Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Red & Black: A Chequered Past
While an upper-crust expat community was exporting Romantic notions about Italy, the
country was facing harsh realities. Commercial agriculture provided tidy sums to absentee
royal Austrian landlords while reducing peasants to poverty and creating stiff competition
for small family farms. In rural areas, three-quarters of the family income was spent on a
meagre diet of mostly grains. The promise of work in the burgeoning industrial sector lured
many to cities, where long working hours and dangerous working conditions simply led to
another dead end, and 70% of family income was still spent on food. Upward mobility was
rare, since university admissions were strictly limited, and the Habsburgs were cautious
about allowing locals into their imperial army or bureaucratic positions. Increasingly, the
most reliable means for Tuscans to support their families was emigration to the Americas.
Austrian rule provided a common enemy that united Italians across provinces and
classes. The Risorgimento (reunification period) was not so much a reorganisation of some
previously unified Italian states (which hadn't existed since Roman times) as a revival of
the city-state ideals of an independent citizenry. The secret societies that had flourished
right under French noses as a local check on colonial control formed a network of support
for nationalist sentiment. During 1848 and 1849 revolution broke out, and a radical govern-
ment was temporarily installed in Florence.
Nervous that the Austrians would invade, conservative Florentine leaders invited Habs-
burg Leopold II to return as archduke of Tuscany. But when rural unrest in Tuscany com-
plicated Austria's return to power, Austrian retaliation and brutal repression galvanised na-
tionalist sentiment in the region. Although Italy was united under one flag in 1861, this
early split between radicals and conservatives would define Tuscany's future political land-
scape.
Unification didn't end unemployment or unrest; only 2% of Italy's population gained the
right to vote in 1861. Strikes were held to protest working conditions, and their brutal sup-
pression gave rise to a new Socialist Party in 1881. The new Italian government's money-
making scheme to establish itself as a colonial power in Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia
and Eritrea) proved a costly failure: 17,000 Italian soldiers were lost near Adowa in 1896.
When grain prices were raised in 1898, many impoverished Italians could no longer afford
to buy food, and riots broke out. Rural workers unionised, and when a strike was called in
1902, 200,000 rural labourers came out en masse.
Finally Italian politicians began to take the hint and initiated some reforms. Child labour
was banned, working hours fixed and the right to vote extended to all men over the age of
