On Men and Bears: a Forgotten Migration in Nineteenth-Century Italy

This article centres on a unique type of migration: the seasonal travels of animal-trainers, mainly orsanti (bear-trainers), from the Italian Apennine region to the rest of Europe in the mid nineteenth century. These migrants set out from the walled mountain towns of Bedonia and Compiano and from surrounding villages in the province of Parma, at the intersection of Liguria, Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna. They roamed Italy and Europe, reaching as far as Turkey, Russia and Scandinavia, with their carts and their animals: a strange company of men, boys, bears, camels and monkeys.

The article is based on material recently acquired by the Archivio Ligure della Scrittura Popolare of Genoa (henceforth ALSP) and the Museo degli Orsanti in Compiano, Parma (henceforth Compiano Museum).¹ Primary materials from these collections – personal documents, private journals, objects and yellowed pictures – have been tackled by borrowing from an unusual body of criticism that extends from the mythological implications of bears to visual semiotics and art history. This interdisciplinary synergy responds to the call by Felix Driver and Bill Schwarz for a widening of the circle of historical production – ‘breaking down the barriers between historians, and ... encouraging greater communication between different fields of historical practice’.² Such a wider outlook is especially necessary when dealing with marginal subjects for whom sources are scarce. In my research I followed the orsanti back to their hometowns, tracking the faded traces of bears and men who travelled a narrow path at the periphery of society and historiography.³

These animal-trainers, usually travelling in small groups but also sometimes alone or with a larger performing company, were part of a large movement of people that for centuries animated the entire European continent. The lower classes had hardly been immobile. Waves of local, circular, chain and career migrations had corrugated the European landscape since the 1600s, belonging to a long history of poverty and charity.⁴ For the peasant classes, as Leslie Moch notes in her Moving Europeans, ‘stability was a privilege’.⁵ Various migrant groups played a part in the developing European economy. Teams of seasonal workers were hired to reclaim and fertilize potential agricultural land, as in the unhealthy swamps of the Tuscan Maremma. In winter men from the poor mountain villages of the Alps and the Apennines came down to seek a living as knife-sharpeners or as pedlars. Walking from one village to another with their wares (ink, toys, needles and other small items) on a wooden tray hung from the neck, such pedlars (in France ‘colporteurs’) were essential to the pre-industrial distribution of goods;⁶ they also helped to shape the modern European market.⁷ Travelling healers or ‘charlatans’ – recurrently licensed and regulated, as David Gentilcore has shown – offered basic medical care for the poorer population.⁸ The orsanti shared some but not all characteristics with ‘char-latans’ (as pedlars of the exotic or bizarre, perhaps), as also with other wandering seasonal migrants.

Living conditions in this mountainous area were particularly harsh for the rural proletariat in the age of urbanization (1815–1914).⁹ Its rural workers were known as mangiamarroni (chestnut-eaters), because their diet was based on chestnut flour. According to the 1881 Inchiesta Agraria (Agricultural Investigation) the peasant diet consisted of ‘bread, very little and commonly a grain mixture. Some soup with vegetables and lard. Plenty of chestnut polenta. Plenty of corn ... very little meat, usually goat and rarely pig. A few garden vegetables, eggs, milk, cheese’. Wine was occasional (‘none or very little’), ‘drunk in osteria’ [at the inn].¹⁰ Driven by poverty and family traditions of migration, the orsanti would leave in spring and come back in autumn. In a letter preserved in the Compiano Museum a wife longs for the end of summer and her husband’s return:

... I waited for you day by day I waited and waited long and long oh how unhappy I will be by the time August arrives oh what a long time it is for me oh how will July pass oh what a long month it is for me.¹¹

Migration from...