The Marche has always been considered a peripheral and marginal region, despite its proclaimed geographical, climatic and character centrality. They have suffered from considerable cultural isolation, resulting above all from being a predominantly agricultural region. It is no coincidence that in cinema the people from the Marche region have always been represented with a crude, ridiculous and clumsy accent; they are certainly not the refined Turin native with the limp R, but a crafty farmer with lively eyes who pays attention to concreteness and his speech is imbued with common places. The Macerata accent is always preferred because it becomes the symbol of a certain narrow-minded and obtuse Italian province, which literally has to deal with a dreamless reality, made of land and chickens and pigs and wheat and nothing else. Always getting to the point, even when Italy is now in the years of the economic boom and post-boom, with the protests, the trade union struggles and the democratic victories of a country which, all in all, becomes a world economic power of a certain importance .
Why this?
It comes naturally to think about the economic context and what supported it: sharecropping was the predominantly used formula that regulated the relationship between those who worked the land - which was excellent, among other things, outlined by many hills and also many valleys and rivers which make it particularly fertile, and a mild climate, rainy and sunny when needed, in short, ideal for many crops - and the landowner, often an aristocrat, priest or notable.
Sharecropping, or the farmer (or settler) who stipulated a contract with the owner of the agricultural land and regularized his position by assuming the burden of cultivating it for a certain number of years, him and his family, and on whom a sense of responsibility for the estate, both the land and the house assigned to it, the farmyard animals and livestock, as well as the fruit trees, olive trees and even the mulberry trees, whose leaves were used to raise silkworms, but above all he felt responsible for the reliability of his family members who had to show the same docility and servility towards the capoccia or vergaro.
If we take a look at just one sharecropping contract between a landowner and a settler, we realize how similar a relationship this was to that between a master and a serf.
Unlike the labourer, a figure of an agricultural worker coming from the north of Italy as well as from the deep south, who is nothing more than a free man who goes where there is a need for hands, precisely, and can also change country or emigrate to another region, The sharecropper is sedentary, he rarely moves because he has to look after the land. Unlike the sharecropper, the laborer does not have a fixed place to eat nor often a roof under which to sleep, and he is alone in the sense that he does not bring his family with him and his work is decidedly linked to the seasons with many moments stop. The sharecropper is equally poor but has a roof over his head and does not die of hunger but the price to pay is a harsh submission to the master, a tendency towards cultural isolation due to his consequent loyalty to the land and to consider his family members as his subordinates and attendants, nothing but arms, family relationships are very hierarchical and leave no room for dreams. Life is hard and has no surprises and if he has them they are never positive. And then seeing life always from the same perspective and from the same landscape predisposes to a certain mental closure.
Not that life was better for the laborer, on the contrary, but the fact of moving provided him with more opportunities for contact and to see other worlds and other ways of thinking different from his own, this also opened him up to emigration, especially regarding the south, and to a certain habit of knowing how to face the multiplicity of existence with an attitude more destined to chance and naturalness.
Sharecropping has made the man from the Marche a gentle man, yes, but with a reasoned, calculated gentleness. Ignorance has made him skeptical towards the new and therefore unaccustomed to expressing himself, an attitude that is carried out more easily in the company of people you barely know and with whom you have no particular ties, nor relationships of subjection or hegemony . In a word, if you are away from home, you have more opportunities to bring out the best in you, especially in difficult conditions, and you become more free, autonomous and stronger.
If the sharecropper had been a man capable of expressing himself naturally, he would certainly have lost authority towards his family and perhaps trust on the part of the owner, which would have made him suspicious and doubtful about his real ability to manage a small agricultural business. which is, essentially, the farm estate.
The sharecropper on the other hand, in addition to the land, cultivates patience and surrender to the master, waiting for the moment in which his attention towards him ceases, he will finally be able to "deceive" him by partially concealing the fruit of his hard-earned work, thus hiding eggs and chickens, he takes away the wheat, the wine and parcels out his income even more, he puts it aside. The sharecropper is a great saver and consumes everything to a minimum: the owner must not see anything: not a new suit or a hat or new shoes, because he might become suspicious. So the Marche is used to hiding his wealth, hiding his self, hiding everything. The successful small entrepreneur from the Marche region comes to mind who in the 70s and
'80 hid his Ferrari in the garage. Don't you think the attitude is the same? Don't show, always hide, especially the fruit of his work. The wealth that should not be boasted.
Modest antihero, incapable of flying high, he does not possess the lightness of the Tuscan, the irony of the Roman, the simplicity but also the courage of the Lombard, the foresight of the Sicilian, he has all this but even less,
he is unable to see beyond his possibilities which he does not know nor is he given the tools to do so, thanks to a religiosity which smacks more of actual superstition rather than spiritual feeling and which exercises a strong control function on the people of the Marche, even mental, even if he professes to be an atheist: attachment to family, to kinship, to his shell, to his old background. And all are functional, often the various members are not offered the possibility of studying outside the region, they must not move away, crossing the ford can be dangerous, under penalty of losing the core, of the maintained and hidden self, of what has always been protected and we don't really know today for what.
The people from the Marche tend to copy, they don't invent (they can't!), they steal with their eye and, as a great worker and as smart as they are, they soon understand that what they copy can be easily achievable on a large scale. Thus the entrepreneur is born, both small and large, the majority of this category in the Marche, at least in the past, have not really invented anything but have taken advantage of other people's inventions to their own advantage and have only modified and improved them.
The famous industriousness of the Marche comes from that agricultural land, whether you want to believe it or not, it comes from that lineage of workers accustomed for centuries to meekness mixed with cunning together with that Christian piety which is nothing other than sagacious mastery in never facing the difficulties in the chest, sugarcoating them and counting on time to put things right. And time actually seems to put them right, but it's often just an illusion. In reality, little changes, the mentality is always the same, and it is decidedly not inclined towards recklessness. It is no coincidence that the Marche region was, in the past, a great source of votes for the Christian Democrats and entrepreneurs such as Merloni, Pieralisi, Berloni etc., etc.
Now some things are certainly changing, many young people, thanks to the great economic crisis, are calmly going abroad to study or work, the new generations feel less the tension of separation. All in all, we are in a united Europe open to the circulation of the same currency and Europeans, there is Erasmus and an attitude on the part of parents aimed at encouraging their children to freely circulate ideas and the possibility of living elsewhere. But let's not forget that we are always children of this land, and that for five who leave another five remain and with it the mentality of the agricultural land remains.
Will the Marche and the people of the Marche be able to open up to others, at least in the future? Because it is not enough to open new communication routes, among other things there are numerous roads and motorways, there are ports and airports and a vertical and horizontal railway, if the tendency is always to close oneself in like a hedgehog, always hanging out with the same people , sacralize family members and see "foreigners" as something foreign, inadequate to their inadequacy, and see the future as an opportunity to truly express themselves, with that lightness and temerity that they have been denied in past centuries?
I believe this is the real challenge for the Marche region of tomorrow. The bet on his future depends on the ability to look inside himself without feeling necessarily connected to the "farm", training for the race of life with courage knowing that outside there is a world that awaits him and that above all awaits his ability to be curious and open to human contact.
1 comment
Beautiful article