Working in Leverano
Peasant struggles, the cooperatives, the crisis and the rebirth.
The history of work in Leverano begins in one of the most extreme and difficult situations, as Leverano is part of the Arneo, a territory that constituted one of the poorest areas, until the land reclamation, in an already very poor southern Italy.
peasant struggles
It is in this context that the movements of the peasant struggles of 1950-1951 were born, culminating in the notorious episode of the burning of bicycles. But even before that, the social consciousness of the workers experienced an initial moment of awakening through the female tobacco workers who - even under the repressive Fascist regime - found the strength to call for protests in Leverano as early as the years 1930-1932. Therefore, it’s safe to say that Salento found in the courage of its women the first necessary impetus to recover from a situation that had become unsustainable. Despite being subjected to harsh repression by the Establishment, the peasant movements nonetheless managed to ensure that some territories in Puglia were included in the Land Reform, with the expropriation of the latifundium for uncultivated land only and its allocation to laborers. The Reform was also opposed, with fears of fragmentation hindering agricultural innovation, but in reality, the opposite occurred - it was due to the tireless work of those farmers the Arneo olive groves were born, as well as the construction of the thousands of kilometers of dry stone walls that delimit them, and the construction of the “truddhi”, the characteristic dry stone buildings that dot their extensions.
the cooperatives
In the case of Leverano, the farmers’ response to the large-scale agricultural enterprise was the rise of cooperatives, capable of uniting small landowners, giving them the strength to compete in the market and access to innovation in production processes. That’s how Cantina Sociale Cooperativa (1959), was born, as well as Oleificio Cooperativo della Riforma Fondiaria (1964), Cooperativa Agricola “San Rocco” (1973) and Conservificio Cooperativo “La Salentina” (1977), which dealt with canning tomatoes. Only this last cooperative failed to establish itself, due to the volatility of prices for canning tomatoes, while all the others have survived to this day as strong and vital productive enterprises.
The crisis and the rebirth
The history of labor in the post-war period was, however, or above all, a story of enormous transformations, with some of the most important crops (cotton and tobacco) progressively entering into crisis and then disappearing. However, the crisis also brought along the seed of rebirth, which in Leverano was represented by the cultivation of cut flowers, which began tentatively in the early post-war period and grew more solid in the 1970s with the introduction of greenhouse cultivation. It was that generation of post-war workers, who had nothing, who proved capable of courageously seizing the change of an era, to launch themselves into completely new and unusual entrepreneurial adventures. Similarly, today we are witnessing new transformations, such as the emergence of a new kind of tourism, different from the traditional seaside tourism, and the integration of new Salentines into the workforce and entrepreneurial fabric, and such as the challenge posed by climate change and the emergence of new agricultural diseases such as Xylella. This is why it seems important that there is a place that preserves the stories of work, like a logbook that reports the routes explored and the new ones, in a celebration of everyone's work, yesterday, today, and always.
