Living in a Village - Turning Tuscan: A Step-by-Step Guide to Going Native - page 43

Living in a Village
T he village of San Cosimo is located just about 15 km outside of Siena. Once upon a time
it was one of the fortified villages around the perimeter of Sienese territory that defended
against Florentine incursions. In the 1550s when Siena faced its final defeat at the hands of
Spanish troops allied with the Florentines, San Cosimo was one of the many Sienese towns
and villages that were systematically destroyed, their walls knocked down and their inhab-
itants subdued. The town eventually rebuilt itself and its walls but lived the life of a quiet
farming village through the succeeding centuries.
Farming in Tuscany was organized largely through a form of sharecropping, known as
mezzadria , until as late as the 1960s. By then it was gradually being abandoned by its practi-
tioners and was soonafter abolished bylaw.Under mezzadria the big farmhouses around the
village belonged to the landowners but served to house large, extended families who farmed
the land. These families grew a bit of everything, and they gave half to the padrone . They
were poor but largely self-sufficient. Almost all of the older villagers in our town grew up
living in this way. By the 1970s they had all abandoned their farmhouses which gradually
fell into ruin. The Tuscan countryside became largely depopulated in the during this period
as people left the land and moved into cities and towns to take jobs. Those were the days
of real estate bargains, a time when Tuscany was a travel destination only for Renaissance
aficionados. We've met a couple that bought a castle in our area in the early 1980s for about
$30,000.
San Cosimo survived the demise of mezzadria better than many other small villages. Af-
fordable new housing was built just outside the town walls and was made available to the
families who were abandoning share-cropping along with their old farm dwellings. Many
of them and their children have continued to live and work around the village to this day.
Today, the population of San Cosimo numbers around five hundred souls; about half still
live within the old walls while the other half live just outside in the newer homes. In Amer-
ica, a sub-division that's 30 years old is considered a well-established neighborhood; here it
will probably be considered the “new part of town” for the next couple hundred years.
Our own apartment is located within the walls of the old part of the village. In fact, one of
the walls in our master bedroom shares a section of the defensive wall that girdles the vil-
lage. At its base the wall is about six feet thick; up two flights of stairs where we live, it thins
to three feet. If the Florentines ever come back, we'll at least have a fighting chance.
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