MOVING NORTH?

I’ve had some technical difficulties so the last post went up about a week late. Cairano has no DSL service, nor the capability for it (it was completely bypassed when the greater area was made wireless-ready), and we have no land line in our house. We connect our laptop to the web via our cell phone—it makes for a slow and clunky connection.

A few days ago I met a number of people in a larger town, St. Angelo dei Lombardi (about 4,000 people). I was shown around the town by a local medical doctor who spent his teen years in New York, where his family fled following the 1980 earthquake. There is a relatively large Italo-Argentine population in this town; in each of the last few years, it turns out, somewhere between five and ten former emigrants (or children of emigrants) have returned from Argentina. This number may appear low, but when you consider the size of the town and the low employment rate of the area, it seems more significant.

I was about to jump in my car and return to Cairano, my notebook full of new names and phone numbers that I needed to follow up on, when my guide received a call from a friend about a demonstration that was happening at a local factory. The factory, just outside of the town of Morra De Sanctis (renamed in the 1930s for its most famous son, the Italian literary critic and politician Francesco De Sanctis), was about to be closed, and about fifty people were going to lose their jobs. It seems that the factory, which makes parts for kitchen appliances, was to be moved to Torino (and you thought I was going to say China!).

A minute after the phone call, an old VW bug, painted red with the logo of the Rifondazione Comunista party painted on the side, drove up in order to take my guide to the demonstration. I jumped in as well.

Trucks had started to come down from the North to begin taking away the machinery; there had been a strike for a few days already. The picket line successfully stopped the trucks from entering and may have even opened up some discussion between the union (the national CGIL) and the plant managers. The owner of the factory lives “al nord.” The move has been put on hold, at least until next week. The local chapter of the Rifondazione is organizing, believe it or not, an “American-style picnic” at the picket lines for May Day, next Monday.

Those attending the demonstration included workers and their families and maybe eight carabinieri. Based on what I heard and saw, there appeared to be no immigrants there, only native Italians. The women passed around salami, bread, and cookies. Most workers make about 1,000 euros a month, and at least one 36-year-old man I spoke to also works at night in a restaurant to help support his three children.