Estate and Class in a South Italian Hill Village1

Abstract

THE loss of centralized authority after the dissolution of the Roman empire gave rise to a loosely clustered system of local power commonly described as feudalism. The basic manorial economy, coupled with the pattern of vassalage and subinfeudation in the theocratic-oriented states, produced a system of stratification in which authority and power were vested in relatively rigid estates. In an agricultural economy which was characterized by largescale land holdings and production for market, one's position in the social system was determined by one's relation to the system of land tenure. The latifondisti (landed-estate owners) of South Italy and Sicily have held sway, in many areas, to the present century. Various land reform movements have occurred in South Italy. The Code Napoleon instituted one such reform in the first decade of the 19th century. For the most part, however, the reforms of the past century were short lived and the small land holdings gained by the peasants reverted to the largescale absentee landlords. The most recent reform scheme, post-World War II, has been in operation for too short a period to have affected materially the existing system of stratification. Indeed, the reforms of the 1940's have yet to be adequately evaluated. The traditional pattern of social stratification found in much of South Italy exhibited a high degree of linkage to the pre-existing feudal form (Fig. 1). Four strata could be distinguished in many of the southern villages: galantuomini (benestante, gentlemen or well-off), artigiani-mercanti, (artisands and merchants), contadini (peasants), and, giornalieri (day laborers) (Banfield 1958:69). The disjunctive nature of the social systems represented in the schematic diagrams is indicative of the lack of social interaction between the various strata. In both the idealized conception of the feudal-estate pattern and the traditional South Italian form, the strata tended toward social closure. Typical of the feudal and traditional stratification forms, the individual peasant rarely owned his own land; rather, he farmed on a share-crop basis (parziaro). The village of Cortina d'Aglio (a pseudonym for a village in the Molisan Appenines) differs from much of the South in one important way: there is a well-established pattern of individual local land ownership. While not unique,