Garzoni e servi di campagna: Urbino, l’Italia, l’Europa (secc. XVI–XX)

This article illustrates the spread and characteristics of Italian rural service, which largely contradict the ideas expressed by influential scholars on the alleged features of rural service in Italy. While the percentage of servants among the rural population was different according to place and time, in several cases it was as high as in many Central and Northern European areas. In several Italian areas where rural servants were numerous, joint families were common, a result that questions the link between life-cycle service and neo-locality. Additionally, even though in those very areas age at marriage was often rather high, almost no link has been discovered in large part of Italy between the presence of life-cycle servants and late marriage (except for Sardinia and some parts of the former Austrian Tirol, now under Italian rule). The most common Italian pattern seems to imply that children started to work as rural servants very young and stopped before they were 20 years old, thus normally long before marrying. The main purpose of leaving home to work as servant seemed to be relieving the strain on their family’s budgets, rather than accumulating resources for marrying. Furthermore, horphanages and foundling hospitals also placed the children they assisted as farm servants; in other words, public welfare institution, tto, had recourse to farm service, which created interesting connections between care provided by public assistance instituzion and care provided by private families.