- Le ciminiere non fanno più fumo: Canti e memorie degli operai torinesi by Emilio Jona, Sergio Liberovici, Franco Castelli, and Alberto Lovatto
A founding myth of the Partito socialista italiano—the historical political party that would represent socialism in Italy’s parliament for the first time—was the much trumpeted victory of its first national congress, which took place in Genoa in 1892. Its success, hailed enthusiastically at the time by the party’s recently established newspaper, Lotta di classe (Class War), marked, as its editor Camillo Prampolini noted, the belated yet ineluctable emergence of Marxist politics as an institutional force in Italy Two years before, in Milan, there had been a similar attempt to marshal sympathetic organizations under the banner of a “national” workers’ party. In the event, the Milan congress had quickly disintegrated into acrimony As was usual, warring left-wing factions failed to agree: on the readiness of Italy’s proletariat for the revolutionary struggle; on whether or not anarchists should be expelled from the party; on the protocols of worker solidarity during strikes; and so on.1 These intractable debates threatened once again to engulf the Genoa congress. Its first day ended abruptly at noon in heated argument, and before the afternoon session reconvened a decisive schism had taken place. One group, comprising proanarchist (largely Milanese) socialists, remained at the original venue, the Sala Sivori theater; the other, comprising the majority and including famous politician Filippo Turati, transferred to the nearby Via della Pace, into the great hall of the Genoese carabinieri.
It was in the latter, more secure environment that the Partito socialista italiano was created: a collective body unifying some 300 workers’ organizations across Italy. The preparations made by Turati and Prampolini (among others) had been extensive and artfully administrated. On the eve of the congress, the third issue of the weekly Lotta di classe went to press, ready to meet the arriving worker-delegates with the following explanation of their mission in traveling to the city:
They depart [for the Congress] alone or in clusters, the militias of human redemption, greeted with enthusiasm, and welcomed again upon arrival by an enormous voice (Oh! Not all ears hear it; but it is not for that reason less alive and real), by an [End Page 80] enormous voice of sadness, of acclamation, of hope, of encouragement, of faith. Analyze that voice, those of you who can hear it: those of you who have not waxed your ears and brains against the exuberant joy of life; those of you who have not closed off the pathways of human and civil solidarity: listen and analyze!
The front-page column, in other words, urged new arrivals to abandon internal debates and instead acknowledge an immense collective voice beyond the audible:
Listen! Here is the mournful song of our female spinners and textile workers, whose inhumane timetable in the sweltering factory blights their youth and compromises their future maternity. To this responds an even more distressing strain [nenia]: that of the worker in the rice paddies of Emilia and Mantovano, those poor mondine, sold like beasts in droves, pushed onward by the cruel force of the summer’s heat and by the sultry deception of the fertile swamp.2
In similarly florid (and carefully prepared) language, Lotta di classe outlined an important ideal for the new party, to aspire to an objective measure of social injustice—as if to become an all-hearing seismograph, capable of analyzing common motifs in the oppression of workers.
Listening in to the sound world of the northern Italian proletariat and its clamorous entanglements with socialist politics is the goal of Le ciminiere non fanno più fumo—a book that focuses on urban workers’ songs in Turin at the turn of the twentieth century (complementing a 2005 volume by the same authors that deals with workers’ songs in agriculture).3 Although published in 2008, the book had a long gestation: one that goes back to the late 1950s, when two of the...