Letter from Umbria

Venetians have been saying for thirty years that their city is nothing more than a museum. The flow of commuters demonstrates this. Before the 1970s, Venetian workers commuted daily across the lagoon to Mestre and Porto Marghera on the mainland, where they had industrial jobs, mostly in chemical plants. By the mid-1970s, they could no longer afford city rents; then heavy industry began to decline. Now Venetian workers live on the mainland and commute back to Venice every day for jobs in the tourist industry.

Umbria has its own version of this transformation. A harsh system of sharecropping, mezzadria, still dominated the economy in the early post–Second World War period. In the 1950s and 1960s, the children of sharecroppers left the region en masse to escape poverty—just as the children of peasants fled the South in the same period. In Umbria many of the old case coloniche—the buildings where landowners housed their sharecroppers along with a few animals—have been sold and remodeled into spiffy weekend retreats for city dwellers and foreigners. Elderly former sharecroppers and some of their middle-aged children now work as decently paid caretakers and gardeners for the weekenders. It beats sharecropping by a lot. In the "art towns" that attract tourists, specialty-food boutiques selling Umbrian olive oil and wines line the streets between architectural monuments.