Three centuries of urban change in Ascoli

The town of Ascoli Satriano has been transformed during the past three centuries from a commercial and ecclesiastical centre, to an agro-town, to a paese di passagioand more recently to a holding centre for the young unemployed.

Ascoli in the 18th century - a city of church and trade

At the start of the 18th century, Ascoli was a city with a resident bishop and duke. The population of about 2000 people (excluding the rural population) was quite small but the town was an important centre in the wide, sparsely populated Tavoliere. Although most of the population were not literate, they made extensive use of documents for both public and private ends. Notaries contracts were more frequent, and more often used by those of lower status, than is the case today. The town was marked by strong geographical mobility, with at least a third of household heads born elsewhere. Elite families moved quite readily between the towns and cities of the region. The economy was fully monetary and commercial, resting mainly on provisioning the estates of the Tavoliere and storage and sale of grain, other foodstuffs and luxury goods. The presence of a bishop, a seminary and four monasteries meant a large number of ecclesiastics with clergy making up 5% of the heads of family around 1730. Almost half of the households in the town were engaged in urban occupations.

Urban organisation was symbolically marked by walls, shrines, chapels and processional routes. Most of the native-born population lived in kinship-based neighbourhoods in the old town. The commercial areas lay outside the walls in and around the piazza and in the adjacent borgo (township) where newly established artisans lived beside farm workers. This outer sector shaded into an area of garden plots and communal pastures where townspeople grew foodstuffs and reared animals. Beyond were the vast expanses of the Tavoliere making up about 80% of the commune.

For much of the medieval and early modern periods, Ascoli was marked by a religious division of labour which made the secular clergy responsible for the spiritual welfare of the town while monastic orders dominated in the countryside. By the 18th century, with the decline of the monastic orders and their large estates, ecclesiastical documentation (produced by the dominant secular clergy) largely ignores the countryside and its population. Marriage dispensations and church court records indicate that the rural population was seen as having lower standards of morality than their urban counterparts.

Ascoli in the nineteenth century - an agro-town

During the 18th century, the agro-pastoral system supported by the Regia Dogana in the countryside, was increasingly seen as archaic and prone to fiscal abuse. At the beginning of the 19th century, the Regia Dogana was abolished (1806) and feudal institutions dismantled. During the century, pastoral production declined to be gradually replaced by great latifundia specialising in cereal production.

At the same time, Ascoli was transformed into a classic agro-town. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the population doubled as peasant cultivators from other parts of Puglia moved into the town. Low-cost housing, financed by estate owners, was built to the east of the old town, expanding the borgo district which had been developed in the mid to later 18th century. Houses in the old town were subdivided into cheap accommodation. The centre of the town moved from the ducal castle to a newly constructed piazza surrounded by the cathedral, municipal buildings, the theatre, confraternity chapels and the new mansions of the elite.

The area of vigne or garden plots outside the town was transformed into smallholdings, many sold to returning migrants. By the 1880s a stable, largely dependant agricultural labour force made up about three quarters of the population and the rural hinterland had become an area of vast, industrialised cereal production and ranching.

Another set of changes which accompanied those outlined above related to the increasing conceptual separation of urban and rural. Rural life was denigrated and the countryside seen as dangerous, especially for women. Kinship among the upper and middle classes of the town took on a more patrilineal cast. This increasingly divided society saw the growth of class-based politics and rural anarchism while the elite looked to national and provincial centres.

Ascoli from 1945 to the present - migration, unemployment and the struggle for urban resources

Since World War II the town has changed again. The population has halved in size (currently 6800) of whom more than 90% live in the urban area. Although agriculture is still very important, much of the local economy depends on public sector employment, pensions from jobs as migrants and state benefits, with a limited amount of industrial and service work. Many townspeople left to work in north Italy or abroad, but international emigration collapsed in the 1980s. The town now has an ageing working population and most young people have no permanent employment.

Mechanisation in agriculture reduced the need for a large number of labourers. Many of those workers migrated away from the town and region. This together with technological change, put an end to subsistence farming at the urban fringe. Post-war land reform led to the decline of latifundia and a rapid increase in family farms with a limited need for wage labour. Attempts to diversify production failed. Small and medium sized family farms are generally based on cereal monoculture. Since the war most of Ascoli's remaining woodland and natural pasture has disappeared. This has been ecologically and economically disastrous, leading to declining yields and a concomitant reliance on subsidies.

The devaluation of rural life continues. The countryside is frequently damaged and polluted while urban employment and living is highly valued. Class based politics have declined in favour of factionalism aimed at securing urban jobs, contracts, pensions and benefits. As general prosperity has increased, so has municipal outlay on festivals, parades, recreational and cultural associations and exhibitions. Part of the purpose is to quieten discontent among a growing, and ageing group of unmarried young adults without expectation of work in the town. As the struggle for urban resources intensifies, this is reflected in increasingly competitive life styles and agonistic marriages.

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