Setting and Sources

Both the fieldwork and archival research on which this paper is based are centred on the small town (a city according to its inhabitants) of Ascoli Satriano (population : 1700, 2,000; 1992, 6,800) situated on the south-western fringes of the Tavoliere plain. has the aspect of a relatively unchanging classical agro-town, but this appearance masks a recent history of rapid, often turbulent, rural change and a radical restructuring of the relationship between town and country. At the beginning of our period, its economy was dominated by the Regia Dogana (Royal Customhouse) with its careful, ecologically sensitive, balance of state regulated inverse transhumance, commercialized grain production and peripheral feudalism (all heavily dependent on outside imported labour); see Marino (1988). This gave way to a gradual nineteenth-century conversion from pastoral to arable farming and the consolidation of specialized latifundia cereal estates, to be followed in the twentieth century by rural syndicalism, land reform, the widespread mechanization of agriculture and mass migration. In this process Ascoli's urban role was sequentially transformed from administrative and trading centre, to agro-town to paese di passaggio..

From the outset, Ascoli cannot easily be described as a traditional peasant community. With ready access to land on a still under-populated south Tavoliere, agriculture offered an important subsistence base. But, already by 1700, it was a highly mobile society with high rates of inward migration and a commercialized and fully monetarized economy. The majority of its citizens were employed in the urban sector : manual workers on large estates and transhumant shepherds were generally recruited from outside the community. Indeed, a recurrent theme throughout the period under review is the steady ruralization (peasantization) of the economy and growing disparity and tension between the 'two' Ascolis - between a relatively small, but slowly expanding urban core of citizens (perhaps 150 family groups in the early eighteenth century), and an ever-increasing, undifferentiated, mass of day labourers who from the mid-eighteenth century (but especially after the opening up of the Tavoliere a century later) took up residence on the outskirts of the town.

Much of our demographic information for eighteenth-century Ascoli comes from an interesting (but ultimately frustrating) series of State of Souls listings covering the years 1709-1765, topped up by marriage records, notarial contracts and ecclesiastical court records of the same period. This information has been partially computerized using the Ingres Database Management System. With the exception of 1709, all the State of Souls listings are finely detailed, closely follow the Orsini formulary, and provide a great deal of topographical information. Their main limitations are an exquisitely urban bias that systematically ignores permanent and semi-permanent settlers in the adjacent countryside, and a degree of uncertainty and inconsistency in the way in which families are counted. For the modern period we have used the computerized Stato Civile, and the initial results of pilot fieldwork carried out in one of Ascoli's newer contrade.

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