I "bergamini": un profilo della transumanza bovina lombarda

This study has been based over published and unpublished sources as well as on interviews with witnesses and protagonists of the «transhumance» phenomenon in the thirties and forties of the last century. Though dealing mostly with the XIX and XX centuries, the paper illustrates the roots of the Lombard bovine transhumance too. In the XV century deep transformations of the agricultural systems of Lombard lowlands occurred. Ancient, very large estates, managed by several independent peasant family units producing mainly wheat, gave place to a small number of large farms managed by capitalistic entrepreneurs paying rent in cash to the landlords. These farms were able to produce large quantities of hay thanks to the increased water supply through irrigation, and were provided with stables. In the meanwhile woods, ferns and dry pastures, which until that time were used by transhumant milking sheep and goats flocks, were turned into arable land. Shepherds who already had some milking cows were amongst the main actors of these transformations . They bred gradually more and more cows and turned from a semi-nomadic pastoral system to a winter indoor system, buying hay from the new farms and providing them with precious manure in return. These cow farmers were called ‛bergamini’ since most of them came from the valleys North of Bergamo, or malghesi because they were owners of a malga, a milking flock or herd. Till the XX century they continued to move their herds to the alpine valleys for to spend the summer where they owned small estates and sometimes rights of pasture as well. Some of these ‛bergamini’ successfully gained knowledge and capitals and eventually became itself landlords or capitalistic entrepreneurs. They were replaced however by other mountain breeders who started going down to the lowlands looking for pasture and hay when their herds exceeded 15-20 heads. The ‛bergamini’ were not only very clever cow-breeders but also pig- and horse-breeders, and used to sell animals to lowland farmers and peasants. The most interesting trait of the ‛bergamini’ however is their nature of semi-nomadic cheese makers. They manufactured stracchino cheese along the routes of the transhumance (which could be as long as 150 km and take one week or more to cover. Many workers, technicians, entrepreneurs of the modern cheese industry that started after 1880 came from the circle of the bergamini. This input of men, knowledge, monetary capital and livestock from the mountains largely explains the great progress of milking cows farming in Lombardy from the XVIII to the XX century, as well as the rise of dairy industry between the late XIX century and the middle of the XX century. However, apart from some observations by Carlo Cattaneo and a few recent historical studies, dealing mostly with the «incubation period» of the XV-XVI centuries, their contribution has been substantially ignored. The reason of this may be found in the ideological bias of bourgeois and Marxist scholars against the role of such grassrootes rural actors. The very conservative cultural attitudes displayed by the ‛bergamini’ reinforced these bias for it apparently contradicts, if interpreted in ideological terms, their very active and dynamic role in animal farming, cheese manufacturing and trading. The group identity of the ‛bergamini’ was very strong and they actively marked their social distance towards either mountain peasants and the rural classes of the lowlands. Group endogamy and their condition of a somehow foreign, closed group, however, favoured extended geographic kinship networks functional to their effective economic strategies. The lifestyle of the ‛bergamini’ was actually very different from that of the mountain peasants: they lived in multiple families that owned and ran isolated farms. On the other side till the first half of the XX century they used to go to town and city markets wearing proudly their pastoral clothes and large golden earrings, thus allowing to be represented as mountain people in the context of a transparent strategy of self-understatement. On the other side when they came back to the mountain villages they used to exhibit symbols of «urban» lifestyle in order to establish their social superiority. Up until the Eighties of the last century dozens of ‛bergamini’ were still in business, buying hay from the farms of the plains and moving their herds from one farm to another every year, or even every six months. Most of them however did non «summered» (took to the mountain pastures to spend the summer) their cows any longer, maintaining instead all year round their malga in the lowlands. Today very few transhumant milking cow-herds remain, but the history of this almost unique transhumance is still going on, in spite of the prophecy of Stefano Jacini — a famous politician and agronomist — who in the middle of the XIX century stated that they were a «residual of the past» which was bound to disappear in a short time.