- Dario Gaggio Reinventing Tuscany: The Vineyards and the Temporalities of Landscape
Rural History Conference, Girona, September 2015
Rural places often tell contradictory stories. They are often perceived as immutable and
traditional, and yet they also tell stories of abrupt and eventful change in which modernity bursts
in with unusual power. In precisely this vein, the vineyards of Tuscany, but also the Tuscan
countryside as a whole, have elicited conflicting senses of place and time in the last few decades.
One perception relies on the sense that these vineyards testify to centuries of harmonious
relationships between people and land. In the words of Ferenc Máté, a Hungarian-American
winemaker and traveller who has made Tuscany his new home,
Perhaps part of a Tuscan’s calm comes from the ancient hamlets and towns around him,
where houses, churches, and art have stood firm for centuries; and from a countryside that,
for the most part, has changed little over time. There are olive groves whose trees are
hundreds of years old, and vineyards that have been vineyards since Etruscan times.1
Another perception, by contrast, understands these vineyards as one of the clearest signs of
the radical changes that have led to the end of “traditional” rural society and the advent of
modern (and perhaps unsustainable) ways of life. In the last page of his unpublished memoir,
former sharecropper Franco Guarducci, who was born in the early 1930s in the Chianti, tries to
make sense of these recent transformations:
In our countryside, where I still live, so many changes have taken place. The rural houses,
many of which were once barely standing are now villas for the foreigners ... The stink of the
stables is gone and amazing halls have replaced them. But the animals have disappeared as
well, as has the manure that was taken to the fields to fertilize them and retain the rain, which
now washes right away… But there are so many vineyards that I am reminded of that
prophecy attributed to Brandano, the Sienese hermit from the sixteenth century, who
responded to someone asking him: “When will wine cost dear?” by saying “When the
Chianti will be covered with vineyards!”2
Perhaps ironically, since he’s an “outsider” of sorts, Máté’s sense of place and time is the one
undergirding “heritage,” or patrimony.3 This perspective looks at the landscape from the vantage
point of the present, constructing a coherent and uninterrupted lineage that makes the landscape
legible and thus marketable to a wide audience. Guarducci’s perspective, by contrast, looks at the
landscape from the vantage point of a perhaps equally mythical tradition, and charts the eventful
collapse of old ways of life.4 His gaze charts a landscape of irreversible change—one that may
even fulfill somewhat ominous prophecies. In this paper I do not intend to validate one of these
senses of place and time and disprove the other. But I want to point out that these perceptions are
both singular and linear, and that perhaps they both belie the irreducibly plural temporalities that
have shaped this and many other rural landscapes.
On the face of it, Guarducci is certainly correct in pointing out that the Chianti is today
covered with vineyards, and that wine is indeed far more expensive, even in relative terms, than
when he was a young man. Back then, in a sense, vineyards were almost non-existent, if by
vineyard we mean a plot of land specialized in the production of grapes and covered with tightly
arranged rows of vines. There were rows of vines, to be sure, but they were not tightly arranged.
Rather, they hung from olive trees or field maples interspersed with wide stripes of arable land
where grains and fodder crops were grown. This was the “mixed agriculture” (agricoltura
promiscua) typical of much of central Italy. In contrast with modern specialized vineyards, these
fields were also horizontally arranged (meaning, across the slope lines), often on terraces or
banks, according to the recommendations codified by the agricultural reformers of the late 18th
and early 19th centuries to prevent soil erosion.5
These agriculturally mixed and horizontally arranged fields created a landscape of rent and
subsistence. Until the 1960s, central Tuscany was dominated by the sharecropping system of
land tenure, or mezzadria,6 in which a landlord contributed most of the fixed capital necessary
for agriculture, including the farmhouse, and the head of the peasant family contributed his labor
and that of his relatives, with the two parties dividing in half both costs and revenue. Peasant
families used the revenue mostly for subsistence, whereas the landlords sold it to pay their
managers and buy the many things that urban life offered, since they typically lived in towns.
Central Tuscany was a land of large estates, and those had villas where the landlords spent some
time hunting and entertaining. This was a landscape saturated with social distinctions. Forms of
class, generational, and gender subordination were inscribed in space and relied on specific
dwelling practices.
Perceptions of immutability did not start with the contemporary residential tourists. Tuscan
sharecropping long appeared as a solid and coherent system, which was sometimes admired for
its conservatively harmonious qualities (sharecroppers were imagined as subordinate partners,
not as proletarians), and other times criticized for its resistance to innovation. Many already
perceived rural Tuscany as an anachronism by the late 19th century. But of course change did
take place, first slowly, in the 1880s and 1890s, in the form of estate consolidations, the spread
of new commercial crops, and impending mechanization. Then, in the wake of WWI, change
came with a vengeance. Tuscan sharecroppers rose up in 1919 and 1920, demanding change and
responding to the propaganda of the socialist party, which they contributed to bringing to power
in many of the region’s municipalities. As a consequence, Tuscany was one of the regions where
the Fascist backlash was most violent, and where the Black Shirts, organized and even staffed by
the landlords fought hardest to restore threatened social boundaries and distinctions.7
The Fascist revolutionary restoration allowed the Tuscan landlords to keep inscribing in the
landscape their myths of social collaboration, and vineyards figured prominently in these
imaginings. At the height of the Fascist era, Ranuccio Bianchi-Bandinelli, an influential
archeologist and aristocratic landlord from the outskirts of Siena, wrote eloquently of the care
and judgment Tuscan peasants bestowed on the land and its creatures, estheticizing the landscape
and glossing over the backbreaking (and largely invisible and unpaid) work that was required of
peasants to make hillside agriculture viable:
The pruning of the olives and vines and the bending and binding of the latter is an art, quite
different from merely sitting on a tractor and traveling around in circles or throwing seed
potatoes into drilled holes ... The result must satisfy the eye as [well as] fill the pocket at
harvest time. Intuition is the impulse behind art, which delights the eye as a result. Bello or
brutto, beautiful or ugly: these two words recur incessantly in the conversation of the man in
the street; they are filled with ethical content.8
Not all creatures, however, were as benevolent as the compliant vine and olive tree. By the
1930s, the vineyards of Europe had been under attack for decades by an aphid that had snuck its
way from the Americas, the phylloxera. By the 1890s it had become clear that the only
permanent protection against the infestation was the grafting of European varietals on American
rootstock, naturally resistant to the pest. The uprooting and grafting of millions of vines was not
an easy task, and it called for massive investments. In Tuscany, as elsewhere in Italy, consortia
of landowners began to emerge at the end of the 19th century, subsidized by the state and in
constant contact with public agricultural extension services. The wealthiest landlords and wine
producers factored this ongoing additional cost into their strategies, but many other landowners
could not (or would not) comply, thereby endangering their neighbor’s vines. As late as the
1930s, the bug seemed to be winning the war.
The mixed agriculture of mezzadria was believed to have slowed down the spread of the
infestation, but it also raised exponentially the costs of vine reimplantation once the infestation
became a real threat, since it made the use of tractors and excavators nearly impossible. In spite
of the sharecroppers’ actual political sympathies in the wake of WWI, Fascism loved
sharecropping and thought of it as a model of social relations to be imitated throughout the
peninsula and the Empire. Fascism also thought of itself as a rural and ruralizing regime,
committed to reclaiming (bonificare) the Italian countryside and its dwellers by all means
necessary, mixing incentives and threats. The problem was that there was no sharecropping
without mixed agriculture, but there was no real reclamation of the vineyards with mixed
agriculture. This contradiction all but paralyzed the regime in the parts of Tuscany, such as the
Chianti, where the bulk of farming revenue came from wine. The general retrenchment from
international trade did not help either, I should add. The regime even tried to replace wine with
bread, or vines with grains, despite the very low yields to be obtained in this hilly region.9
Let’s pause for a moment here and attend to the temporalities that were embedded in the
Tuscan landscape circa 1935, the year former sharecropper Guarducci was born (and by
temporalities I mean both senses of time and material trajectories). There was the landlords’
powerful nostalgia linked to the effort of keeping sharecropping alive as an antidote to the
tensions of modernity. There was the violently suppressed utopia of the sharecroppers, who had
struggled for social change in the wake of the war. There were the utopian claims of the regime,
which imagined a strong and regenerated future rural society. There was the admiration for the
compliant manual labor of an eternal peasantry, belied by the roar of the increasingly common
tractor. There was the undeniable agency of a perfidious bug, which sentenced vines to their
doom. And indeed there was a widespread sense that rural Tuscany was “out of step” with time
and perhaps “out of time” altogether, at the mercy of its contradictions.
As soon as the regime fell, Tuscan peasants rose up again, this time organized by the
Communist Party and its affiliated union. The current leftist identity of Tuscany (or whatever is
left of it) owes much to these struggles. For the first time, peasants seemed to matter as peasants;
they thought and claimed to be joining “History” on their own terms.10 And sure enough, new
dreams of regeneration began to circulate on the Tuscan hills. Among other requests, organized
sharecroppers demanded that their labor stop being invisible and unpaid, and that the landlords
invest in mechanizing cultivation and in improving housing conditions. They also demanded the
installation of two million new vines across the region, noticing that wine production in the late
1940s was less than half of its pre-WWII level. And these vines were to be planted in mixed
vineyards, lest specialization make sharecroppers altogether redundant.
Much like the Fascists, albeit in a far more locally rooted and consensual way, Tuscan
Communists combined nostalgia and utopianism, developing at least as contradictory a
relationship with modernity as the Fascists. The landlords, by contrast, had gotten over their
nostalgic love for the mezzadria system. In the face of the renewed militancy of the peasants,
whom they could no longer beat into submission, they threw up their arms and stopped investing
altogether, despite government injunctions. They decided to wait it out, trusting that the future,
however uncertain, would belong to them.
Overall, the landlords were right on all counts. Sharecropping, and the Tuscan peasantry with
it, died a slow death in the course of the postwar decades. Sharecropping was replaced by smallscale farming on the one hand and by mechanized and specialized agriculture on the other.
Above all, and in both these new systems, rural Tuscany became a subsidized space, like most
other rural places across Europe, where ongoing public intervention was necessary to battle
unwelcome and threatening trends, above all the complete abandonment of the land. Tuscan
agriculture shed two thirds of its workforce in the 1950s and 1960s, and an additional half in the
next two decades. The landscape that Guarducci simultaneously admired and bemoaned at the
turn of the 21st century was forged at this juncture, largely through ongoing subsidies coming
first from Rome and then from Brussels.
As soon as the sharecroppers left for non-agricultural jobs in the nearby towns, the landlords
(in many cases the same old families that had supported the rise of Fascism) applied for
European funds to restructure their vineyards. Mixed agriculture was abandoned almost
overnight, terraces and banks were leveled, and the landscape assumed a vertical appearance,
thereby facilitating the work of the tractors and heavy machinery. In the process, the war on the
phylloxera aphid, which helped justify the restructuring in the first place, was quickly won,
although soil erosion and the massive use of pesticides became new concerns. Also, in 1963 a
new law came to regulate wine production on the French model of the appellation d’origine,
improving the quality of Tuscan wine (or at least making it conform to international taste), but
also manufacturing scarcity by limiting the size of the vineyards, as well as their yields and
density. The new vineyards were 3 times more productive than the old ones on average, but they
could easily have been far more productive still. Hence the rising prices, in a context of
exploding international demand.
It goes without saying that this was not the kind of regeneration that the leftist administrators
of Tuscany, many of whom were former sharecroppers, had in mind. The irony was that the
return of democracy had brought many former peasants to power at the local and regional levels,
but this power could not be translated into real control over the shape of the region’s rural
landscape. For a couple of decades, Tuscan Communists saw the new specialized vineyards as
examples of capitalist restructuring and speculation, based on the socialization of the costs of
rural change and the privatization of its profits.11 This contrast was especially flagrant in the
cases when multinationals paired by with the landlords to market Tuscan wine worldwide. In a
sense, the Tuscan sharecroppers seemed to be paying, through taxation, for their own
dispossession, as the price of prime land quadrupled from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s.
Indeed, circa 1975 there were at least as many conflicting temporalities confronting each other
on the Tuscan hills as there had been forty years before.
Starting in the late 1970s, however, these transformations came to be naturalized. The Tuscan
Left made an uneasy peace with specialized vineyards, or vine monocultures, as they were
sometimes called. This process of reconciliation was itself the product of a considerable amount
of cultural and material work. The sharecroppers’ struggles, as well as their labor, receded into
the past, as a more remote (and almost entirely imagined) “patrimony” was made to matter in the
present. New genealogies began to appear that linked contemporary vineyards to those depicted
in the art of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, such as the frescoes of Ambrogio
Lorenzetti and Beato Angelico.12 After all, these claims argued, there was nothing natural about
the terraces of the sharecropping system, which had been bulldozed to make room for the new,
vertical, vineyards. Many Tuscan municipalities began to offer tax incentives to replace the
cement poles that now supported most Tuscan vines with more Medieval-looking ones,
preferably made of chestnut wood. Appropriately framed in these ways, the blatantly modern
vineyards could thus reinforce the myths of continuity on which the heritage industry rested.
The main question, of course, was (and still is), “whose heritage?” Despite their novelty,
Tuscan vineyards have come to be inscribed into a celebrated “landscape,” understood as a
representation to be appreciated esthetically and protected from the ravages of the same kind of
modernity that has created them in the first place. The normative approach to landscape, which
regulates work and dwelling practices in the name of esthetic coherence and hegemonic
understandings of the common good, is something of a compromise between conflicting
trajectories and sensibilities. “Speculation” is a threat against which diverse coalitions can be
forged. In this arena, commonalities between the leftist heirs of the sharecroppers, who still
control the democratic process, and the large-scale landlords, who still own the bulk of valuable
land, can emerge, at least provisionally. The generic character of this compromise dovetails with
the sensibilities of international visitors and residential tourists such as Máté, who are eager to
see Tuscany as a place where the tensions of modernity have been kept at bay. These groups read
partly different patrimonial stories in the Tuscan hills, while defining the contours of a bland and
generic “rurality” that is almost devoid of meaning. Generic patrimonial beauty is the latest
version of the signature combination of nostalgia and utopia that has forged rural Tuscany since
at least Fascism. In a move that simultaneously affirms and negates Tuscany’s complex
modernity, different senses of place and time keep shaping the land in the name of its
preservation.
1
F. Máté, The Hills of Tuscany: A New Life in an Old Land (New York: Flamingo, 1999): 29.
2
Marcello Guarducci, Memorie di un Contadino Smesso, Archivio Diaristico Nazionale, Pieve S. Stefano: 29.
3
The most influential study of “heritage” in its relationships with history and is perhaps David Lowenthal,
Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (New York: Free Press, 1996). Here, I am
less interested in contrasting these categories than in showing how they define each other in interaction in the actors’
complex senses of place and time.
4
For a discussion on conficting senses of time in southern Tuscany, see Federico Scarpelli, La Memoria del
Territorio. Patrimonio Culturale e Nostalgia a Pienza (Ospedaletto: Pacini, 2007).
5
Emilio Sereni, Storia del Paesaggio Agrario Italiano (Bari: Laterza, 1961), chapters 71, 72, and 75.
6
On the history of central Italian sharecropping, see Giorgio Giorgetti, Contadini e Proprietari nell’Italia Moderna
(Turin: Einaudi, 1974); Elisa Bianchi, Il Tramonto della Mezzadria e i Suoi Riflessi Geografici (Milan: UNICOPLI,
1983); Cristina Papa, Dove Sono Molte Braccia E' Molto Pane (Perugia: Editoriale Umbra, 1985).
7
F. Snowden, The Fascist Revolution in Tuscany, 1919-1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
8
R. Bianchi-Bandinelli, “Introduction,” in Arnold Von Borsig, Tuscany. 200 Photographs by Arnold von Borsig
(New York: Thomas Crowell, 1955): 7. The Italian edition was published in 1938.
9
Domenico Preti, “L’Economia Toscana nel Periodo Fascista,” in Giorgio Mori (ed.), Storia d’Italia. Le Regioni
dall’Unità a Oggi. La Toscana (Turin: Einaudi, 1986): 580-621.
10
Alessandro Orlandini and Giorgio Venturini, Padrone Arrivedello a Battitura: Lotte Mezzadrili nel Senese nel
Secondo Dopoguerra (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1980) and Emo Bonifazi, Lotte Contadine in Val d’Orcia (Siena: Nuovo
Corriere Senese, 1979). The summa of the post-war reflection on these themes is perhaps reflected in the two
volumes, I Mezzadri e la Democrazia in Italia. Annali dell’Istituto Attilio Cervi 8 (1986) and 9 (1987). See also
Dario Gaggio, “Before the Exodus: The Landscape of Social Struggle in Rural Tuscany, 1945-1960,” Journal of
Modern History 83 (2011): 319-345.
11
Antonio Fiorentino and Marco Massa, La Collina Fiorentina tra Speculazione Edilizia e Investimento
Multinazionale (Florence: Edizioni Pappagallo, 1979).
12
Pier Luigi Pisani, "La Vite nel Paesaggio del Chianti," in Italo Moretti (ed.), Il Paesaggio del Chianti. Problemi e
Prospettive (Florence: Associazione Intercomunale 10, 1988): 99-123.