The Tuscan Maremma before Italian unification: land reclamation vs a productive silvo-pastoral economy

The reclamation of the Tuscan Maremma is certainly one of the most interesting chapters in the history of Italian land reclamation. In fact, unlike other similar regions, the Tuscan Maremma was characterised by a productive silvo-pastoral economy that was mostly lost when modern farming methods were introduced.

The lands generally considered part of the Tuscan Maremma historically – comprising about 40% of Tuscany – fall within the current provinces of Pisa, Livorno, and Grosseto. Of these, it was the Grosseto province that contained the largest number of marshy plains: the Padule (marshes) di Castiglione della Pescaia, fed mainly by the Bruna River, were considered to be the most serious source of malarial infection due to their vast size, while others were Padule di Scarlino, formed by the Pecora tributary, the smaller Alma marshes, originating from the stream of the same name and, lastly, Padule di Gualdo. Further inland, there were the lakes below the ancient Etruscan-Roman city of Rusellae (Roselle), Lake Bernardo and Lake Lagacciolo. Additional marshes were to be found south of Grosseto: the Torre della Trappola marshes, formed by the stagnant waters of the Ombrone River; Padule di Alberese; and Stagno (pond) di Orbetello. On the border with the Papal States, there were the coastal lakes of Burano and La Bassa (see Map 1).

Map 1.

GIS analysis and cartography by Marco Orlandi, MobiLab - Digital Laboratory for Mobility Research, University of Padua.

The Maremma countryside was less unhealthy in antiquity than it was in the 18th century. The presence of prosperous Etruscan cities such as Vetulonia, Roselle, and Talamone shows that the area must have been habitable, fertile and rich in natural resources from at least the 6th–4th centuries BC onwards. Even in the Early Modern period, marsh fever notwithstanding, the Maremma was considered ‘productive’ relative to its population. From October to May, when the risk of malaria was lower, the wetlands, or the lands around them, hosted grazing livestock and farmland and were used for hunting and fishing. They were also a source of marsh plants such as cane and sedges, a significant rural economic resource. Nevertheless, the economic potential offered by wetland reclamation for farming meant that attention to water regulation and marshland reclamation was a constant in all the governments managing the area front antiquity onwards, especially from the 16th century. Dry areas were extensively farmed to wheat, but crisis struck the Maremma grain trade in the 17th and early 18th centuries, due to a multiplicity of restrictions and prohibitions and a gradual drop in prices. Thus, as Salustio Antonio Bandini underlined, if the Maremma in the 15^th and 16^th century deserved to be called the ‘granary of half of Europe’, by the mid-18^th century, it was a completely unproductive ‘putrid infectious menace’.Footnote ⁶

The Medici, whose rule came to an end in 1737, proved unable to implement coherent political territorial reorganisation.Footnote ⁷ It was under the Grand Duchy of Lorraine and Habsburg-Lorraine (1737–1765, 1765–1801) that the state decided to implement large-scale land reclamation work and, within a short space of time, the Bientina basin and the whole of northern Maremma, as well as the Val di Chiana basin, were reclaimed.Footnote ⁸ However, until the end of the 18th century, the population density of the entire coastal strip, excluding the towns of Pisa and Livorno, was fewer than 10 inhabitants per km², a population which halved in the summer months, when malaria forced people to move to the healthier inland hill towns.

Throughout the 18^th century, Maremma’s landowners resisted expensive reclamation work whose success was by no means certain, preferring the secure, albeit low, income deriving from grazing. Health reasons alone failed to convince them to invest their capital in the well-being of small communities, and it was only significant financial contributions from the government which finally persuaded some to change their minds, but not before the early 20th century. It was not until after World War Two, as we will see, that the land structure of the Tuscan Maremma changed significantly.

After the short French-rule parenthesis – a period in which little was done to tackle the health and sanitary issues – the return of the Lorraine Grand Dukes in 1814 led to the completion of various projects with a number of crucial roads being built, including the Volterrana road, and work being begun on important land reclamation areas, particularly in the Val di Chiana.Footnote ⁹ This was further stimulated by the advent of Leopold II (1824–1859), whose Minister of Foreign Affairs was Vittorio Fossombroni. On 10 August 1828, Fossombroni made his Discorso sulla Maremma (Speech on the Maremma) to the Grand Duke, setting out his great reclamation project which was to channel the waters of the Ombrone, Bruna, and Sovata rivers into Lake Castiglione. On 27 November 1828, Leopold II inaugurated the reclamation of the entire Pisa and Grosseto Maremma between Rosignano and Alberese, with a decree that Alfredo Baccarini, Director of the Genio Civile di Grosseto (Civil Engineering Office) since 1871 and, as we will see, the brains behind the first Italy-wide reclamation law of 1882 – would later call a ‘memorable moment in the history of hydraulic science’, emphasizing that it ‘gave rise to the largest artificial filling operation in Italy, not to mention Europe’.Footnote ¹⁰

The Grand Duke set up a Camera di Soprintendenza Comunicativa (Chamber of Communication Superintendency), which was to supervise all phases of the reclamation work. Completion of the work was slowed down by the numerous natural disasters which struck Tuscany in this period: famine, locust invasions, cholera epidemics, plague, and a serious earthquake in 1846.Footnote ¹¹ In any case, the results achieved from 1828 to 1859 in the Sienese-Grosseto Maremma can be considered significant: over 9,000 hectares were converted to farmland, and the marshy area north of the Ombrone River acquired a reasonably functional minor water network on the eve of Italian Unification which was modernised in subsequent decades.Footnote ¹²

The Maremma wetland reclamation work was certainly given an enthusiastic reception, partly because of the employment it created. Some comments by Idelbrando Imberciadori, however, prompt reflection on the cost in human lives paid to reclaim the marshes. Imberciadori notes that ninety people lost their lives among ‘the workers and engineers who suffered from pernicious fever’ during the excavation work for the first diversionary Ombrone canal in 1829. A year later the death toll had risen to 800.Footnote ¹³

The success of some of its reclamation work notwithstanding, in 1844 36% of Grosseto’s inhabitants were still suffering from malarial fever and a significant number of temporary labourers contracted the disease on an annual basis.Footnote ¹⁴ With reference to the inhabitants of Grosseto in 1841, Imberciadori speaks of 500 families, 470 of which were ‘new families, from elsewhere’ and adds that the average life expectancy was twenty-two compared to the Florentine average of thirty-seven, yet ‘a new society was created: through risk, through sacrifice, the Maremma’s resurgence was definitely underway’.Footnote ¹⁵

The 1840s were years of significant social and economic transformation in the Maremma. Alongside the large landowners, other agricultural entrepreneurs tried to implement land improvement practices. Many of these supported the Associazione Agraria Grossetana (founded in 1847) and prepared for mechanisation:Footnote ¹⁶ since the malaria problem remained, the intensive use of machinery seemed to be the only way to make up for the shortage of labour.Footnote ¹⁷

Greater capital was needed, however, and landowners were reluctant to invest in work whose success could not be guaranteed. The Maremma’s agricultural-pastoral model was a stable one and only greater financial investment by the Lorraine dukes would convince landowners to take this leap in the dark. The economic policies attempted by the Lorraine rulers failed on many occasions because land reclamation in the Tuscan Maremma was a long-term project which, unlike other areas such as the Po plains, was blocked by an economic model which had been productive for many centuries, despite adverse health conditions, and was thus difficult to uproot.Footnote ¹⁸

From unification to the Baccarini law (1882)

After Italy’s unification, from the 1860s to the 1880s, a nation-wide economic development policy was required that encompassed laws relating to land reclamation. Italy’s regions were geomorphologically highly diverse, and the consequences of a standardised policy were obviously negative. In this phase, the focus of reclamation was purely on economic considerations: obtaining active involvement from landowners in land reclamation work in Italy in the 19th and 20th centuries meant ‘rendering land investible’, and this was undoubtedly primarily a matter of the availability of substantial capital.Footnote ¹⁹ The shortage of long-term investment capital was a constant brake on both landowners’ decisions and those of the state, above all when the very notion of reclamation changed over the years from straightforward hydraulic drainage to full-blown agricultural transformation, making defining the obligations and limitations of public action and the constraints and burdens on landowners more complex.

The economic issues – ranging from sourcing capital to distributing it to the various affected areas – prevailed over all other factors for some time and it was only from the late 1870s onwards that it became clear that transforming marginal and marshy lands into productive areas inevitably involved combating malaria and making areas healthier.Footnote ²⁰ Until then malaria had been considered a ‘poor people’s illness’. Angelo Celli, an Italian physician, hygienist and parasitologist, spoke of ‘social causes predisposing [people] to malaria’ in reference to peasants’ unfavourable dietary, clothing and housing conditions,Footnote ²¹ which had been the focus of the Inchiesta Agraria (Jacini Inquiry, 1877–1884) and the subsequent Inchiesta sulle condizioni igieniche e sanitarie nei Comuni del Regno (Inquiry into the hygienic and sanitary conditions in the towns and villages of the Kingdom).Footnote ²² In addition to a generic interest in social progress, the motives of Italy’s early governments in addressing the marshland drainage issue were also bound up with the building of the railroad network that was, in many cases, to take shape right along the malarial coast. Indeed, the political class seems to have fully taken stock of the dangers of malaria only when it affected the performance of workers laying tracks and watchmen in charge of supervising construction sites: at this stage, malaria was seen as a purely ‘occupational’ disease affecting the performance of certain specific categories of workers.Footnote ²³

Although land reclamation work involved a high risk of contracting and dying from malaria, the miserable conditions in which many peasants lived prompted them to accept any working conditions whatsoever.Footnote ²⁴ And agricultural crisis from the early 1870s to the mid-1890s greatly exacerbated peasants’ living conditions.Footnote ²⁵ The landowners’ response to the crisis was to reduce the vulnerability of crop production to market fluctuations by increasing the proportion of land protected by customs duties (tomatoes and sugar beet). In a way which was closely bound up with industrial transformation processes, these crops led to a progressive penetration of capital into the countryside alongside marked production diversification.Footnote ²⁶ In this specific economic climate, parliament debated the need for a law capable of regulating reclamation work and the prevailing idea was the adoption of liberal economic principles which were to naturally generate production increases.Footnote ²⁷

However, some members of Parliament considered state intervention important and, on 3 December 1878, Alfredo Baccarini, the same hydraulic engineer who had been entrusted with land reclamation in the Tuscan Maremma in 1871 and was now Minister of Public Works, presented a bill to the Camera dei Deputati (Chamber of Deputies)Footnote ²⁸ under which the state was to carry out the most important and urgent reclamation work in Italy. Reclamation was divided up into two categories. The first category comprised work whose main aim was health related and that was accompanied by considerable agricultural improvement. This was to be implemented by the state, which would contribute half the necessary funds, while a further quarter of the funds was to come from the affected provinces and municipalities and the remaining quarter was to be divided up between the various landowners who would benefit directly from the reclamation. The second category – which did not fulfil these criteria and was thus entitled to lower state contributions – was to be implemented by individual landowners or private consortia the setting up of which could, in certain cases, be made obligatory. Undoubtedly, the bill drafted by Baccarini constituted a turning point in terms of its focus on health conditions in the marshlands: he had found an effective way of curbing the influence of the Liberal politicians by foregrounding, and in a certain sense ‘instrumentalising’, the health and anti-malaria purpose of reclamation work. The minister was keen to point out that health was ‘a sine qua non […] of any land reclamation law. If this fundamental motive behind state interference was removed, it would imply encroachment on the field of private initiative’.Footnote ²⁹

On June 1882, the Baccarini Bill came into force as the first thoroughgoing Italian law on land reclamation (25 June 1882, Law No. 869). Health was not the state’s only concern, however, and additional benefits included reducing unemployment, controlling social tensions and limiting emigration.Footnote ³⁰ However, while on the one hand reclamation work brought new jobs, temporary though these were, on the other it is worth noting that resident populations in areas such as the Tuscan Maremma performed a range of economic activities on their marshy plains, which were reasonably productive lands farmed in accordance with an agro-pastoral system rooted in local culture. This system was seriously damaged, and sometimes completely destroyed over time by the construction of new lands.

Let us now look at what happened in the Tuscan Maremma in this period. On 18 May 1859, Tuscany’s Governo Provvisorio (Provisional Government), presided over by Bettino Ricasoli, appointed a Commission to report on the measures to be taken to improve the health and sanitary conditions that made the Maremma uninhabitable from June to September–October. Since the Middle Ages, people living in the Maremma plain had been migrating to the towns of its hilly hinterland and Mount Amiata in the summer months and returning home in autumn. In the winter months, the Maremma was populated by large numbers of men and animals, as required by its dominant cereal-pastoral model.Footnote ³¹ At such times, a great many people poured into the area’s towns to take up work in agriculture, reclamation, forestry and crafts, as woodcutters, carriage drivers, ditch diggers, water carriers, potters, labourers, bricklayers, shoemakers, saddlers and carpenters. Malaria, on the other hand, made it almost impossible to remain on the plains in the summer. Seasonal internal migration from the plains to the hills and vice versa was a particularly significant and difficult-to-manage phenomenon until the late 19^th century, which gradually decreased only during the first half of the 20^th century, when effective malaria drugs appeared.Footnote ³²

In 1862, Gioacchino Pepoli, Minister of Agriculture, Industry and Commerce, asked Inspector General of Public Works Raffaele Pareto to personally visit the peninsula’s coastal marshes and collect all available data from local administrations. Pareto published a comprehensive report in 1865,Footnote ³³ which is the ‘oldest and richest source of information on Italian land reclamation’.Footnote ³⁴ His research showed that marshes accounted for 763,961 hectares of Italian land.

Pareto divided the Kingdom’s fifty-nine provinces into fourteen groups whose geomorphological characteristics were relatively homogeneous. One of these groups was made up of land in the Tuscan coastal provinces (10^th group), while another group included areas of the Tuscan hinterland (11^th group) (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Extent of marshy areas in the Kingdom’s various provinces in 1865

Source: Pareto 1865, pp. 220–228.

As far as the 10th group was concerned, Pareto believed that the extent of the marshy areas in hectares (28,148) had been underestimated, especially with regard to the province of Grosseto. He claimed that the real extent of the marshes in this area amounted to 65,237 hectares (42,677 of which in the province of Grosseto). Pareto emphasised that the Po valley marshes were unhealthy but not “as deadly as the Tuscan, Neapolitan and Sardinian ones. The former experience periodic fevers, but they can be inhabited and are inhabited in all seasons of the year; in the latter, death can come after a single night’s sleep; and as to the marshes I am talking about now, no workers are willing to work there, at any price, from the end of June to the first days of November.”Footnote ³⁵

In the 1860s reclamation work in the Maremma had little effect. Thus, in 1871, direction of the area’s land transformation work was entrusted to hydraulic engineer Alfredo Baccarini.Footnote ³⁶ That year, Baccarini presented a new thoroughgoing plan for the Maremma that envisaged: filling in the Piombino and Scarlino marshes; building embankments and reorganising the Cornia River and certain secondary watercourses; containing the Alberese marshes, which had started to spread again after the 1857 filling-in work; finding a solution to unhealthy conditions in the area around Orbetello. All of this shows that the recently-formed Italian state was serious about tackling the problems created by the marshes in this area. However, Baccarini’s plans did not yield the desired results either, due to a shortage of capital and of clear regulations.

As noted above, a desire not to delay the implementation of measures deemed urgent led Parliament to pass uniform legislation applicable to the entire country in 1882. The best solution was considered to be entrusting land reclamation to the initiative of private consortia. Yet, the consortia that had existed in Tuscany for some time lacked the expertise required to transform marshy lands into farmland, and in many cases this was not even the goal of the landowners involved. Indeed, many of these still believed that the silvo-pastoral economy was the only system capable of delivering stable earnings, while they had doubts regarding the success of drainage work and the productivity of the newly reclaimed lands. This explains why the main purpose of the majority of the consortia set up in Tuscany was not draining the land but defending themselves against watercourses bursting their banks and damaging pastures. In this regard, it is worth remembering that an important new report on the Italian land reclamation situation written by civil engineer Michelangelo Cuniberti and published by the Ministry of Public Works on the occasion of the 1878 Universal Exhibition in ParisFootnote ³⁷ noted that Tuscany had the largest number of consortia, 299 out of the country’s total of 882. 220 of these, however, were defence consortia, forty-three drainage consortia, thirty-four ‘mixed’ consortia and two consortia for ‘various uses’. The ‘defended’ land’s surface area amounted to approximately 111,500 hectares, whilst the ‘drained’ land numbered approximately 85,000 hectares and ‘defended and drained’ land approximately 56,000.Footnote ³⁸ Seven of the thirty-eight reclamation projects funded by the state with the help of provinces, municipalities, and individuals were in Tuscany (see Table 2):

Table 2.

State reclamation funded by the state with the help of provinces, town councils and individuals

Source: List of land reclamation work carried out by the state directly and indirectly (Cuniberti 1878, p. 225).

The second part of Cuniberti’s monograph was devoted to private land reclamation and included works involving filling in, natural drying with drainage channels and artificial drainage with pumping stations. Land reclamation involving filling in had been widely used in Tuscany, in particular, due to the specific geo-morphological conformation of its coastal land and the nature of its waterways, which were rich in silt and debris: sixty-six out of a total of 132 works in Italy (26,527 ha), distributed over an area of 2025 hectares (see Table 3).

Table 3.

Private land reclamation works involving natural and artificial filling-in in Italy

Source: Cuniberti 1878, pp. 112–144.

The fifty-seven reclamation works consisting of natural drainage carried out in the whole of Italy covered an area of 45,444 hectares of which only one, measuring just 25 hectares, was in the province of Grosseto.Footnote ³⁹ None of the reclamation projects implemented with pumping stations were located in Tuscany and thus filling-in remained Tuscany’s predominant land reclamation method.

As is well known, transforming the marshes into farmland using this method took an extremely long time. Cuniberti estimated that 231,345 hectares of land were awaiting reclamation in Italy and that 151,483 of these were constantly swamped. Tuscany was fourth in the regional rankings, with 17,283 hectares of land needing draining (see Table 4).

Table 4.

Extent of land awaiting reclamation in 1878

Source: Cuniberti 1878, pp. 216–219.

The Jacini Agrarian Inquiry was published in the early 1880s with a view to shining a spotlight on an as yet little-known state of agricultural affairsFootnote ⁴⁰ and showed that Mugello, the Florentine and Pisa plains and the Tyrrhenian coast were economically backward. The Maremma was semi-deserted, the southern areas of Siena and Pisa virtually abandoned and it was only in the Val di Chiana that reclamation work was restarting in those years.Footnote ⁴¹

In an agricultural monograph on the province of Grosseto included in the Agrarian Inquiry, Alfonso Ademollo pointed out that vast swathes of the Maremma countryside were unfarmed, and in the marshes and brackish areas malaria was rife. Alongside a number of other general causes (low population and scant capital, for example), this appeared to be the main cause of the limited farmland available on the Grosseto plains.Footnote ⁴² With regard to the Grosseto province health condition, Ademollo noted that the province’s twenty municipalities could be categorised as those with healthy air throughout, those where the air was unhealthy (including Grosseto) and those whose air was of “mixed” quality. The consequences of this situation on farm workers’ health and life expectancy were tragically evident. Where the air was unhealthy ‘one ages prematurely and death strikes prematurely. The peasant is born healthy and robust and remains so in his early years, when he when he usually gets married, but in his 40s or a little older, he does not have the necessary aptitude for work’.Footnote ⁴³ While in the mountain areas peasants were fit for work on average up to the age of around sixty, in the plains the cut-off age was forty. Many premature deaths in the plains were due to marsh cachexia and pernicious fevers, as well as typhoid fever. Infant mortality, which was high in all areas for a variety of reasons, was also partly due to malaria in the lowlands. It is no coincidence that Ademollo dwelt on malaria, the disease whose impact on the lowland areas of the province of Grosseto was most serious.Footnote ⁴⁴ In order to avoid the worst effects of malaria, every year, from July to September–October, its population moved away from its unhealthy areas, covering approximately 190,000 square hectares. There, the useful agricultural period was just eight months. However, many workers living in healthy, mountainous areas of the province were also exposed to malaria because annual migration to the plains to make a living was the norm, exposing temporary migrants to the disease.Footnote ⁴⁵

On the strength of his extensive experience in Maremma, Alfredo Baccarini sought to strike a balance between loyalty to laissez-faire values and an interventionist conception of the state’s role in the country’s economy. Without straying too far from a policy attentive to the interests of large landowners, the law he advocated involved a greater focus by the government on the social question, with action designed to protect the health of the rural classes.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the five years after the passing of the Baccarini Law, from 1882 to 1887, seventy-eight projects were classified as category one. Yet, the only project on which work had begun was the reclamation of marshland in Sesta Presa, in the province of Padua. In subsequent years other works were implemented or started in the lower Polesine, the Ferrara area, the Tuscan and Roman Maremma and the Liri and Volturno valleys, but these were implemented by individuals and consortia or were the result of earlier legislative provisions.Footnote ⁴⁷

The law of 1882 and subsequent measures developed by Minister of Public Works Francesco Genala in 1886 and 1893 (Law No. 4963, 4 July 1886; Law No. 455, 6 August 1893) confirmed a “fragmentary vision of the problem of water regulation,” which required more comprehensive intervention. This was especially true in central-southern Italy and on the main islands, where every single river basin from the Apennines to the sea was part of an indissoluble hydrological whole.Footnote ⁴⁸ Indeed, while numerous consortia were set up in northern Italy from 1886 to 1898 to obtain concessions for “category one” work, only one application for a concession was submitted by the southern and island provinces (from Vittoria, in the Sicilian province of Syracuse) and the only central Italian consortium was Consorzio del Trasimeno.Footnote ⁴⁹ No consortium was thus set up in the Tuscan Maremma.

Slow progress in the Giolitti age

In post-Unification Italy, the reclamation model adopted by the ruling class for many years was the Republic of Venice’s consortia. In the second half of the eighteenth century, in particular, the Serenissima had left considerable room for manoeuvre to landowners in consortia, who committed to invest in the farming of the drained land and the maintenance of the works. However, the decision by late nineteenth century legislators to use the consortia set up in the Po Valley as a model for the whole of Italy was a serious mistake.Footnote ⁵⁰ A range of reclamation work was, in any case, implemented or at least initiated after the passing of the Baccarini and Genala laws, as the three ministerial reports written in 1903, 1907, and 1915 testify.Footnote ⁵¹

On the eve of World War One, a new reclamation mindset had come to the fore which was sensitive to the diverse Italian regional contexts. While in the north the laws continued, for good reasons, to count on the consortia, in central and southern Italy direct state intervention was considered inevitable, as the work needed was often too complex and costly to be done by the landowners. The war brought this work to a halt, at the cost of serious economic losses, infrastructure damage and an increase in unemployment and social tensions, as the unprecedented wave of strikes which hit Italy from 1919 onwards shows, a situation which bolstered the interventionist approach over the Liberal strategy.

With the Ruini Law (Decree Law 28 November 1919, no. 240), the government tasked the Comitato speciale per i lavori contro la disoccupazione (Special committee for tackling unemployment) with determining which lands the Reclamation of the Agro Romano law dating to 1878 (11 December 1878, Law no. 4642) could potentially be extended to cover. This latter was the first example of post-Unification state agricultural and sanitary reclamation legislation on private land and under it 70% of the cost of land reclamation was to be covered by the state, with the remainder being paid for by the Province of Rome and the municipalities affected by the works. A few years later, compulsory consortia were set up to increase the policy’s effectiveness, and the expropriation of defaulting owners was brought in as an option. Indeed, the Ruini law of 1919 reiterated the principle of land expropriation of reclaimed land as a way of ensuring agricultural transformation.

In the three decades from the 1880s to the 1910s no significant agricultural production progress was made in the Tuscan Maremma in either quantity or quality terms, and malaria continued to be rife in the countryside. In 1896, it was decided to speed up the reclamation of the ancient Castiglione marshes, but work moved forward very slowly and ground to a halt at the outbreak of the World War One. The only reclamation project of any size to take place in Tuscany at the end of the 19th century was at the Alberese estate (about 315 ha) between 1892 and 1897.

After Law no. 333 of 7 July 1902 was passed, placing the costs of reclamation squarely on the shoulders not only of the state but also of the provinces, municipalities and landowners, the government was called on to respond to numerous accusations from Maremma landowners who considered themselves to have been economically damaged by legislation compelling them to co-fund work offering no immediate return on their investment. It was precisely because of the shortage of available capital and sufficient state funds that reclamation work in Maremma was still lagging behind in 1903, despite attempts to electrify mechanical drainage in Scarlino, Pian D’Alma, Gualdo and Pian Di Rocca.Footnote ⁵²

The Table 5 shows the extent of submerged and marshy land requiring hydraulic drainage work in Italy in 1906, highlighting that much of the work underway was still awaiting completion, particularly in Emilia Romagna, Veneto, Campania, and Tuscany. Overall, only one-third of the work had been completed (see Table 5):

Table 5.

Extent of land awaiting reclamation and land already reclaimed in Italy in 1906

Source: Atti Parlamentari, Camera dei Deputati, 1907, pp. 240–275.Footnote ⁹¹

From Italian Unification to the turn of the century, the average annual state expenditure on land reclamation work amounted to approximately 4,300,000 lire, while about 14,600,000 lire was allocated to it in each of the following fourteen tax years. At the beginning of the 20th century, the sum set aside annually for reclamation was much larger than had been the case in the previous forty years. The regions receiving the highest state contributions were Campania (124 million), Tuscany (82 million) and Emilia Romagna (51 million), followed by Puglia (29 million) and Veneto (20 million). The state concentrated its efforts primarily on extremely costly but limited-scale hydraulic work which was not fully made use of by individual farmers, who were often unable to afford the subsequent land and agricultural transformation.Footnote ⁵³

Much remained to be done, as was proved by the fact that a Commission was set up in 1908 by the Minister of Public Works, Giulio Rubini, to study progress in land reclamation in the Tuscan Maremma. This was followed, two years later, by a second working group set up by the Ministry of Agriculture and Trade to examine what could be done to improve economic, social, and sanitary conditions in the area. The Commission drew up a detailed report highlighting the need for urgent action. This was only partially implemented, however, and then halted by the outbreak of World War One.Footnote ⁵⁴

When the conflict ended, the Maremma’s agricultural landscape was made up, on the one hand, of numerous swamps and marshy areas and, on the other, by large farms on which extensive farming systems had been chosen. A small number of large landowners had divided their estates up into farm units assigned to farming families on sharecropping contracts, but landowners’ income came less from farming these lands than from wild livestock breeding on them.

After World War One, the first important legislative measure concerning the Maremma was Royal Decree no. 2297 (9 November 1919) which extended some of the provisions applying to the Agro Romano to this region, including tax exemptions, subsidised loans, premiums and subsidies for those taking on work. In 1921 reclamation bodies were set up in all regions to carry out “category one” works. These bodies were exempted from taxes, endowed with facilities and operational autonomy and tasked with proceeding with the rapid reclamation of entire areas.Footnote ⁵⁵

The health situation in the Grosseto province remained serious, with malaria affecting 18.9% of the inhabitants of the provincial capital. Despite these precarious living conditions, the Maremma’s population tripled from 1820 to 1914, and population density increased from eleven to thirty-five inhabitants per km², the new inhabitants of this area being mainly workers from the Apennines and Amiata, demonstrating the attractiveness of the Maremma plain despite its environmental difficulties, as it offered sufficiently well-paid seasonal work and land reclamation employment.Footnote ⁵⁶

Immediately after the war, the concerns of the Maremma landowners were heightened when war was declared on the latifundia by the Republican and Socialist parties, resulting in the occupation by peasants and labourers of unfarmed land held as pasture in almost all of Grosseto province’s towns.Footnote ⁵⁷ The so-called ‘Red Biennium’ in the Maremma saw many strikes over the renewal of regional sharecropping contracts and the Socialists won all but four seats in the province of Grosseto in the 1920 local elections. The area’s landowners thus chose to support the nascent Fascist movement with conspicuous financial backing, even though a few years later they realised that the Fascists would not unequivocally defend the latifundia, at least not until 1935 when, as we will see, Arrigo Serpieri, italian economist, politician, expert in agricultural economics, was removed from the Sottosegretariato per la bonifica integrale (Undersecretariat for Land Reclamation).

Fascism and the Maremma

The most common agricultural arrangements in malarial areas, especially in the central and southern Italian regions, were based on extensive and discontinuous farming requiring limited work which was concentrated in the run-up to summer, i.e. when the risk of malaria was less acute, as was the case with the Tuscan Maremma. The complex health conditions in these places meant that virtually none of the landowners were interested in modifying the management of their estates because the costs involved in doing so would have been too high and the profits by no means certain. According to Angelo Celli the latifundia had been created and ‘were being maintained’ by malaria, ‘if the latter is not eradicated the former will not be “broken” and will break men who try to do it’.Footnote ⁵⁸

In 1922 Serpieri had been tasked with reporting to the Commissione di studi della Federazione dei consorzi agrari (Research Committee of the Federation of Agrarian Consortia) on the draft law proposed by Giuseppe Micheli of the People’s Party on estate transformation and internal settlement.Footnote ⁵⁹ Many of the observations he made at that time can be found later in what is known as the Serpieri Law (Decree Law no. 753 of 18 May 1924) in which the concept of land reclamation was definitively treated as distinct from that of hydraulic reclamation: this law extended the scope of land reclamation, classifying as ‘reclamation districts’ all those areas in which land transformation was of significant public interest, both to increase production and for land settlement purposes. Land reclamation ceased to be exclusive to marshy and drainage-deficient areas and was extended to all territories in a state of economic backwardness.Footnote ⁶⁰ The land transformation districts were areas needing public work, such as the creation of mountain catchment areas, road work, and rural hamlet building, action that was not necessarily complementary to hydraulic reclamation. The Serpieri Law provided for the expropriation of defaulting landowners and, above all, allowed capitalist companies to obtain work concessions, substituting absentee entrepreneurs. In so doing, Serpieri’s intention was to strike a decisive blow against the latifundia and the frequent absenteeism of landowners.

In this respect, it is important to remember that doubt had already been cast, to some extent, on the rights of the large landowners by Opera Nazionale Combattenti (ONC) (Veterans’ National Foundation). Set up by Decree Law No. 55 of 16 January 1919 and initially conceived of by Francesco Saverio Nitti and Alberto Beneduce as a way of facilitating war veterans’ return to the labour market, ONC was almost immediately tasked with modernising the countryside.Footnote ⁶¹ During the Fascist period, too, the strong points of the project implemented by ONC were: its role as a large land reclamation body in southern Italy; its preference for land-improvement contracts, which made combining individual and collective interests possible; its preference for large co-operative-run companies; its active role as a credit institution and agency providing technical support to co-operatives. However, these strategic guidelines were largely disregarded. To the landowners, ONC looked suspiciously like a revolutionary attempt to remove land from absentee landowners and give it to better motivated individuals, while the peasants viewed it as overly timid and the socialists opposed it on the grounds of its preferential treatment of ex-combatants.

The ruralist objectives pursued by the Fascists in the countryside soon distanced themselves from those of ‘co-operative’ inspiration.Footnote ⁶²

Decree Law no. 2164 of 29 November 1925 partly modified the Serpieri Law, introducing precedence for owners’ consortia in public works concessions.Footnote ⁶³ Having been reassured by this decree, the landowners did not rush to set up Consorzio di bonifica dell’Agro Grossetano (Land Reclamation Consortium of the Grosseto countryside) but waited for Law no. 3217 of 1 January 1928 – which extended the benefits provided for the reclamation of the Agro Pontino (in the Lazio region) to the whole Maremma – to be passed. It was only with Royal Decree no. 1239 of 29 March 1928 that the Consortium was finally created to carry out category one work and land transformation in an area which included the muncipalities of Grosseto, Gavorrano, and Castiglione della Pescaia.Footnote ⁶⁴

A few months later, after the Mussolini Law (24 December 1928, no. 3134) was passed, Consorzio di bonifica dell’Agro Grossetano was allocated substantial funding. However, a year and a half or so passed before it obtained concession for the work, a concession that, by a particular ‘coincidence’, was made official with Royal Decree no. 2215 of 12 May 1930, two days after Mussolini’s visit to the Maremma, during which a speech by the Duce extolled the rural virtues of the province and the importance of moving onto appoderamento (the subdivision of farming or farmable land into independent farms) as soon as possible.Footnote ⁶⁵

In the 1930s, Consorzio di bonifica dell’Agro Grossetano was tasked with providing new job opportunities as soon as possible: this pressure came from the Prefect who was, in turn, leant on by the podestas of the municipalities involved, such as Castiglione della Pescaia, Montepescali, Buriano and Vetulonia, where various co-operatives specialising in land reclamation had sprung up.Footnote ⁶⁶ Unfortunately, the funding in support of the Mussolini Law promised by the state was delayed. In spite of Serpieri’s recommendations, by 1931, when the economic crisis originating in the United States hit Europe, work had slowed down.Footnote ⁶⁷

The new Consolidation Law of 1933 made 41,200 hectares of the Grosseto plains one of its new ‘reclamation districts’, restoring a degree of order to the regulations and the assignment of work. The Consolidation Law required Consorzio di bonifica dell’Agro Grossetano to draw up a General Land Reclamation Plan, which was to include an outline plan of the work falling under state jurisdiction and key directives for subsequent agricultural transformation under private ownership. Settling the area was considered to be one of the cornerstones of land transformation: the objective was to increase population density from one person per seven hectares to one per two hectares. Farm size was to be around 20–30 ha and average farm size 200 ha. Farmers were advised to replace fallow land with regenerative crops, grassland and fodder meadows, and free-range livestock was to give way to cattle sheds. Road networks were to be improved, new farm buildings built, drinking water made available to the population, vines and other trees planted, specialised crops introduced, coastal pine forests planted, and mechanical ploughing and hydraulic-agricultural irrigation work done. The aim was for the total income from land transformed in this way to double.

The Consortium was forced to admit that the land ownership situation made the planned land transformation work impossible without substantial state aid. The General Land Reclamation Plan was not presented until 31 December 1933, and prior to this the work carried out was fragmentary and disorganised. From the 1930s onwards, in the Grosseto-Castiglionese plains, to the right of the Ombrone River, a Consortium of the same name set up in 1928 undertook a large-scale transformation project, including a network of high-water channels draining the Ombrone and Bruna rivers. From 1928 to 1936, the Padule della Ghirlanda (Ghirlanda Marshes) east of Massa Marittima were definitively settled. In the five-year period following on from the presentation of the General Land Reclamation Plan, several other projects were carried out. First, the course of the Ombrone and Bruna rivers and their tributaries was shored up with banks and weirs. In addition to hydraulic work, new roads were built and these were not solely country roads, as they also connected up the various parts of the main road network gravitating around Grosseto. The reclaimed area was then equipped with a rural aqueduct.Footnote ⁶⁸

At a conference held in Florence in the spring of 1934, organised by Accademia dei Georgofili, the leaders of the farmers’, workers’ and agricultural technicians’ unions and of the National Association of Consortia debated the following topic: who was to be responsible for land transformation and reclamation work? Private-sector consortia or state-controlled land reclamation agencies? On this occasion, Arrigo Serpieri firmly stressed the need to abide by the directives already outlined in the 1933 Consolidation Act, on the basis of his belief that the state should take forceful action when owners proved reluctant to do so.Footnote ⁶⁹ At the end of 1934, Serpieri presented a bill dealing with ‘norms to ensure the completeness of land reclamation’, which was blocked in the Senate and led to his dismissal from the Sottosegretariato di Stato per la bonifica integrale (Undersecretariat for Land Reclamation) in January 1935: his rigorous approach to the application of the legislation, implying the expropriation of land from defaulting owners, was thus ultimately defeated.Footnote ⁷⁰ Emilio Sereni judged Serpieri’s political and technical failure to be bound up with the specific phase of monopolistic state capitalist development in 1930s Italy which had “systematically [reduced] the margins of gross national product available for a reform of the dominant classes to a minimum.”Footnote ⁷¹ These were Fascism’s most difficult years, in which its colonial wars led the regime to abandon most of its promised reclamation projects. Indeed, Mussolini decided to channel Italy’s reduced economic resources almost exclusively on the Agro Pontino and the development of its ‘new towns,’ to which he gave maximum propaganda prominence.Footnote ⁷²

However, in February 1937, Consorzio di Bonifica dell’Agro Grossetano presented a new General Land Reclamation Plan and drew up key directives for the agricultural transformation of the area for the Tuscan Maremma Inspectorate.Footnote ⁷³ At the end of that year, the work was divided up into numerous executive projects of limited size authorised one at a time, a modus operandi designed to cut unemployment in the province following redundancies in its few existing industries and a reduction in the number of jobs available in the Amiata and Colline Metallifere mines.

As the formidable economic restrictions bound up with its African campaigns were already making themselves fully felt by 1937, the Fascist regime essentially relied heavily on private enterprise for its land transformation plans.Footnote ⁷⁴ Yet without real economic commitment by the state the goals envisaged before the outbreak of the Second World War could not be brought to fruition. Transformation of the latifundia would have to wait for new land reform proposals in Republican Italy.

The post-world war two period and agricultural reform

The 1944–1950 period witnessed a new-found land reform vitality, especially in the south of Italy and in areas where latifundia existed. Growing post-war unemployment and poverty prompted thousands of peasants and agricultural labourers to occupy large landed estates left unfarmed and led to demands for these to be handed over to them. In an article published on L’Unità on 18 August 1944, Giuseppe di Vittorio, one of post-war Italy’s most eminent trade unionists, declared that “the existence of the latifundia, on the one hand, and of large masses of landless peasants, on the other, were incompatible with the existence of a truly democratic system.”

Yet, neither the decree issued in 1944 by Fausto Gullo (Minister of Agriculture in the Provisional Government of National Unity), on the basis of which farm labourers’ associations could obtain the transfer of privately owned or public-owned land which was found to be uncultivated or inadequately cultivated, and the bill proposed by Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi in 1946 to regulate relations between landowners and peasants in an equitable manner, known as Lodo De Gasperi, did much to meet the demands of farm labourers and peasants.Footnote ⁷⁵

Since 1946 part of the European Recovery Program had been set aside for land reclamation projects both in the north of Italy, where these had been seriously damaged by the war and a lengthy maintenance hiatus, and in central-southern Italy, where the intention was to launch a public work policy designed to respond to the problem of growing unemployment. The resulting legislative decree no. 1744 of 31 December 1947 reset the boundaries of the land reclamation districts and sanctioned the principle of expropriation of defaulting landowners. The decree identified priority criteria for areas of intervention, which included the Tuscan Maremma, but sidestepped the then deeply felt issue of general land reform.

1948 witnessed strikes, demonstrations, and land occupations. That same year, Minister of Agriculture Antonio Segni put forward an agricultural reform that was to cover the whole area from Calabria to the Po Delta and the Tuscan Maremma, the Fucino, and Flumendosa river basins and some areas of Campania and Puglia. Two years later, in 1950, the landowners, who were opposed to the reform, enacted extensive lockouts that interrupted the harvesting of the products.Footnote ⁷⁶

The land reform issue was one of the priorities set out in the programme of the Catholic Party, which was then so popular in the countryside with its various categories of land worker tenants, sharecroppers, and small landowners. In April 1949 Prime Minister Alcide de Gasperi set out the main characteristics of the new land reform, but rather than waiting for a new nationwide draft law to be passed, the government decided to act right away starting from the areas judged highest priority. The result was Law no. 841 of 21 October 1950, Norme per la espropriazione, bonifica, trasformazione ed assegnazione dei terreni ai contadini (regulations for the expropriation, reclamation, transformation, and allocation of land to peasants) known as Riforma fondiaria, a transitional law which deferred general land reform to a later date, which never came. The 1950 law authorised the government to identify intervention areas: in practical terms, this meant areas with the largest numbers of large land estates (the Po Delta, the Tuscan-Lazio Maremma, the Fucino River basin, Campania, Puglia, Lucania, Molise, Sardinia and Sicily) in which expropriation, transformation, and the breakup of the large land estates were set in motion. Enti di riforma (reform bodies)Footnote ⁷⁷ were set up, including Ente per la colonizzazione della Maremma tosco-laziale e del Fucino, and tasked with creating a small landowner class and building modern infrastructure over a period of twelve years. Many of these bodies did not succeed in achieving their objectives, especially in the south of Italy, partly because a more general transformation of the economy had taken place in the meantime, consisting of the demise of the pre-eminence of the primary sector and a shift to predominantly industrial production involving an exodus from the countryside.

When World War Two came to an end, new regulations brought in different classification criteria for reclamation work and special governing bodies were created alongside local consortia. In the Maremma, work had to take into account both the slowness with which land reclamation had proceeded from 1937 onwards and the extensive damage done by the German army to the area’s reclamation system. Large swathes of land had been flooded, the Badia bridge over the Bruna River had been damaged by bombing, and the building housing the Ombrone pumping station had been destroyed, causing the disastrous flood of 2 November 1944.

This state of affairs meant that the Grosseto reclamation project was included in what was referred to as bonifiche di accelerazione, i.e. priority reclamation work (Decree Law no. 1774, 31 December 1947). A new general plan was drawn up and came into force on 9 September 1948: the appoderamento issue was still the main issue in the Grosseto land transformation area. Approximately 100 of the 550 farmhouses planned by the Fascist government were built in the Maremma immediately after World War Two, and the families moved into these were given sharecropping contracts, a quasi-feudal contractual relationship which worked to the detriment of sharecroppers. The situation was unequivocally condemned by Confederterra (Confederation of Land Workers) whose Maremma membership already numbered over 10,000 in 1946.Footnote ⁷⁸

By 1950, hydraulic reclamation was nearing completion on all Tuscany’s plains. However, while the coastal areas north of Piombino and its inland basins were by then being intensively farmed to small-scale mixed-crops (sharecropping or direct-crop farming), agriculture in the Grosseto Maremma was still typically cereal-silvo-pastoral latifundium in style: approximately 40% of its surface area was unfarmed land and wetland or wooded areas and an extensive cereal farming system prevailed, where wheat rotated with fallow land or fodder for small livestock herds.Footnote ⁷⁹

Indeed, as the latifundia problem had still not been resolved in certain parts of the country, in the early 1950s, a range of legislative measures were adopted which, at least officially, set agricultural reform in motion: Transitional Law no. 841 of 21 October 1950; Sila Law no. 230 of 12 March 1950; and Sicily’s Agrarian Reform Law no. 104 of 27 December 1950. The territorial bodies set up to implement the Transitional Law included Ente per la Colonizzazione della Maremma Tosco-Laziale e del Fucino (Ente Maremma), set up by Presidential Decree no. 66 of 7 February 1951, from which Ente Fucino was later separated in 1954.

The large landowners’ association had begun mobilising against the inclusion of the Maremma in the Land Reform’s areas in February 1951 to no avail, and the individual owners took all legal action available to them to obtain partial or total exemption from expropriation. Some of these succeeded in being classified as ‘model farms’, thus obtaining total exemption, while others managed to retain a third of their land by committing to land improvements. In some cases, landowners resorted to illegal methods, falsifying sales contracts pre-dating the Transitional Law or physically blocking access to the lands by Ente Maremma functionaries. But the body succeeded in managing the situation and reaching a compromise solution with the landowners who accepted state authority and were granted an active part in the co-operative movement.Footnote ⁸⁰

The various estate expropriation, distribution and allocation processes set in motion by these laws presupposed radical transformation and improvement of the land expropriated by those authorised to carry out the work: clearing land, reclamation, constructing irrigation systems, choosing suitable crops, building rural houses, setting up farm centres, schools, technical assistance areas, new roads and aqueducts. Ente Maremma had jurisdiction over a territory of about 995,000 hectares, including southern Tuscany (40 municipalities) and northern Lazio (49 municipalities), stretching about 250 km north of Rome as far as the Volterrano road and covering the entire coastal area from Palo Laziale to Piombino, and inland as far as the provinces of Siena, Viterbo and Rome.Footnote ⁸¹ The Authority was organised at municipality or sub-municipality level into colonisation centres which were coordinated and monitored by central headquarters in Rome. Its tasks fell into three areas: expropriation, redistribution, and parcelling out of land, land transformation, and assistance to farmers.Footnote ⁸²

Ente Maremma’s first president was Giuseppe Medici, a Christian Democrat senator and university lecturer in Agricultural Economics. On 3 February 1952 Medici gave a speech in Cerveteri (Rome), which was published the following year as Il contratto con i contadini (The Contract with Farmers): the reform was to benefit farmers and the country as a whole and the Authority was to enforce the contract in the interests of the community. The Ente thus undertook to provide technical assistance to farmers, supplying them with modern technology, building new roads, and replacing working cattle with dairy and meat livestock. The subdivision of the latifundia was to be followed by transformation of the rural environment: appoderamento, more widespread use of agricultural machinery and chemical fertilisers, crop intensification, and the transformation of pastures and unfarmed land into irrigated meadows. Forage production was to increase, cattle sheds were to be built, and farmers helped to build homes for themselves.Footnote ⁸³

Ente Maremma also acted to ensure the availability of drinking water in the countryside, using the Fiora aqueduct in particular, provided for hydraulic and forestry work in mountain areas, constructed roads and buildings and supplied land irrigation with water from the Osa, Albegna, Ombrone, Merse, Melacce, Bruna and Orcia rivers and Lago di San Floriano. In 1958, fourteen hillside lakes were created whose total capacity was 676,000 m³ of water. Ten years later, thirty-one lakes with a reservoir capacity of 2,425,000 m³ were irrigating 28,700 hectares of the Grosseto province.Footnote ⁸⁴

In 1962, Ente Maremma issued new guidelines, its so-called Zoning Plans, which divided up farms into colonisation centres, homogeneous agricultural areas that moved progressively in the direction of adopting crops suited to water availability and the characteristics of the land. The Zoning Plans constituted a final attempt by the Authority to modernise the region before its transformation into Ente per la Colonizzazione della Maremma Tosco-Laziale (1954–1965) and later into Ente di Sviluppo per la Toscana ed il Lazio (1965–1976). The new bodies focused heavily on mechanised and specialised agriculture, ignoring other economic activities such as sheep breeding and the exploitation of forestry resources. They favoured investments concentrated in the most productive areas, such as the Grosseto plain, to the detriment of more marginal territories like the Val di Cecina.Footnote ⁸⁵

At the end of 1962, approximately 170,000 hectares of large landed estates had been expropriated and assigned to 20,000 families: 130,000 hectares were used for the creation of 8,000 farms (with attached peasant houses), and 40,000 hectares were divided into 12,000 ‘quotas’, small plots of land entrusted to ‘part-time’ farmers, which could be paid for in 30 annual instalments.Footnote ⁸⁶ By law, the new owners had to possess a ‘farm labourer’ qualification, verified by local Provincial Agrarian Inspectors, and prove that they did not own sufficient property to provide work for the whole family.Footnote ⁸⁷ Ente di sviluppo agricolo (Agricultural Development Board) did not build residential villages, but opted for scattered settlements, building farmhouses on the land (the only exception was Villaggio bracciantile di Rispescia – the agricultural labourers’ village of Rispescia in the province of Grosseto). Scattered settlements of this sort required a road network covering each single farmhouse, and the same problem arose for water supply and power lines. Ente di sviluppo agricolo was also involved in technical assistance and experimentation, both agronomic and zootechnical. It had six experimental centres covering a total of 38 hectares.Footnote ⁸⁸

In the first years of implementation of the agrarian reform, a number of those granted land gave it up of their own free will or by decision of the reform bodies, which considered them unsuitable. Contract termination peaked in 1960–1961 and then fell sharply from 1964 onwards, due both to a drop in the demand for industrial labour and to the settlement of families that had been assigned land: incomes deriving from farming were, in fact, beginning to grow, and by then many of the ‘less suitable’ families had been replaced by ‘more suitable’ ones.Footnote ⁸⁹

The results of this land reform did not live up to expectations, yet it is undeniable that Ente Maremma brought about a profound transformation in this area of Tuscany, bringing in significant farming innovations and new crops, carrying out new hydraulic work and increasing livestock farming. There is general scholarly consensus that the Maremma is to be seen as the agrarian reform’s greatest success.Footnote ⁹⁰ Very little of the approximately 200,000 hectares of unfarmed, malaria-infested land covered with stagnant water still present in the Maremma in the 18th and 19th centuries remained by the end of the 1960s.