Word: landed
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...island of Sardinia, black-capped, white-trousered unemployed farm laborers moved onto the rocky hills which had been untouched by the plow for generations. Near Cerveteri, along the rolling hills of Via Aurelia, on a plot of 124 meager acres which had produced nothing but blackberries for years, the land-hungry were fiercely hacking away weeds and shrubs; one old man, behind a pair of snow-white oxen, turned a fresh furrow in the fallow earth to stake his claim...
...many places the peasants clashed with police; there were hundreds of arrests and nearly a score dead. Communist agitators were among the land-grabbing peasants; but most were moved by a genuine, desperate need. Italy, though greatly recovered under Marshall Plan aid, was still far from raising enough food for her teeming, fast-breeding folk. Yet about 4,000,000 acres of land, held by a handful of wealthy owners, still lay idle or were worked by antiquated methods...
Well aware of the problem, Premier Alcide de Gasperi's government, which draws support from Italy's huge landowners, had failed miserably to carry out a sensible land-reform program. In Rome, Jesuit Father Riccardo Lombardi, who has carried his ardent revivalist "Crusade of Love" across the land (TIME, Dec. 20, 1948), cried: "The mighty of this world, the ecclesiastical and civil authorities, must do something for those who cannot wait because hunger gnaws at their vitals...
...Sheep of Melissa. The great hunger for land has been gnawing at Italy's vitals for years; it has nowhere been more fierce than in Melissa, a grey, forlorn village in malaria-ridden Calabria, where the wave of land seizures began, in bloodshed, more than a month...
...Melissa's 6,000 people, 1,840 are unemployed. The peasants live in filthy hillside hovels, ten and twelve to a 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...