Family and neighbourhood in the twentieth centuryIf we compare contemporary family and marriage practices in Ascoli with those of two centuries earlier, two immediate differences stand out : a marked increase in age at marriage for both sexes, and a sharp decline in extended and complex households, with a corresponding increase in the number of solitaries. Over recent decades, average age at marriage for women has moved up to the early thirties with husbands 3-5 years older. Allowing for legal fictions, the seventy families living in the neighbourhood of Pompei, in which we are currently working, are divided into the following types : solitaries, 20%; no structure, 1.5%; simple, 69.5%; extended, 4.5%; complex, 4.5%. At least two-thirds of the solitaries are living close to kin (mainly matrilateral kin), and with one exception, the complex families, like their eighteenth-century counterparts occupy separate apartments in the same building. The internal composition of nuclear families is quite different from those of the earlier period in that they contain a higher percentage of young unmarried adults. Three other inter-related changes are also worth noting. The first, is a greater patrilineal skew to inheritance strategies. The second, the gradual switch from a marriage to a death oriented system of property transmission for women, is closely linked to the ageing of the population. The third, is the growing competitiveness of marriage, which is often cited by informants as one of the reasons for delayed marriage. Most of these changes have their origins in the transformation of the rural economy and in relations between town and country which followed the opening up of the Tavoliere in the mid-nineteenth century. The development of an agro-town economy in Ascoli led to the expansion of a much more widespread class of landowners who, in order to keep patrimonies intact through the generations, adopted heirship strategies more closely resembling those of the eighteenth-century elite than other members of the urban core. Their successors, small and middling landholders who, since the First World War, have come to dominate Ascoli's economy, have broadly followed their example and, in particular, have used the essentially patrilineal notion of the razza (patriline, possibly clan) to articulate and justify the patrilineal skewing of inheritance patterns. The wider availability of arable has allowed household heads to establish a more rigourous sex-linked system of property transmission that excludes women altogether from ownership of land, the main productive asset : responsibility for the successful negotiation of courtship and subsequent marriage has passed more and more to women. Fathers and brothers are still expected to guarantee the contractual seriousness of marriage. But, over recent years, marriage payments have become more closely geared to ritual consumption and to the demonstration of family status in an increasingly differentiated community, than to the endowment of newly founded households. Couples must now find their own resources; for daughters as well as sons death has become the focus of the intergenerational transfer of property. The effects of these changes on the relationship between families and the wider kinship networks of which they are a part is neatly illustrated by the example of the twentieth-century evolution of Pompei. This neighbourhood was initially developed in the early thirties, on a near green-field site, by four Ascoli families (three small builders and a middling farmer). From talking to their descendants, it is plain that, within the confines of a bilateral system of inheritance, heirship strategies were, from the outset, tilted towards males, mainly on the principle that patriline continuity could best be preserved by keeping both property and sons together (Sono i figli che fanno la casa, che mantengono la razza). Thus, taking the example of the farming family, over three generations, successive household heads have managed to preserve the bulk of their landed property for the exclusive use of sons. And, despite conventional usage that assigns houses to daughters and land to sons, have also sought, like their eighteenth-century predecessors, to ensure that the main family house passes to a male heir. Although daughters have generally been provided with a trousseau, a cash settlement or occasionally a dowry house (and in periods of crisis, with small amounts of land), on balance houses within the neighbourhood have passed more frequently to sons. In these circumstances, we might expect Pompei to display a marked patrilineal inflexion in the distribution of households and the articulation of wider kinship relationships. If anything, however, the balance is in the opposite direction. Direct patrilineal descendants of the four founding families are still well represented in the neighbourhood, and their respective razze are generally linked to it by other Ascolani. Nevertheless, at the level of day-to-day interaction and associational behaviour, it is matrifocal clusters of mothers, daughters and sisters that prevail. Thus, children associate more freely with matrilateral cousins. Care for the aged and the sick both within extended and complex households and through residential propinquity is mainly entrusted to daughters. Sets of sisters often share a common pattern of devotion to the Madonna of Pompei, and have a common interest in maintaining reputation and presenting marriageable daughters to the wider community. Child-minding, the exchange of domestic services and petty reciprocities, although a duty of all neighbours, is mainly between sisters, mothers and daughters. An ideology of maternal nurture and domestic altruism is projected out into the wider community. Similarly, political allegiances, neighbourhood politics and the membership of local sporting clubs are more readily based on co-operation between brothers-in law than on membership of the razza. Finally, it is necessary to stress the voluntary nature of associational life in the neighbourhood. Although parents evidently seek to influence the residential decisions of their children, and sometimes use dowry houses or earmarked inheritance as an inducement, in the absence of the standardized provision of houses on marriage to children of either sex, choice ultimately rests with the children themselves. In Pompei at least, over the last fifty years, daughters have systematically shown a greater propensity to stay put - to rent, buy or activate potential inheritance rights in the neighbourhood in which they were born. Sons, by contrast, have been far more willing to sell out in periods of economic crisis, to emigrate, or to be persuaded to move to their wife's neighbourhood. These choices are in part determined by the fact that women more commonly marry close to home; in part they are an expression of their more narrowly focused view of the kinship universe. But they also represent a conscious choice, a realisation and positive evaluation of the solidarity and moral and practical support offered by close female kin |