ropes, and dangling just above the bed… Under the bed the animals stand: the space thus divided into three layers: the animals on the ground, the men on the bed, and the infants in the air. I hunched over in bed, when I had to listen to a sick person, or give an injection to a woman who chattered from fever and smoked from malaria; with her head I touched the hanging cradles, and between her legs the pigs or frightened hens suddenly passed ….
August 19, 2023 (change August 19, 2023 | 21:41)
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