Land Hunger

The great march was on. All over Italy, but mostly on the brown, exhausted earth of Calabria and Sicily, thousands of peasants were taking by force what they wanted most in life--land. Swinging picks and axes, they invaded the big estates and began to work the soil.

On the 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.

In 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."

The 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 ago.

Of 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 on it, and the bitter townsfolk say that the sheep of Melissa are better fed than its men.

On the 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 not be theirs.

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 Red martyrs.

Said Francesco Mauri at nearby Cutro: "This land will be ours as soon as it is cleared, or we will lie dead upon it. They may kill us, but we won't leave the land."

The Rape of the Land. This deep feeling for the soil is shared by many Italian landowners who work their land themselves, or treat their tenants as fellow owners. But under Italy's widespread system of absentee ownership, too many masters of the land rent it out for a fixed fee to subcontractors; they in turn rent it out to tenants who must make them a profit.

Near Cutro, a peasant paused behind his plow and explained how the system works: "This land belongs to the heirs of the noble Filippo Albani. They live far from Calabria. Cavaliere Francesco Cosentino rents land from them. He is a wealthy gentleman who sits in an armchair in Crotone. When we take off our hats to him, he seldom answers. We don't deal with Cosentino direct; he rents his land out to Francesco Corradi.

"Corradi doesn't despise the company of poor peasants. In fact, he is always around. I planted a fig tree here one day. I have held this land for 15 years, and never a tree on it. I want a tree. But Corradi rushed up shouting, 'Who planted this fig tree?' He made me cut it down."

Wealthy Francesco Cosentino, in his armchair in Crotone, agreed with his tenant. "We follow a system which amounts to rape of the land. We are no careful husbandmen--not husbands but rapists."

The Call of the Hour. The civil authorities on whom Father Lombardi called last week had realized at last that action was urgent. A government law, passed three years ago, had granted Italy's peasants the right to move onto certain fallow lands--provided they first obtained permission from provincial committees set up to consider their claims. The committees have been working at a snail's pace; with his usual policy of trying to please everyone--the landowners as well as the peasants--De Gasperi had pleased no one. Last week the government was readying a new and better land-reform bill. It provides that unused or poorly used land of 8,000 estate owners will be expropriated, bought up by the government and sold to peasants on easy payment terms.

Premier de Gasperi held one of his rare press conferences, gave out reassuring figures showing Italy's rising food production. He hopefully pointed to ECA projects in Italy which are trying to educate the peasants to use their land to better purposes. At La Sila, not far from Melissa, the Italian government, with ECA help, is spending 15 billion lire ($24 million) on a project to improve the land, plans to settle 20,000 peasant families there. They will be instructed in crop rotation and other modern agricultural methods, get new tools and fertilizers. The U.S. has earmarked about $240 million for about 100 similar reclamation projects in Italy.

Recently, De Gasperi himself went to Calabria to talk to the peasants. He told them that, until the situation was cleared up by law, they might keep the land they had seized. He promised reform. Said he: "... I am no revolutionary, but I cry woe betide landowners who don't heed the call of the present hour."

But until they got land, the peasants would be skeptical. Said Maria Rosa Giuliano, who lives in a windowless cavern with her nine children: "We will believe in the good things De Gasperi says when we see them. We liked him--the poor, thin man. But we have been disappointed too often."

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