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‘I Terroni in Città’: Revisiting Southern Migrants’ Militancy in Turin's ‘Hot Autumn’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 September 2012

NICOLA PIZZOLATO
NICOLA PIZZOLATO*
Affiliation:
School of History, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS; nicola_pizzolato@hotmail.com
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Abstract

This article proposes a revision of the predominant view of southern Italians during the ‘Hot Autumn’ of 1969 in Turin, one of the most remarkable moments of working-class mobilisation in modern European history. The representation of southern Italians as ‘primitive rebels’ and ‘spontaneous’ radicals has its roots in an earlier notion of southerners as social deviants and has obscured a much more complex historical reality. This image, endorsed by historians and popularised in fictional accounts, contradicts contemporary evidence which points to southerners’ singular mix of radicalism and conservatism, resistance and integration.

‘i terroni in città’: une réexamination du militantisme des ouvriers migrants meridionaux pendant l'‘automne chaud’ de turin

Cet article propose une révision de l'opinion prédominante des italiens méridionaux pendant l'‘automne chaud’ de 1969 à Turin, l'un des moments les plus remarquables de la mobilisation ouvrière dans l'histoire européenne moderne. On a représenté les italiens du sud en rebelles primitives, en extrémistes ‘spontanés’, mais cette notion remonte en fait à l'idée que les méridionaux sont des déviants, une idée qui masque une réalité historique bien plus complexe. Cette image, renforcée par les historiens et popularisée dans les romans, se trouve en contradiction avec l'évidence de l'époque, qui indique par contre un mélange méridional très particulier d'extrémisme et de conservatisme, de résistance et d'intégration.

‘i terroni in città’: eine überprüfung des kampfgeistes südlicher migrantarbeiter in turin während des ‘heißen herbstes’

Dieser Artikel regt eine Korrektur des vorherrschenden Bildes von den Süditalienern während des ‘Heißen Herbstes’ von 1969 in Turin an, einem der in Bezug auf die Mobilisation der Arbeiterklasse bemerkenswertesten Momente in der modernen europäischen Geschichte. Die Darstellung der Süditaliener als ‘primitive Rebellen’ und ‘spontane’ Radikale ist tief in der damals bereits vorhandenen Wahrnehmung der Menschen aus dem Süden als soziale Abweichler verwurzelt und verschleiert eine weitaus komplexere historische Realität. Dieses von Historikern gebilligte und durch fiktionale Darstellungen verbreitete Bild wird von zeitgenössischen Quellen widerlegt, die auf eine einzigartige Mischung von Radikalität und Konservatismus, Widerstand und Integration im Charakter der Süditaliener hinweisen.

Type
Articles
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 21 , Issue 4 , November 2012 , pp. 619 - 634
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 For an updated overview of the Hot Autumn see Berta, Giuseppe, Conflitto industriale e struttura d'impresa alla Fiat (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998)Google Scholar; Giachetti, Diego and Scavino, Marco, La Fiat in mano agli operai: L'autunno caldo del 1969 (Pisa: BFS, 1999)Google Scholar. Trentin, Bruno, Autunno Caldo: Il secondo bienno rosso (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1999)Google Scholar is a memoir. In English: Tarrow, Sidney, Democracy and Disorder: Protest and Politics in Italy, 1965–1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Lumley, Robert, States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978 (London: Verso, 1990)Google Scholar; Ginsborg, Paul, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943–1988 (London: Penguin, 1990), 309–31Google Scholar; Sabel, Charles, Work and Politics: The Division of Labor in Industry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 145–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Contini, Giovanni, ‘Politics, law, and shop floor bargaining in post-war Italy’, in Tolliday, S. and Zeitlin, J., eds, Shop Floor Bargaining and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar. Contemporary accounts are: Georgakas, Dan, ‘Italy: New Tactics and Organisation’, Radical America, 5, 5 (1971), 3–39Google Scholar. For the theoretical debate underlying the protest see Wright, Steve, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 2002)Google Scholar. A widely used primary source is Rieser, Vittorio, ‘Cronaca delle lotte alla Fiat’, Quaderni Piacentini, 38 (1969), 2–29Google Scholar.

2 For an overview of the changes introduced by the Statuto dei Lavoratori, see Giugni, Gino, Il sindacato fra contratti e riforme 1969–1973 (Bari: De Donato, 1973)Google Scholar; Regalia, Ida, Regini, Mario, ‘Italy: The Dual Character of Industrial Relations’, in Ferner, A. and Hyman, R., eds, Changing Industrial Relations in Europe (London: Blackwell, 1998)Google Scholar; Salvati, Michele, ‘Muddling Through: Economics and Politics in Italy, 1969–1971’ in Lange, P. and Tarrow, S., eds, Italy in Transition: Conflict and Consensus (London: Frank Cass, 1980)Google Scholar.

3 The following books provide an overview of the most significant interpretations of the causes of the Hot Autumn: Tarrow, Democracy and Disorder; Lumley, States of Emergency; Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy; Sassoon, Donald, Contemporary Italy: Politics, Economy and Society since 1945 (London: Longman, 1986), 62–4Google Scholar; Pizzorno, Alessandroet al., Lotte Operaie e Sindacato: Il Ciclo 1968–1972 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1978)Google Scholar.

4 ‘Primitive rebels’ is Hobsbawn's characterisation of the Sicilian peasants rebellion: see Hobsbawn, Eric, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959Google Scholar; translated into Italian by Einaudi in 1966), 93–107.

5 On Lombroso, see Fregessi, D., Giacanelli, F. and Mangani, L., Delitto, Genio, Follia (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1995)Google Scholar; Niceforo, A., L'Italia barbara contemporanea (Studi e appunti) (Milano-Palermo: Sandron, 1898)Google Scholar; on the origins of prejudice against Meridionali, see Teti, V., La razza maledetta: Origini del pregiudizio antimeridionale (Roma: Manifestolibri, 1993)Google Scholar; Dickie, John, Darkest Italy: The Nation and the Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno (London: Macmillan, 1999)Google Scholar and Dickie, ‘A World at War: the Italian army and brigandage 1860–1870’, History Workshop Journal, 33 (1992), 1–24.

6 As remarked in the conference on ‘Immigration, work, and mental health’ (23–4 March 1963), quoted in Ambrosi, P., Grassi, A., Rampazi, M. and Vender, S., Malattia Mentale e società: Storia e critica della psichiatria sociale (Roma: Il Pensiero Scientifico, 1980), 64Google Scholar.

7 Canestrari, Renzo, ‘La psicologia del pregiudizio sociale’, in Rassegna di psicologia generale e clinica, 1 (1959)Google Scholar; Batacchi, Marco, Meridionali e Settentrionali nella struttura del pregiudizio etnico in Italia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1972 [1959])Google Scholar.

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10 Compagna, Francesco, I terroni in città (Bari: Laterza, 1959)Google Scholar.

11 IRES, Immigrazione di massa e struttura sociale in Piemonte (IRES: Torino, 1965), 276–9; Batacchi, M., Meridionali e Settentrionali nella struttura del pregiudizio etnico in Italia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1959, 1972)Google Scholar.

12 Nord e Sud nella società e nell'economia italiana di oggi. Atti del Convegno promosso dalla Fondazione Luigi Einaudi 30/3–8/4 1967 (Torino: Einaudi, 1968), 436.

13 Rizzo, Giuseppe, ‘L'iniziativa dei comunisti verso gli immigrati al nord’, Cronache meridionali, 2/3 (1964), 77–83Google Scholar, quoted in Fiammetta Balestracci, ‘Immigrati e Pci, 1950–1970’, in Levi, Fabio and Maida, Bruno, eds, La città e lo sviluppo: Crescita e disordine a Torino, 1945–1970 (Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2002), 164, 160Google Scholar.

14 Batacchi, Meridionali e Settentrionali nella struttura del pregiudizio etnico in Italia; Di Napoli, Cataldo, I Meridionali al Nord (Roma: Editoriale Idea, 1967), 101Google Scholar; Passerini, Luisa and Filippa, Marcella, ‘Memorie di Mirafiori’, in Olmo, Carlo, ed., Mirafiori: 1936–1962 (Torino: Allemandi, 1997), 341Google Scholar.

15 La Classe, 13–14 Aug. 1969.

16 Compagna, I terroni in città.

17 Giannotti, Lorenzo, Gli operai della Fiat hanno cento anni (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1999)Google Scholar.

18 Balestrini, Nanni, Prendiamoci tutto (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1972), 7Google Scholar.

19 Balestrini, Vogliamo tutto (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1971), 188.

20 For a critical survey of this literature see Borghello, Giampaolo and Rossa, Linea, Intellettuali, letteratura e lotta di classe 1965–1975 (Venezia: Marsilio, 1982)Google Scholar. On Vogliamo tutto, see Marwick, Arthur, The 1960s: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958-c.1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 519–22Google Scholar, and, especially, Berta, Giuseppe, Mirafiori (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998), 106–10Google Scholar.

21 See Pizzolato, Nicola, ‘Revolution in a Comic Strip: Gasparazzo and the Identity of Southern Migrants in Turin, 1969–1975’, International Review of Social History, 52, Suppl. 15 (2007), 59–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 See for instance, Giachetti and Scavino, La Fiat in mano agli operai, 33, 191. Franzosi, Roberto, The Puzzle of Strikes: Class and State Strategies in Post-war Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 264CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Lumley, States of Emrgency, 210–1.

23 This representation of southern workers resonated with the account of revolutionaries in the nineteenth century, the Sicilian Fasci, famously described by Hobsbawm in Primitive Rebels.

24 Musso, Stefano, ‘Gli operai nella storiografia contemporanea’, in Musso, ed., Tra fabbrica e società: Mondi operai nell'Italia del Novecento (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1999), xxxiGoogle Scholar.

25 Lumley, States of Emergency, 211.

26 Giannotti, Renzo, ‘Il movimento operaio in Piemonte: un bilancio (1960–1980)’, in Agosti, Aldo and Bravo, Gian Maria, eds, Storia del movimento operaio, del socialismo e delle lotte sociali in Piemonte (Bari: De Donato, 1981), 447Google Scholar.

27 Critical analysis of Vogliamo tutto can be found in Sangiovanni, Andrea, Tute Blu: La parabola operaia nell'Italia repubblicana (Roma: Donzelli, 2006), 165–9Google Scholar; Berta, Mirafiori, 106–9.

28 The themes of Vogliamo tutto are echoed in some interviews selected in Polo, Gabriele, ed., I tamburi di Mirafiori (Torino: CRIC, 1989)Google Scholar.

29 According to Lumley, States of Emergency, 209, 63% of police or carabinieri were southerners.

30 In the same year left-wing writer and director Pier Paolo Pasolini had famously defended the policemen after the clashes with the student movement by characterising them as sons of the southern proletariat.

31 Oral history is well suited to understanding the individual experience of social change. Here I use individual stories to question a mainstream narrative of a collective experience. The oral history of southern car workers in Turin has largely focused on militants who had been prominent in the factory strikes and marches (see Polo, I tamburi di Mirafiori), interviewed by historians who wanted to tell the story of the radicalisation of unskilled workers; clues to an alternative interpretation are preferably to be found in narratives of southern workers interviewed with a different research agenda, as in the community study and the company study quoted below. Contemporary documentaries, which often selected workers for interview at random outside the factories or in the neighbourhoods, also showed a wider array of positions.

32 ‘La diffidenza degli operai verso noi “studenti” era un sentimento sempre presente; e da taluni anche quotidianamente rinfocolato’. In Viale, Guido, A casa: Una storia irritante (Napoli: L'Ancora del Mediterraneo 2001)Google Scholar, 63, quoted in Sangiovanni, Tute Blu, 157.

33 Interview with Ennio Furchì, in ‘Le svolte storiche – L'autunno caldo’ (documentary) by P. G. Murgia, Rai Teche (1977).

34 Documento 12, ‘Riunione Studenti e Operai, 12 maggio 1968’, in Lanzardo, Liliana, Cronaca della Commissione operaia del Movimento Studentesco torinese, dicembre 1967-maggio 1968 (Pistoia: Centro di Documentazione di Pistoia, 1997)Google Scholar, 56, quoted in Hilwig, Stuart J., ‘“You Are Not our Vanguard!” A Study of the Italian Student Movement's Failure to Mobilise the Workers of FIAT in the 1960s’, Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, 36, 2 (2008), 255CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Interview with Luciano Parlanti, in Polo, I Tamburi di Mirafiori, 63.

36 Quoted in Revelli, Marco, Lavorare in Fiat (Torino: Garzanti, 1989), 57Google Scholar.

37 Interview with Dino Antonion, in Polo, I tamburi di Mirafiori, 89–90.

38 An example was the father of Mimmo Calopresti, who emigrated from Calabria in the early 1960s to work at FIAT. See Calopresti's documentary Tutto era Fiat (Bianca Film, 1999).

39 Author's interview with Angelo Greco, April 2004.

40 Luciano Parlanti, in Polo, I tamburi di Mirafiori, 69.

41 See for instance the interview with Beppe Rorro in Lerner, Gad, Operai (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1988), 31–5Google Scholar.

42 Bobbio, Luigi, Storia di Lotta Continua (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1988), 38–50Google Scholar; Revelli, Lavorare in Fiat; Polo, I tamburi di Mirafiori.

43 Tronti, Mario, Operai e Capitale (Torino: Einaudi, 1966)Google Scholar.

44 For an account of the representation of the mass worker see Sangiovanni, Tute Blu, 153–72.

45 Quoted in interview with Vittorio Rieser, 3 Oct. 2001 in Borio, Guido, Pozzi, Francesca and Roggero, Guido, eds, Futuro anteriore: Dai ‘Quaderni Rossi’ ai movimenti globali – ricchezze e limiti dell'operaismo (Roma: DeriveApprodi, 2002)Google Scholar, appendix.

46 Lotta continua, ‘Proposte relative all'organizzazione del nostro lavoro politico’, Centro Studi Piero Gobetti, Fondo Marcello Vitale, Box 3, folder 1.

47 Bobbio, Storia di Lotta Continua, 43–4 and 65–8.

48 See the oral histories of Beppe Rorro in Lerner, Operai; Alfano Bonaventura in Bonaventura, Alfano, Mirafiori e dintorni (Roma, Ediesse, 1997)Google Scholar; and interviews with migrants Francesco and Nicola (no surnames given) in Castrovilli, Angelo and Seminara, Carmelo, Mirafiori, la città oltre il Lingotto (Torino: Ages, 2000), 81, 83Google Scholar.

49 Tarrow, Democracy and Disorder, 193.

50 A good description of this process is in Alfano, Mirafiori e dintorni.

51 This is the image for instance conveyed by Donald Sassoon in an otherwise excellent synthesis of contemporary Italy: Sassoon, Contemporary Italy, p. 63.

52 Anfossi, Anna, ‘L'immigrazione meridionale a Torino’, in CRIS, Immigrazione e industria (Milano: Comunità, 1962)Google Scholar; Fofi, L'immigrazione meridionale a Torino (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1963).

53 As demonstrated by Franco Ramella in his essay on southerners in Turin, ‘Immigrazione e traiettorie sociali in città: Salvatore e gli altri negli anni Sessanta’, in Arru, Angiolina and Ramella, Franco, eds, L'Italia delle migrazioni interne (Roma: Donzelli, 2003), 339–85Google Scholar. See also Revelli, Lavorare in Fiat, 16, 31.

54 Franco Ramella, ‘Immigrazione e traiettorie sociali in città’; Ramella, Franco, ‘Le migrazioni interne: Itinerari sociali e percorsi geografici’, in Storia d'Italia (Annali 24, Migrazioni; Torino: Einaudi, 2009), 425–48Google Scholar; Fofi, L'immigrazione meridionale a Torino.

55 Interview with Nicola (no surname given) in Catrovilli and Seminara, Mirafiori, la città oltre il Lingotto, 83. Interviews with southern migrants show many examples of this attitude. See for instance the Meridionale Peppino Muscarà hired in the late 1950s who recalls his wife's reaction to the news of the hiring at FIAT: ‘She was excited. She thought it was like entering the university. She used to say “My Lady, at last!”’, in Jodice, Renata, Torino 1945–1983. Memoria FIOM [Federazione Italiana Operai Metalmeccanici] (Milano: Franco Angeli, 1984), 109Google Scholar.

56 Berta, Giuseppe, Conflitto industriale e struttura d'impresa alla Fiat (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998), 149–52Google Scholar. For a direct witness see the interview with the FIAT chaplain in the magazine Sette giorni in Italia e nel mondo, 127 (16 Nov. 1969), 23.

57 There are many examples of this argument. See for instance this statement of Gianni Alasia, head of the communist Chamber of Labour: ‘the old unionised workers of Turin learned new tactics from the southern immigrants, they brought with them the ideas of Jacquerie, the peasants’ revolt’, quoted in Hilwig, ‘You are not our Vanguard’, 255.

58 Arisio, Luigi, Vita da capi: L'altra faccia di una grande fabbrica (Milano: Etas Libri, 1990)Google Scholar.

59 Writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie argues that ‘The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story’. See Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, ‘The danger of a single story’, TED talk, available at http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html (last visited 17 Nov. 2011).