Word: berlingieri
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Dates: during 1949-1949
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...room. Between them, 6,000 people hold 7,400 acres of hard, rocky land, which means an average of little more than an acre for each-barely enough to stave off starvation. Some 4,000 acres, including fine, fertile land by the nearby seashore, are owned by Marquis Anselmo Berlingieri, whose family has held them for centuries. Most of Berlingieri's land is uncultivated; he finds it more profitable to graze his sheep on it, and the bitter townsfolk say that the sheep of Melissa are better fed than...
...land that he does work, Berlingieri-like most of Italy's other larger landowners-follows an ancient ruinous practice: he raises two wheat crops in succession, and turns the produce into a quick cash profit. Then he returns the land to his sheep. Berlingieri's tenants can do no better; generation after generation they have worked their fields only on three-year leases, had to face expulsion from the land at the end of each three-year term at the owner's will. They never dared to invest years of labor improving a soil whose yield might...
This year, as the autumn sowing season arrived, Melissa's gaunt people turned hungry eyes on one of Berlingieri's idle hilltops. One foggy morning 300 of them went up with axes and picks. The carabinieri soon arrived. In the battle that followed, three of the squatters were killed, several others wounded. The police charged that the squatters started the fight, with gunfire and hand grenades; two carabinieri were seriously wounded. The carabinieri blamed the Communists, and the Communists, eager to make political capital from the peasants' discontent, promptly replied that all the Melissa casualties were indeed...
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