on men and bears: a forgotten migration in nineteenth-century italy

On Men and Bears: a ForgottenMigration in Nineteenth-Century Italy

by Ilaria Serra

This article centres on a unique type of migration: the seasonal travels ofanimal-trainers, mainly orsanti (bear-trainers), from the Italian Apennineregion to the rest of Europe in the mid nineteenth century. These migrantsset out from the walled mountain towns of Bedonia and Compiano andfrom surrounding villages in the province of Parma, at the intersection ofLiguria, Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna. They roamed Italy and Europe,reaching as far as Turkey, Russia and Scandinavia, with their carts andtheir animals: a strange company of men, boys, bears, camels and monkeys.

The article is based on material recently acquired by the Archivio Liguredella Scrittura Popolare of Genoa (henceforth ALSP) and the Museo degliOrsanti in Compiano, Parma (henceforth Compiano Museum).1 Primarymaterials from these collections – personal documents, private journals,objects and yellowed pictures – have been tackled by borrowing from anunusual body of criticism that extends from the mythological implications ofbears to visual semiotics and art history. This interdisciplinary synergy re-sponds to the call by Felix Driver and Bill Schwarz for a widening of thecircle of historical production – ‘breaking down the barriers between histor-ians, and . . . encouraging greater communication between different fields ofhistorical practice’.2 Such a wider outlook is especially necessary when deal-ing with marginal subjects for whom sources are scarce. In my research Ifollowed the orsanti back to their hometowns, tracking the faded traces ofbears and men who travelled a narrow path at the periphery of society andhistoriography.3

These animal-trainers, usually travelling in small groups but also some-times alone or with a larger performing company, were part of a largemovement of people that for centuries animated the entire European con-tinent. The lower classes had hardly been immobile. Waves of local, circular,chain and career migrations had corrugated the European landscape sincethe 1600s, belonging to a long history of poverty and charity.4 For thepeasant classes, as Leslie Moch notes in her Moving Europeans, ‘stabilitywas a privilege’.5 Various migrant groups played a part in the developingEuropean economy. Teams of seasonal workers were hired to reclaim andfertilize potential agricultural land, as in the unhealthy swamps of theTuscan Maremma. In winter men from the poor mountain villages of the

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Alps and the Apennines came down to seek a living as knife-sharpeners or aspedlars. Walking from one village to another with their wares (ink, toys,needles and other small items) on a wooden tray hung from the neck, suchpedlars (in France ‘colporteurs’) were essential to the pre-industrial distri-bution of goods;6 they also helped to shape the modern European market.7

Travelling healers or ‘charlatans’ – recurrently licensed and regulated, asDavid Gentilcore has shown – offered basic medical care for the poorerpopulation.8 The orsanti shared some but not all characteristics with ‘char-latans’ (as pedlars of the exotic or bizarre, perhaps), as also with otherwandering seasonal migrants.

Living conditions in this mountainous area were particularly harsh forthe rural proletariat in the age of urbanization (1815–1914).9 Its rural work-ers were known as mangiamarroni (chestnut-eaters), because their diet wasbased on chestnut flour. According to the 1881 Inchiesta Agraria(Agricultural Investigation) the peasant diet consisted of ‘bread, very littleand commonly a grain mixture. Some soup with vegetables and lard. Plentyof chestnut polenta. Plenty of corn . . . very little meat, usually goat andrarely pig. A few garden vegetables, eggs, milk, cheese’. Wine was occasional(‘none or very little’), ‘drunk in osteria’ [at the inn].10 Driven by poverty andfamily traditions of migration, the orsanti would leave in spring and comeback in autumn. In a letter preserved in the Compiano Museum a wife longsfor the end of summer and her husband’s return:

. . . I waited for you day by day I waited and waited long and long oh howunhappy I will be by the time August arrives oh what a long time it is forme oh how will July pass oh what a long month it is for me.11

Migration from this area had been commonplace since the fifteenth cen-tury, though not appreciated by the landowners and priests who signed themigrants’ travel documents. As early as the fourteenth century theMarquises of Malaspina in the Val Trebbia (between Tuscany and Emilia)decreed that peasants who did not return after three months of absencewould forfeit their property (‘De non eundum ad habitandum extra terrasdominorum suorum’).12 Documents in the Parma Archive provide evidenceof increasing migration from 1757 onwards, and depict a universe of va-grants who left the region (or passed through it) and wandered acrossEurope, sometimes silently dying in prisons or hospitals of the poor, orinjured in trivial road accidents, or often just vanishing.13 A good numberof these were misfits who ended up crowding foreign prisons; historianEmilio Franzina sees them as the source of long-standing anti-Italianstereotypes.14

Records of passports issued show that migration touched many familiesin the orsanti towns –in 1768 a startling eighty-five percent of them.15 In1831 the town of Bedonia registered 450 expatriates from a total of four tofive thousand inhabitants.16 In the various companies, small or large, which

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set out with their primitive wagons and their animals from the area around

Bedonia, certain family names recurred as leaders: the Belli, Roncaioli, Del

Nevo and Taddei departed from Masanti; Bernabo, Bruni, Aramini,

Caramatti, Corti and Volpi left from Cavignaga; Dallara from

Fontanabardi; Agazzi, Delchini, Sozzi and Rossi from the village of

Prato; Bertani from Libbia and Bruni from Monti.17 One of the first docu-

ments from this migration of orsanti is a permit for the exhibition of animals

in foreign lands, dated 1802. It gives a virtual snapshot of a young man –

short, illiterate – who called himself a ‘charlatan’.18

The citizen Francesco Noberini, profession Charlatan, native of Strella

[Strela], village of the State of Piacenza, domiciled in this village, 22 years

old, short stature, long face, short black hair, large forehead, gray eyes,

ordinary nose, mediocre mouth, round chin, leaving from this village, he

moves to France to show wild animals . . . .Signature of exhibitor: he doesn’t know how to write.Parma, from the Primaire Government, XI Year of the French

Republic.19

In the second half of the nineteenth century one small village near

Bedonia, Cavignaga, supplied no fewer than four travelling circuses.

Paolo Bernabo’s circus performed in Athens in 1843, on the occasion of

Greek independence. The Volpi family (nicknamed Spincia) owned a circus

that performed in England. Antonio Cappellini (‘Ciccotto’) eventually

closed his circus and went back to Cavignaga to retire: well known for

wearing a pair of odd embroidered slippers, he died there in 1916. The

fourth and most famous company was owned by Antonio Bernabo.Stories of these celebrated orsanti, oral and written, survive and are still

told to local children.20 Antonio Bernabo, for instance, had left as a ten-

year-old to follow his brother Luigi to Germany. Escaping from this

brother/master he was ‘lost’ for eight years, after which he came back to

Cavignaga, much changed. ‘Look, you’re dead’, his mother told him, but

finally she recognized the scar on his forehead and hugged him, in accord-

ance with the narrative rules of melodrama.21 Antonio spent his life travel-

ling to distant places to buy exotic beasts. In 1879 he was in Crimea, where

he bought fifty-seven camels. In Odessa he met a Taddei from Masanti who

owned an osteria and a Lusardi from Cavignaga who performed with a dog

and a monkey and had been given up for lost. He then travelled to the Arctic

Circle to capture polar bears. The climax of his career occurred in 1903,

when he dazzled the Turkish sultan into buying his entire circus and making

Bernabo and his associates (Giovanni Agazzi and the goat-trainer Giovanni

Aramini, who spoke eight languages), knights of Constantinople. He used

the money from the sale (18,000 lire) to buy a larger circus but this had to be

abandoned because of the First World War. Bernabo was never reimbursed;

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he died back in Bedonia in 1933. After their last show, in Belgrade in 1915,Giovanni Aramini retired to Prato di Bedonia.22

In 1833 one Rossi, from Compiano, was in London, dealing in wild ani-mals which he imported from Africa and sold to his wandering compat-riots.23 In 1844 Bernardo Dallara, nicknamed Bagolone, was attacked andkilled by his three bears in Momarola (near Bedonia), where he lived.24

Another famous bear-trainer, Guglielmo Puelli from Varano de’ Melegari,travelled to Finland and Russia, where he purchased a giant bear, andreached Sweden in 1880. There he married Johanna, who travelled withhim selling toys and balloons. Puelli slept with the bear to protect himselffrom the northern frost and the bear defended him if brawls broke out. ‘Heis a better friend than a human being’, the orsante said to a journalist. Puellisettled in Stockholm and became a plasterer. On the advice of his wife hesold the animal, but he always reminisced about his wandering life. Whenthe bear died it was stuffed and mounted in the window of a shop in the oldquarter of the town, and Puelli would spend hours gazing at it.25

The last orsanti travelled with their bears into the 1920s: Antonelli fromCeio, Sozzi from Casa Lazzoni, Gigino Agazzi from Rio Merlino, Bertanifrom Libbia, Bruni fromMonti – all villages in the same area. The last circusto disappear was the monkey circus (Affentheater) which was still function-ing in the 1950s. It belonged to Giovanni Taddei, known as Tencio, ascimmiante from Masanti di Sopra (see below).

THE PHOTOGRAPHIC TRAILThe question of how to incorporate the photographic image in research hasbeen much debated. Some historians have railed against the use of picturessimply as illustration (‘no essay should use pictures that are not supportedby documents’).26 Others use photographs as a source in their own right, inimmigration history for instance, where they constitute a link of the migra-tion chain, a way to ‘testify’ to good health and continuing relationship, an‘auxiliary of memory’.27 Some historians recognize that photographs have aspecial value for research on the historically marginal: the ‘photographicimage opens a distinctive view into the production and meaning of histor-icity, particularly in social contexts in which the subject’s place is urgently atissue’.28 Whether pictures are staged or truthful can also be contentious.Researchers divide between a positivist approach (the image as proof) anda sceptical one (the image as a manipulated convention). A middle wayentails questioning the relation between reality and intentionality, and ac-cepting a compromise: ‘the conventions may filter the information comingfrom the external world, but they do not exclude it’.29 Interweaving photo-graphs with other sources, ‘using one to expose the silences and the absencesof the other’, is the method Raphael Samuel proposes in his essay the ‘Eye ofHistory’.30 In this article I attempt to make pictures – most of them publicityshots – speak of orsanti history and personality by treating them as semiotictexts (as theorist Roland Barthes says, ‘whatever the origin and the



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destination of the message, the photograph is not simply a product or chan-nel but also an object endowed with structural autonomy’)31 and by com-paring them with other visual material.

‘All first impressions are irreplaceable insights’, according to visual an-thropologists John and Michael Collier.32 In these photographs animalsalways occupy a central position, just as they did in the company, as itscentre and heart.33 (‘If a beast dies on you, the bread dies’, Antonino Taddeiwrote to his son Giovanni in Germany in 1868.)34 But something aboutthese portraits is disquieting. The viewer is disturbed by some arrestingdetail, what Barthes calls a punctum – something that makes a photographsubversive or striking ‘not when it frightens, repels or even stigmatizes, butwhen it is ‘‘pensive’’, when it thinks’.35 The first puncta are given by con-spicuous incongruence in the subjects photographed. Animals and men areposed side by side, camels in snow; monkeys are dressed like dolls; bearswalk on two legs like travel companions. The presence of animals in thesephotographs emanates exoticism and a deep sense of things out of place. Inone picture (Fig. 1) three camels look dumbly at the camera under the citysign of Fulda in central Germany while monkeys watch from the ricketysuperstructure of the horse-drawn cart behind. In the foreground, reachinghigh for its staff, a bear stands between two men. The pictured objects situneasily with each other: the camels do not belong with the bear, the beardoes not belong with the muzzle or the staff, the monkeys do not belong onthe cart, and the group itself does not belong on a German street.

Figure 2 shows the company in a town in Germany with its cart andanimals. Again, both bear and camel are incongruous against the back-ground (the Gasthof Erich Bach, a typical German half-timbered building).On the right a man is beating a drum, the standard way to announce animpending orsanti performance. As the audience gathered, the acts wouldbegin: balancing tricks from the goat, ‘counting’ by the horse, ‘human’activities performed by the monkeys. The bear would dance and walkwith a stick, then ‘fight’ with a man until defeated by tickles. (When audi-ence interest waned, the camel would appear and let the children climb on itsback.) One can easily imagine the effect of this extraordinary procession onsurprised locals, such as the woman in the black shawl following at a dis-tance in this photo. The serious look on the men’s faces, not to speak of thedejected expression of the bear, seem to cast the coexistence of man and bearas somehow gloomy. The once cheerful thunder in the summoning drum islost in the sepia (and perhaps rain).

These photographs seem uncanny – in the Freudian sense of unheimliche:their elements are cognitively dissonant, familiar yet strange, paradoxicallyattractive yet repellent at the same time. Their uncanny-ness stems directlyfrom the bizarre type of labour entailed by this migration. Animal-trainers,descendants of the old ‘charlatans’, traded in exoticism and sold surpriseto hungry peasants ignorant of the world, letting them toy with the extraor-dinary and briefly experience an unfamiliar, yet familiar, world.

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Fig. 2. An orsanti company in Germany (detail).

Fig. 1. The company of Antonio Bernabo in Germany.



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The charlatan had a long tradition in Europe, historian Piero Camporesi hasshown. Camporesi evokes him as he appears in a fifteenth-century advicebook by Teseo Pini.36 He has a straight face with no flush or shame; a deepmastery of his craft (anyone ‘who is in business and does not know it, willsoon see his money turn into flies’); a distant work-place (‘buy in Apulia, sellin France if you want to earn money’); a constant movement like that of ariver (‘He who stays at home sells his bull, he who goes to the market is likethe river Po’); and definitely, a fiery shrewdness (‘He who goes to the marketwears a fox skin, not a donkey skin’).37 From the sixteenth century, char-latans began to augment their beguiling words with props. They made skilfuluse of ‘what is marvellous or astonishing, and even more what is blood-curdling, from the horrific to the terrifying’.38 The orsanti’s big brown bearssurely fell at the far end of this spectrum, but – with a little exaggeration –even monkeys would do, as we read in the publicity posters of the orsanticircus, written in different languages: ‘Citizens! If you want to laugh andhave fun, come all to the Public Gardens to the Great Theatre of theMonkeys –three great shows every day.’39 There was irony in the repeateduse of the word ‘great’, next to pictures of the small round enclosure withinwhich monkeys and parrots performed. Attractions included ‘the savantgoat Gisella’, ‘Augusta the monkey on a swing’, the trapeze-artist monkeyMoretto, and a ‘monkey banquet served by African waiters’.40

A few photographs show the monkeys close-up, in frilly dresses, theirpointed faces under straw hats (most ‘uncanny’). The Taddei collection inthe Archivio Ligure della Scrittura Popolare of Genoa includes several pic-tures of the old circus man Giovanni Taddei, owner of a small circus ofmonkeys and parrots, with wrinkled and smiling peasant face, across hiswaistcoat a watch with a golden chain and under his arm the omnipresentstick. In one photograph he poses with a friend and a monkey, the three ofthem aligned humorously at the same level.41 In other pictures, Taddei issurrounded by dreamy child faces. They are the pale German children withenraptured eyes. The scantiness of his theatre contrasts with the fascinationit produces in the children. Taddei trained his animals for a set programme:the monkeys would prepare lunch, go to bed or use a chamber pot, takewalks and strolls in buggies pulled by dogs, and ride a small bike.42 Thefollowing picture is probably an unposed snapshot (Fig. 3). It provides arather striking glimpse of Giovanni Taddei affectionately buttoning theback of a monkey’s dress as if she were a little girl, while the rest of thetroupe perform. Taddei particularly liked this picture, and chose it as apublicity shot.

The punctum of the orsanti photographs above becomes even more strik-ing if we compare them to the standard pictures of Italian migrants to theUnited States.43 These, in contrast, produce only what Barthes calls studium:an unassuming interest, a quiet curiosity. In them, the immigrant’s individu-ality, and his very ethnicity, is forfeited, hidden behind the phony back-ground or foreground. Often the photographer’s cardboard stages

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(sometimes depicting a car or bicycle) let only the subject’s head be seen,thus completing the standardization of the immigrant. Conventional studiopictures offer a ready-made, overtly normalized stage upon which the im-migrant body disappears. In the picture of an anonymous Italian immigrantminer, for example, taken in Michigan (Fig. 4), the personality of the im-migrant is subsumed by the staging, so as to send home a reassuring image.The message is that the migrant has undergone assimilation, and the only(weak) punctum, revealing the performativity of the whole operation, is thatthe shirt, probably rented in the studio as a last touch to make him picture-perfect, is tucked in at an awkward diagonal.

An additional contrast between the ‘American’ and the ‘orsante’ portraitis provided by comparison with the next illustration (Fig. 5). This carddepicts the famous orchestra-man, Bartolomeo Corti.44 He belonged to afamily of seasonal migrants from Cavignaga and learned to play seven in-struments at once from the Rossi brothers, of Sidolo, who at the beginningof the twentieth century had performed for the king of Montenegro and forthe Grand Vizir of Constantinople. Bartolomeo was based in Switzerland,in Lausanne, and from there travelled around Europe with his two sons.He is depicted here with his son Giovanni, whom we can see in other pic-tures with monkeys: he grew up to be a scimmiante too and was stillworking in the 1940s.45 Bartolomeo holds a traditional ghironda (hurdygurdy), and wears a peculiar hat with brass bells. (A similar hatpreserved in the Compiano Museum is topped by a star and half-moon,which suggests Turkish origin.) The card is signed by Giovanni Corti anddated Milan, 27 December 1900.46 What is striking in this photograph isthat it suggests movement. Immigrant pictures are mostly static. They

Fig. 3. Giovanni Taddei with performing animals in circus enclosure.



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usually show a worker posing for the camera at rest, or in the case of studiopictures a settled person, someone who has arrived, an immigrant at hisfinal destination. Corti by contrast refuses such stability – even in the still-ness of the print. The parallel composition of father and son immortalizesthe unrelenting movement of these people over an uncertain, blurred,landscape.

Children like Giovanni, especially orphans, were often part of this mi-gration.47 Some documents call them ‘portable orphans’ (orfanelli portatili).Guglielmo Belli, an orsante from Masanti, left for the Austrian territorywith a youngster of thirteen, Andrea Reboli, in 1848. The boy made re-peated attempts to escape, according to an 1853 report in the ParmaArchive. Reboli, it recorded, was ‘a disobedient runaway and wouldprefer to escape the owner and live in idleness’. After one flight, he wasfound in the house of a ‘good man’ in Brotzen, Bohemia, who agreed tokeep him. Reboli accepted but wished to see his mother one more time. If hisfamily wanted him home they had to pay for his trip, and their plea to thegovernment for help is in the Parma Archive.48

Fig. 4. Anonymous mine-worker in Calumet, Michigan. Studio Portrait, no date.

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The Compiano Museum has a copy of a contract between two streetmusicians, master and servant, written in 1869, in Chiavari. GiovanBattista Raffo promises ‘to take under my service for thirty months’Antonio Zenone, born in Sopralacroce, by ‘taking him with me and at myexpense in Prussia as a wandering musician, giving him a good musicalinstrument, room and board, and keeping him if sick for fifteen days forone illness, and giving him a monthly salary of fourteen cents of Italian lirestarting a month after departure’. Antonio Zenone also promises to remainin Raffo’s service for thirty months, ‘to serve him as a good and well-behaved servant, giving him all the gain that I will make while playing,and not to desert his service without good reasons’.49 The age of Zenone’sservant is not clear, but he could well be a young boy, since the law againsttaking minors of eighteen years abroad was passed only four years later.

Corti’s smiling eyes and his son’s shy gaze suggest the resilience of theorsanti – and their melancholy, which letters occasionally convey. AntoninoTaddei writes to Vittore Belli, from Ansbach on 5 August 1909, a bittersweetletter. He declares he is ‘always happy never worried’,50 but then adds: ‘youwill tell me about the news from Masanti you know well that when we areabroad we crave to . . .know news of the dear town where we were born inthese countries we never know anything we only know where to go to drinkbeer where it is better’.51 The orsanti inhabited instability, unlike Americanimmigrants, who would settle for longer in one place, trying to make it

Fig. 5. Orsante Bartolomeo Corti and his son.



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home. The orsanti stayed in a foreign town only long enough to know wheregood beer was served. There is no sense of belonging, the rootlessness isconstant and repeated.52 They not only experienced the ‘double absence’that is at the core of every immigration,53 they also multiplied it endlessly.Even letters could barely maintain their ties with home. These men were notinterested in writing about their experience abroad (‘once abroad, the will towrite home disappears’).54 Receiving letters from home was a matter of luck.Letters for orsanti were held ‘fermo posta’ at the post-office box of the townwhere a fair was held, but sometimes the letter arrived after the orsanti hadpacked and left. Addresses on the envelopes help trace the itinerary of theirtrips. Vittore Belli, for example, left the village of Masanti (where his familyowned an osteria) for Germany. Cards sent between 1908 and 1910 to his‘Arena Mit Dresirte Affen’ (arena with trained monkeys) give addresses inLindau in May, Kempten in June, Kitzingen, Ausbach, Wurtzburg, andLindau again in October. It was probably the same itinerary every year.In their rootlessness, these characters were attractive romantic subjects.As novelist Arturo Cura put it:

they were not surprised by anything, by any of the facts that happenedduring their absence. They would listen, they smiled, but a vague shadowof melancholy hovered in their eyes. How could they return small andlimited like their paesani, enclosed within the narrow borders of theirvegetable gardens, they who kept thousands of streets and cities intheir heart?55

THE EYES OF THE MARGINAL MANThe second striking detail in these portraits is the look in the eyes of theorsanti. It is not the satisfied look of the successful immigrant, the contentedpose of the americano (like the anonymous miner in Figure 4). Nor is it thescared ‘deer in headlights’ look of immigrants about to board ship or todisembark in the new country (as in the well-known photographs of immi-grant families at Ellis Island). Nor again is it the suffering look on theblackened faces of miners or railroad workers. These typologies are allabsent here, unless perhaps in the sidelined figures of women and children.What we meet instead is a challenging gaze that pierces the picture, a hardlook that is impenetrable rather than communicative, the mysterious andflaunted confidence of a man who stands hand in hand with a bear. TakeFigure 6: three men, a camel and two bears. The pyramidal compositionprovides a triangle of stability and self-assuredness. The erect position of themen, one astride the camel, speaks pride. Their faces are impertinentlyraised; they look straight into the camera, quietly but securely. Their tightjackets swell over their proud chests.56 They show no fear; but they stagetheir strength. They keep two ferocious bears standing by them on a leash(and possibly an iron ring through the cheek). Forced to look straight

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ahead, the bears participate in the men’s display of pride. In the backgroundstands the camel, its tongue lolling, with no interest in the show of strength.In these men’s eyes we can read the roguish effrontery that pushed thembeyond familiar borders. Their gaze shows equal amounts of selfishness andcamaraderie. It reveals the spirit of the pack that keeps them faithful to their‘company’ (‘I am fine united with my company’)57 and respectful of oneanother.

Such characteristics are evidenced in the handwritten notebook ofBernardo Dallara, preserved in the Genoa Archive.58 Born on 24 October1854 in Bedonia (Parma), Bernardo spent most of his life travelling. Even atfifty-eight, in 1913, having obtained a three-year passport for Switzerland,Austria, Germany and France; he set off with his teenage sons Bernardo andLuigi. Dallara’s notebook, kept over several decades, recorded financialdetails (calculations of interest, called ‘gain’ or ‘frutto’; records of debts59

and bank deposits); a hand-written map of a field with notes on its cultiva-tion; a calculation for building a new addition to the farm; even hand-writ-ten copies of contracts and certificates. They show him as landlord and manof business as well as performance entrepreneur. Such a man, though re-corded as a travelling artist, was no naıve artist or happy-go-lucky wan-derer. He and others who headed orsanti companies and traded in exoticanimals might not spell correctly, but they could precisely calculate interestand business transactions. They used banks and had business-oriented

Fig. 6. Orsanti identified by the Compiano Museum as Marchini (‘Tresette’), from Conco

Desidero, and Antonio Delgrosso and Stefano Chiesa from Cavignaga.



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minds; if they decided to help each other with various loans, they also askedfor a significant amount of interest (five per cent). They spoke other lan-guages: in Dallara’s case at least three.60 As historian Carlo Stiacciniobserves:

Officially Dallara appears to be a modest wandering artist with littlecultural baggage, like many of his colleagues . . .He belongs to that‘grey zone’ with many other small owners and wandering artists. Hehas scant writing abilities, clearly shown in the notebooks, but [yet]also an assiduous, we could say daily, relationship with writing.61

The respect that tied one orsante to another is demonstrated in the note-book, in the only reference to their migrant work (there could have beenmore in pages which are missing). Stiaccini notes the difference of tone onthis page, where the undisputed authority of the landowner is replaced bythe ‘consideration and mutual respect’ of the circus owner.62 The worker’sopinion is being requested in what seems to be a draft letter regarding man-agement changes in the circus. ‘In regard to the price of the beast I cannot beprecise . . . I need to know if your beasts are all healthy[,] mine as well asyours how many monkeys we each have[,] their quality[,] mine andyours . . . . you’ll let me know.’63 There is also a reference to the companyof men who need to stay together, and the boss’s word that needs to be kept:

besides I had agreed with my men to let them go home one after theother[,] when it is possible and then to have them come back to thecompany[,] this has to be observed as well . . . it is necessary to keepthem all if they want to stay even if they are not strictly needed . . . andkeep our word regarding the salaries and the part that goes to the men[,]mine and yours just the same[,] who will be paid from the company’sprofits . . . and we both will have the same rights and the same obligationstowards the same men.64

How these pages were actually used conveys indirect information aboutthose making entries and their relationship to the book. For instance wefind the Dallara family history on the first page (or the last page of thenotebook reversed), with birth dates of the three children (Palmira, 1887;Giovanni, 1892; Luigi, 1899).65 On the last page (or inside the front cover)deaths are noted, by another hand: Laura Baffi, 1910; Giovanni, 1921;Luigi, 1933; and ‘padre Dallara Bernardo’ himself, 1935.66 On this samepage, that records the tragedy of a father outliving his sons, there is asimple sum (for a child?) adding up pears (5þ 1, 6þ 1). Another page con-tains a string of insults toward a certain Luigi: a ‘Beast’, an ignorant, ascoundrel, a vagrant (‘Luigi della Bestia delli ignorante del lasarone delvagabondo’), and an account of an accusation made by a debtor. The ex-treme variety of content expresses the eclectic abilities of these farmers and

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performers. Their handling of the paper, too – the first notebook continu-ously changes orientation and needs to be turned sideways and upside downto read every entry – is reminiscent of the sleight of hand familiar to peopleaccustomed to shuffling cards, and makes the most of limited resources.

The passport issued in 1905 to Vittore Belli, another orsante (born inBedonia, Parma, in 1884), presents a similar mix of information: officialrecords with field-maps; quantities of logs cut and of coal; contracts,debts and payments; and the date (23 May 1922) when the expired passportbecame an account book (Fig. 7).67 Flexibility and unpredictability, thoughuseful to an orsante, could be painful for his loved ones at home. In 1903Vittore Belli left his brother in Paris to join a circus in Germany. He had notfirst told his father Antonio, who bitterly reproached him by letter: ‘Withtears in his eyes he told me . . . you left your brother in Paris and left forGermany, so suddenly, with a somersault . . .Dear Son, you have to knowthat all stones are hard everywhere, and he who decides on his own will payfrom his own bag’.68

A STRAIGHT GAZEPrevious representations of wanderers and animal-trainers help us to readthe ‘gaze’ in these later photographs. In the seventeenth century the Italiannobility started to commission paintings of lowly subjects, such as wan-derers, travellers, or migrants, liking to view on canvas what they mightabhor seeing in reality. Painter Annibale Carracci portrayed beggars,

Fig. 7. The second page of Belli’s expired passport (issued 1905; used as notebook from 1922),

with jotting and field-map.



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Giacomo Cerruti (nicknamed ‘Pitocchetto’, or ‘Little Beggar’), SebastianoRicci and Alessandro Magnasco painted charlatans and vagrants. One detailinterestingly links some of the lowly subjects in these paintings – the state oftheir eyes. The vagabonds in two paintings by Pitocchetto (Incontro nelbosco and I due pitocchi) have squints (Fig. 8); Carracci’s man with themonkey (Uomo con scimmia) has a lazy eye (Fig. 9); while in Carracci’sSuonatore di violino guidato da un giovane the travelling musician is blind.Diseases and infections could indeed leave a man blind, with little choice butto take to the road. But such visible defects can also symbolically suggestthat these folks do belong to the margins and do look different. They bearthe sign of the outsider, they belong to an alternative world, and they looksuspicious. They are deviant as is their gaze. This interpretation would fitwith the longstanding prejudice and suspicion towards wandering people.

Early nineteenth-century prints of orsanti do not show specific character-istics in the bear-trainer. He is stylized and romanticized, as are his sur-roundings. But the responses of his audience are vivid – their curiositypalpable, their emotions visible as if performed on stage. Almost all theonlookers in Achille Pinelli’s ‘Ballo dell’orso’ (1809) are women and chil-dren, simultaneously fearful and excited by the strangeness and size of thebear and perhaps too by his master. That eager interest in difference was apotential market, and printmakers began to produce more images (oftensentimental or verging on the voyeuristic) of the poor, the vagrant, the

Fig. 8. Giacomo Ceruti (‘Pitocchetto’), I due pitocchi (The Two Beggars), c.1730–4.

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exotic. In the Compiano Museum this is illustrated by a French postcard:‘Les saltimbanques derriere leurs baraques’ (Acrobats behind their stall). Itsemphasis is on poverty backstage, demonstrated by the ramshackle wagon,the boy standing beside it, dogs roaming around, a pot on the small fire, abroom on the ground near barrels and drums.

The representation of wandering orsanti and scimmianti thus moves onfrom the paintings of vagrants and pitocchi (beggars) on the walls of the rich,and the later prints and postcards stressing poverty and difference, to apoint where the migrants begin to take control of how they are depicted.Historian Marco Porcella tracks this shift. ‘They are not the untrustworthyragged poor of Pitocchetto and do not have the artificial air of the nine-teenth-century prints, calendars or ‘‘popular costumes’’. They have becomesubjects and authors of their portraits.’69 Historian Gabriele D’Autilia sug-gests that when the peasant masses start asking to be depicted, once por-traits become easily available, they initiate ‘a process towards the activeposition of the subject, but also toward the modality of self-representationof the bourgeoisie’.70 In Autobiografia di una nazione, D’Autilia notes theemergence of several new subjects in nineteenth-century Italy, all spurred bythe ‘need of representation’.71 They include those renowned outsiders ofItalian society, the brigands in the South. The brigands were the first in-ternal enemies of the newly-formed Italian state, and Italy waged a warwith them that made use of cameras as well as rifles. Initially these

Fig. 9. Annibale Carracci, Uomo con scimmia (Man with monkey), c. 1590.



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peasants-turned-enemies were portrayed either as rebel corpses or in crim-inal mugshots – then they turned the tables.

When possible, these brigands [asked] to be pictured in similar ways(boldly clutching their rifles): even the enemy [had] now interiorized therituals, symbolic and ‘‘social’’ role of the photographic medium.72

The bold, direct gaze of our orsanti, then, like the defiant stance of thebrigand, thus demonstrates an important change in the control of represen-tation. Both groups stood at the margins of society, and possibly of legality.Once they appropriated the dominant class discourse by becoming produ-cers, sellers and users of their own publicity images, they wore their mostdefiant gaze. Visual anthropologist Johanna Cohan Scherer invites the re-searcher to question the relationship of subjects and camera and to establishwhether the subjects are fearful, antagonistic or full of wonder, excitementand pleasure.73 These migrants, practised performers, definitely took anactive part in their own ‘imaging’.74 Besides, no one else could decide howto move a bear and could keep it, the camels and the monkeys in their stagedpositions for the camera. While the americani trusted the photographer tofind the best pose, these orsanti did their own staging.

STAGING MIGRATION AND BEARSOf the illustrations to this article, Figure 10 most clearly demonstrates theorsanti’s entrance on the historical stage. Probably intended as a publicityshot, this picture displays the highly successful Bernabo circus company inall its splendour. The intrusion of the hen in the centre foreground, certainlyunplanned, highlights the ‘stagedness’ of the rest of picture (the Barthesianpunctum). These migrants are ‘performing’ themselves in their own particu-lar way. They are neither renting the photographer’s suits nor borrowing afake background. The focus is on the group, not the individual, and foreignelements are not expurgated. The strange company includes horns, paws andhooves; the accessories of their work – animals, carts, drums – are all there.Men and animals are composed and framed in a studied way: the semicircleof men, beer mugs to hand, the three hats on the third table, the prim girl onthe chair. The animals too are posing: the goat balanced on a barrel on thetable, the two horses with their front hooves on bales of hay, the monkeyson the wagons, the camels in silhouette to show their humps, the bear on aleash but almost sharing the table with the men. Three women are on the farright-hand side: this was definitely a male migration, women joined it insmaller numbers.75 The eyes of these subjects are quietly staring into thecamera. They do not reveal the commotion that must have preceded andfollowed the staging. In this theatre of migration, in front of the stage, youeven find a spectator. Perhaps involuntarily, that hatted head works as afilter between us viewers and the stage. It makes the company of animalsand man a theatre in itself, in their utter to-be-looked-at-ness. Besides

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realistic reminders of life on the road (those barrels evoke the quantity of

water required for the beasts while travelling), the meticulous precision and

attention to detail speak of a strong will to create their picture in history – at

the same time displaying their work tools. They are, perhaps unwillingly,

creating their own myth, and photography is the new technique they adopt

to complete their performance.76

The image depicted in Figure 11, used for the cover of the novel Orsanti

by Arturo Cura, is perhaps the best known. It is definitely a staged picture,

but again, not domesticated into a docile studium. This is not only due to the

imposing stature of the bear. The rhyming position of man and bear – the

spread of their legs, their raised arms, their leaning towards each other, and

the angle of their staffs – may well look artificial. But there is something, a

fiery internal duality heightened by the parallel posture, that does not allow

the picture to rest. The man and the bear identify with each other, almost

imploding into each other. Zoom in to their eyes and you will be struck by

the contradiction: the man is a vagrant, marginal, subordinate, if with a

certain raffish confidence. The bear is a powerful giant, but enslaved,

chained and trained to unnatural movements and steps. He is truly a

deposed king.How the bear reached the small Apennine villages is still unclear. Mortali

and Truffelli suggest that it was somehow brought from distant lands just as

iron sulphate or gum Arabic were brought from Africa to be peddled. They

also argue that local bears were present in these woods, citing occasional

mentions in documents and the occurrence of the word ‘bear’ (orso) in local

place names (Codorso, Valle dell’Orso, Tana dell’Orso). ‘Orsi’ is, I may add,

Fig. 10. The Bernabo Company, probably in Italy, maybe before a seasonal departure.



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Fig. 11. Orsante and bear with their staffs.

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a common local last name.77 John Zucchi offers the possibility that (with acertain historical irony) the bears were brought to Italy in the 1500s byRussian minstrels (skomorokhi).78 Marco Ascari’s hypothesis is that peas-ants who travelled to Eastern lands as soldiers saw and learned the tricks.One last supposition is that the bears came from the central Italian region ofAbruzzi, where, protected, they still live today.79 Whatever its origins, thebear is still present in the cultural substrata of the area. Even today, in themountain towns, bear masks are very common at Carnival time.

It is noteworthy that these bears are dark. In Black: the History of a Colorcultural historian Michel Pastoureau links the association of black and thedevil with the bear. The bear’s ‘dark fur and anthropomorphic appearancemade it a formidable creature, good to hunt but attributed with wickedbehaviour’ in Roman times.80 In medieval times, its dark colour becamethe main feature of the diabolical beast: ‘Like Satan, the bear was darkand hairy; like him it was cruel and harmful; like him it loved dark, secretplaces’.81 The blackness of the animal fused with the blackness of its soul,adding to its powerful and deadly charge. The orsanti’s black beasts gatherstrength from centuries of history that identify black with evil.

If we read further, the bear is not only the instrument of the orsanti trade.It is also the reflection of their decadence and redemption. The bear seemsuncannily like a man, yet he is not. He seems a powerful beast, yet he is not.The deep significance of the bear in European history and mythology hasbeen studied by Michel Pastoureau in his L’ours. Histoire d’un roi dechu.This argues that there is a deeply-rooted relationship between men andbears, a history that interlaces power relations and religious domination.Pastoureau notes the resemblance between them. The bear is the only animalthat can be represented standing upright (the origin of the uncanny feeling).Not only does it look like a man disguised, it can also physically behave likea man. ‘It can stand, sit, sleep on its side or on its stomach, run, swim, dive,roll, climb, jump and even dance. . . . [T]he bear is the only animal who oftenraises its head to contemplate the sky and the stars.’82

The bear used to occupy a place between the human and the divine. Itwas the king of the natural kingdom, emerging from the pagan North, untilthe early Middle Ages (around the year 1000) when the Catholic Churchsupplanted it with the king of the South, the lion. Pagan festivities relatingto the bear slowly metamorphosed into days dedicated to saints whose le-gends include a bear (such as Valentine, Eligium, Vincenzianum, Blaise) orsaints with the Latin root ursus in their names (Saint Ursus, Ursicenus,Ursula). The Catholic Candelora, the presentation of Jesus in the templeand the feast of light, replaced the antique feast that celebrated the end ofthe hibernation months for the bears, on 2 February. Always suspicious ofhuman conduct that too strongly resembled animal behaviour, or that couldevoke excessively sexual or violent suggestions, the Church relegated beardisguises to the marginal time of the year, Carnival. Literature reflected thedecadence of the bear: the twelfth-century cycle Le Roman de Renard has



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Brun, the bear, dishonoured in front of the entire royal banquet. The beastwas also humiliated in daily life. He appeared with a muzzle in the squarewhere he was made to dance for the crowd. Children could touch him, dogscould taunt him, and ‘he obeyed as a sort of sad and resigned buffoon’.83

Only women had to keep their distance since the sexual attraction was con-sidered reciprocal. Sensational stories spread tales of women violated bybears. The Church, asserts Pastoureau, would look upon this brutalizationwith favour because it stressed the demise of an animal that was oncevenerated. Wandering animal-trainers had the ethical permission to workwith animals who bore the mark of impurity and were symbolically negative,such as the dog (unclean creature), the hare (believed to be a hermaphroditeand excessively sexual), the monkey (diabolical animal, hypocritical andobscene), even the squirrel (seen as the monkey of the forest). The ‘dancingbear was a creation of medieval Christianity’, writes Pastoureau.84 In thesixteenth century Russian bear-trainers were immortalized by Ariosto in hispoem Orlando Enraged:

But as the usage is of surly bear,By sturdy Russ or Lithuanian led,Little to heed the dogs in crowded fair,Nor even at their yelps to turn his head . . . .85

The number of bear-trainers increased toward the end of the eighteenthcentury, but the beast was by then somewhat less wild. Engravings, printsand pictures showed ‘small, meager, hairless bears’, with ‘a shy and resignedexpression that contrasts with the flushed and grim look of their owners’.86

Through this dethroning the bear becomes a most melancholic animal, andthus a romantic hero. In its decadence it does not, however, lose its strength.The physical force of the animal is clear (every language retains the saying‘strong as a bear’). Eating bear meat meant absorbing its strength. Even ifthe diet of bears has changed from being eighty percent meat-based in an-tiquity to a mere ten percent meat-based today, Pastoureau writes, the bearhas always meant danger. The saints who tamed bears and the hermitsaccompanied by bears showed the power of holiness to subdue animalstrength.

This long tortuous history is captured in the bear’s eyes as they appear inphotographs. While some of the orsanti pictures do show smaller, meagrebears, the most disquieting images (Figures 1, 2, 6, 11) show man-sized bearswho seem to share human nature by walking upright and looking straightahead with sad eyes. In these beasts we can see the alter ego of the orsanteand the shadow of his migration. The language reflects it: Gregorio Scaia,from Trentino, starts his story of migration: ‘I felt full of strength like abear’.87 Antonio Belli writes to his brother Vittore ‘you must work like abear’.88 We need to note that the bears in these pictures are always standing,never prostrate or dominated by the hunter’s boot. They become the

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migrant’s travel companion and his mirror.89 Like a bear, the migrant is amarginal, repressed, subaltern figure. Like the bear, he was forced downfrom the mountains in search of food. Like the bear, he was disciplined todo strenuous work (hagiography and iconography have bears carrying thebaggage of Saint Corbinian, evangelizer of Bavaria in 700, or pulling theplough for Saint Eligius in 650). Like the bear, he ‘woke up’ in the springand travelled. Like the bear, it was a painful destiny that provoked the‘dance’ of his migrations.90 The same mixture of dejection and strengthappears in the eyes of migrants and bears. Sharing his destiny with thefallen king, the orsante domesticated the beast of migration.

CONCLUSION: ERASED TRACES AND ENDURING CHARMToday, few traces remain of this picturesque migration. The homes of themigrants are empty. Most of their children are gone. Fontanabonardi, forexample, where the Taddei family lived, is a ghost village. The few letters leftby the travellers are vague about their work.91 They contain no record oftheir life in foreign lands, no stories about their animals or their audiences.Such a lack can be physical, where the documents themselves are deficient(with torn or missing journal pages) or illegible (with vertical, horizontal ordiagonal lines across entries, or indecipherable words), or where photo-graphs are impossibly faded.92 But it also takes the form of a memoryvoid, like an ancestral shame, the shadow of the outcast. Mortali andTruffelli document how in nineteenth-century Bedonia ‘there was a currentthat did not accept and was ashamed of these artist and beggar compatriotswho travelled the world’.93 Often, families selling a house burned their docu-ments first, for fear that they might contain compromising information, orfrom reluctance to let anyone know the value of their possessions. InBedonia, a small mountain town with 1,500 inhabitants, there are, surpris-ingly, five banks.94

These migrants have been almost erased from history, rather as if a stagesecret needed to be kept. The deletion is the more remarkable as it is para-doxical: these were showmen, preceded by the publicity of drums and fol-lowed by a trail of applause. They were illusionists, dealers in exoticism andcuriosity, entertainers. Their silence is thus conspicuous. And yet, theirmyth, if not their real story, is still alive and it inspired the opening of theMuseum of Orsanti in Compiano. More a theatre than a traditionalmuseum, with its heavy red curtains draped in an abandoned church, itemotively heaps together fake, probable and historical testimonies ofpast life. It was founded by the eclectic and exuberant stylist, painter andmarionette-maker Maria Teresa Alpi.95 Around it, every summer, the cityorganizes the Festival of the Travelling Artists (girovaghi), that draws streetperformers from all over Italy. The spirit of the orsanti is far from dead.

Ilaria Serra is Associate Professor of Italian and Comparative Studies atFlorida Atlantic University. She has taught Italian at Purdue University, at



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Palacky University in Olomouc (Czech Republic), and at the University of

Venice. Her research ranges from Italian cinema and literature to the history

of Italian immigration to the United States. Her publications include:Immagini di un immaginario: L’emigrazione italiana negli Stati Uniti fra i

due secoli: 1890–1925 (Verona, 1997); The Value of Worthless Lives:

Writing Italian American Immigrant Autobiographies (New York, 2007);

The Imagined Immigrant (Madison NJ, 2009).

NOTES AND REFERENCES

In this article I use the Italian singular orsante and its plural orsanti. Translations fromoriginal Italian and French sources are mine.

1 The material has been collected by Prof. Carlo Stiaccini and Prof. Fabio Caffarena of theUniversity of Genova and by Maria Teresa Alpi of the Compiano Museum. A further privatecollection belongs to Carlo and Bruno Cavalli, who live in Bedonia. This article is the first studyon the orsanti in English. For a comprehensive study, see Giuliano Mortali and CorradoTruffelli, ‘Per procacciarsi il vitto’: L’emigrazione dalle valli del Taro e del Ceno dall’ancienregime al Regno d’Italia, Parma, 2006. For a description of the orsanti collection in theGenova Archive, see Francesca Goglino, ‘Orsanti, scimmianti, pelpini: Archivi familiari emestieri girovaghi nell’Appennino parmense fra Otto e Novecento’, Dissertation, Universityof Genova, 2009.

2 Felix Driver and Bill Schwarz, ‘Widening the Circle’, editorial,History Workshop Journal70, autumn 2010, pp. 1–3.

3 The research was made possible by a grant from the Life Long Learning Center ofFlorida Atlantic University, 2009.

4 See for example Bronislaw Geremek, Poverty: a History, transl. Agnieszka Kolakowska,Oxford, 1994.

5 Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650,Bloomington, 2003, p. 2.

6 See Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce (Les Jeux de l’echange, Paris, 1979),transl. Sian Reynolds, London, 1982.

7 Laurence Fontaine, Le voyage et la memoire: colporteurs de l‘Oisans au xixe siecle, Lyon,1984; and Histoire du colportage en Europe (xve-xixe siecle), Paris, 1993 (History of Pedlars inEurope, Durham NC, 1996). Fontaine classifies them as the destitute pedlar, the regular ped-lar, the merchant-pedlar, and the so-called ‘Manchester man’, tied to a firm and not a town(pp. 73–93).

8 See David Gentilcore’s ‘Italian Charlatans Database, 1500–1800’ (www.esds.ac.uk), andhis book Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy, Oxford, 2006.

9 The population was growing rapidly over this period. In Italy, it doubled: 18.1 million inabout 1800, 23.9 in c. 1850, 33.9 c. 190, 36.2 in 1910. See Andre Armengaud, ‘Population inEurope, 1700–1914’, in the Fontana Economic History of Europe, vol. 3, ed. Carlo M. Cipolla,London, 1973, p. 29.

10 Piero Camporesi, Alimentazione, Folklore, Societa, Parma, 1983, p. 22. An old sayingevokes rural hardship: ‘The peasant yawns / because he’s parched or hungry / or he’s sleepy andwants a nap / or he’s sick with something he can’t name’: (‘E’ sbadaja e vilan / O ch’l’a sed och’l’a fam / O ch’l’a son e un po’ durmı / O ch’l’a un mel ch’e’ un n’e’ po’ di’): Italo Camprini,Canta la cicala taglia taglia il grano al padrone al contadino la paglia. Ricerca di storia e culturapopolare, Lodi, 1978.

11 ‘[M]a vi spetava vui ciorno per ciorno vi spetava tanto etanto che vi spetava o chegrande sconsulazione o avuto venire al mese d’agosto o che tempo lunco e mai per me o comefara mai a pasare luglio o che mese lunco sara mai per me.’ (letter displayed in the CompianoMuseum).

12 See ‘Gli statuti di Cariseto’, in Carmen Artocchini, La legislazione statutaria deiMarchesi Malaspina per i feudi della Val Trebbia, ‘Archivio storico per le Provice Parmensi’,4th series, XV, 1963, pp. 170–3. Cited in Mortali and Truffelli, ‘Per procacciarsi il vitto’, p. 12.

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13 Searches for missing people figure in the Parma Archive. Maria Sottardi, missing herfather Pietro, aged fifty-five, and ‘seeing that my melancholy is growing’, begged the authoritiesto find him. He had left seventeen years before, as a viola player, and his letters home hadstopped. He was found in Russia, having crossed Switzerland and Germany on foot. In 1852the wife of Mose Moglia from Romezzano had been without news of her husband since Julywhen he was in the town di Corti in Corsica. Seven years later, the State of Parma found outthat Mose had died fighting in the revolution of Montevideo of 1858. These and other storiesare collected by Marco Ascari in L’emigrazione girovaga parmense a meta’ Ottocento (merciai,orsanti, organettisti), Centro Studi Valle del Ceno, Quaderno 13, Bardi, 2006. His main sourceis Fondo Dipartimento Affari Esteri, Parma Archive.

14 See Emilio Franzina, ‘Identita regionale, identita internazionale ed emigrazione all’es-tero’, in L’identita italiana: emigrazione, immigrazione, conflitti etnici, ed. Enzo Bartocci andVittorio Cotesta, Roma, 1999.

15 See Mortali and Truffelli, ‘Per procacciarsi il vitto’, p. 91.16 Marco Porcella, ‘Premesse dell’emigrazione di massa in eta prestatistica’, in Storia

dell’emigrazione italiana: Partenze, ed. Piero Bevilacqua, Andreina De Clementi, EmilioFranzina, Roma, 2001, p. 32.

17 For this census see Carlo Stiaccini, ‘Orsanti: I quaderni di famiglia dei girovaghidell’appennino tosco-emiliano’, in El legado de Mnemosyne: las escrituras del yo a traves deltiempo, ed. Antonio Castillo-Gomez and Veronica Sierra-Blas, Gijon (Spain), 2007, pp. 95–114.

18 For the changing meanings of the term ‘charlatan’, see Piero Camporesi, Il libro deivagabondi: lo Speculum cerretanorum di Teseo Pini, Il vagabondo di Rafaele Frianoro e altritesti di furfanteria, Torino, 1973; also Gentilcore, Medical Charlatanism, and ‘ItalianCharlatans Database, 1500–1800’.

19 Cantu-Faganello Collection, Compiano Museum. The complete text in Italian reads:

Al cittadino Francesco Noberini di professione Ciarlatano / Nativo di Strella Villadello Stato Piacentino / Domiciliato in detta villa / D’anni 22 / Di statura piccola, voltolungo, capegli neri corti, fronte alta, occhi griggi, naso ordinario, bocca mediocre,mento rotondo e che parte da detta villa e si trasferisce in Francia di far vedere animaliselvatici, senza negargli o permettere che gli venga arrecato alcuno ostacolo, anzi colprestar al medesimo aiuto ed assistenza.Firma dell’esibitore: non sa scrivereParma dal Governo G. Primaire / Anno XI della Repubblica Francese / R. Politi / 27/10/1802.

20 Many of these stories are included in Mortali and Truffelli, ‘Per procacciarsi il vitto’.21 This tale was tirelessly told by Sante Caramatti (1913–2012), grandson of Antonio,

schoolteacher and local notable, often interviewed by local historians. I use Mortali andTruffelli’s version.

22 See Mortali and Truffelli, ‘Per procacciarsi il vitto’, pp. 327–9.23 See Marco Porcella, Con arte e con inganno: L’emigrazione girovaga nell’appennino

ligure-emiliano, Genova, 1998, p. 88.24 See Mortali and Truffelli, ‘Per procacciarsi il vitto’, pp. 201–2.25 See Mortali and Truffelli, ‘Per procacciarsi il vitto’, p. 335.26 Adolfo Mignemi, Lo sguardo e l’immagine: La fotografia come documento storico,

Torino, 2003, p. 219.27 Antonio Gibelli, ‘ ‘‘Fatemi un po sapere’’ . . .Scrittura e fotografia nella corrispondenza

degli immigrati liguri’, La Via delle Americhe: L’emigrazione ligure tra evento e racconto, ed.Luca Borzani and Antonio Gibelli, Genova, 1989, p. 92.

28 Sara Blair, ‘About Time: Historical Reading, Historicity and the Photograph’, PMLA125: 1, January 2010, p. 162. This article on photography in literary and postcolonial studiesfocuses on pictures of ethnic and colonial subjects such as American Jews and Africans anddemonstrates continued interest in the use of photography across fields. I recognize the ‘dangersof empathy’ against which Mark Salber Phillips warned historians who try to offer ‘the dignityof narrative as compensation for lifetimes of oppression and exclusion’: Mark Salber Phillips,‘On the Advantage and Disadvantage of Sentimental History for Life’, History WorkshopJournal 65, 2008, p. 55.

29 Gabriele D’Autilia, L’indizio e la prova. La storia nella fotografia, Milano, 2005, p. 214.



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30 Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture,London, 1994, p. 332.

31 Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, New York, 1977, p. 15.32 John and Malcolm Collier, Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method,

Albuquerque, 1986,p. 168.33 The animals were expensive in terms of transportation, food and shelter, and purchase.

There is an interesting reference to this in a card from Bedonia dated 3 October 1901, with theletterhead: ‘G. Aramini (decore de S.M.T. le Sultan) of the Company of A. Bernabo (Tournedes Varietes A. Bernabo)’. It reads: ‘Dear Bruni [another family of circus workers], in responseto your welcome letter, I give you news of my health. I am fine and I hope the same for you.You ask me what you should do with the beast, my advice is to sell it as you suggest, becausebringing it home costs a lot’ (‘Caro Bruni, in riscontro alla gradita tua ti do mie notizie di salut,sto bene cosı spero di te e comp. Mi dici di cosa tu devi fare della bestia quanto ti possoconsigliare io vendela a tua idea perche per condurla a casa costerano della moneta’): TaddeiCollection, ALSP.

34 Letter, Antonino Taddei to his son Giovanni, 23 March 1868 (‘Se ti muore una bestia emorto il pane’), Cavalli Private Archive, cited in Porcella, Con arte e con inganno, p. 87.

35 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, New York, 1982, p. 38.36 See Piero Camporesi’s superb Il libro dei vagabondi, which provides complete transcrip-

tions, with commentaries, of the fifteenth-century manuscript Speculum Cerretarum, by TeseoPini, and of Rafaele Frianoro’s Il vagabondo, 1627.

37 ‘Chi fa mercantia e non la conosca, li suoi denari diventano mosca’; ‘compra in Puglia evendi in Franza, se vuoi che la casa s’alza’; ‘chi sta a ca’ vende al bo’, chi va in merca fa come ilPo’; ‘piu in pelle di vulpi che d’asini vanno al mercato’: Teseo Pini, in Camporesi, Il libro deiVagabondi, chap. 149.

38 Camporesi, Il libro dei Vagabondi, chap. 152.39 The Compiano Museum has a Bernabo circus poster written in Romanian: ‘Circ

Zoologic / Cavaler Bernabo / Romania 1913 / Cai, caini, maimute, capre’ (horses, dogs, mon-keys, goats).

40 ‘Cittadini! Se volete ridere o divertirvi, accorrete tutti ai Giardini Pubblici al GrandeTeatro delle Scimmie – ogni giorno tre grandi spettacoli. . . . La scimmia Augusta su altalena,la scimmia Paolina su corsa, la scimmia Moretto clowns [sic] ginnico sul trapezio . . .banchettoscimmiesco servito da servitori africani . . . la produzione della capra sapiente Gisella . . .l’impresa spera di vedersi onorata da numeroso concorso.’ Admission to the show was 2liras for one seat, L.1.50 for two seats, L.1 for a child. The conclusion is self important: ‘theenterprise hopes to have the honour of a numerous attendance’. This poster belonged toGiovanni Taddei; it is in Italian and is probably from the mid 1900s: ALSP, Taddei Collection.

41 A few of the pictures in the ALSP have been published: see Mortali and Truffelli, ‘Perprocacciarsi il vitto’; the exhibition catalogue La via delle Americhe: L’emigrazione ligure traevento e racconto, Genova, 1989; and Porcella, Con arte e con inganno.

42 Private archives contain interesting objects that belonged to these migrants. The tools ofthe animal-trainers’ trade – the toy bike, the toy violin, the miniature guns which made a noise,the parrot’s chair, the whip (Bruno Cavalli’s) – are photographed in the Belli-DallaraCollection (ALSP Genova). Charlatans’ equipment is on show at the Compiano Museum,for instance the little cage with the ‘planets of fortune’, from which a parrot would extract apaper with a prediction. The museum also owns three tabernacles which contained religiousimages: the Child of Prague, a Russian icon and a Madonna. In some cases they travelled withthe orsanti. Set up on the cart and opening like a box, they were used to solicit offerings. Thetwo Eastern European images suggest the audience at which they were aimed. The descendantof charlatans of old knew his audience: on Charles Bridge in Prague (a favourite performingplace), for instance, the passer-by would not recognize a Sicilian Saint Rosalia. Such objects(and monkeys too) were sometimes exchanged or shared by orsanti during their travels, wegather from occasional letters.

43 The following comparisons are suggested by my past studies on Italian migration: seeThe Imagined Immigrant: Images of Italian Emigration to the United States between 1890 and1924 New York, 2009 and The Value of Worthless Lives: Writing Italian-American ImmigrantAutobiographies, New York, 2007.

44 The picture must have been sent in an envelope and used as a letter. Giovanni writes toa ‘dear friend’ and refers to a book he has sent as requested. He has paid for it with his ownmoney, but the friend will buy him a glass of wine the next time he passes by Milan.

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45 We can infer that the child is Giovanni Corti by comparing this image with anotherpicture that shows him with monkeys, probably in the Taddei circus: see Mortali and Trufelli,‘Per procacciarsi il vitto’, p. 475.

46 The handwriting seems that of an adult, so Giovanni must have sent an old picture ofhimself with his father.

47 The employment of juveniles of either sex in travelling occupations was banned in Italyin 1873 (‘Proibizione dell’impiego di fanciulli d’ambo i sessi nelle professioni girovaghe’), butthe law was widely disregarded. The first law regulating the emigration of minors, passed on 31January 1901, prohibited those under fifteen from leaving the country without work permit ormedical check, and punished abandonment of those who were seventeen or less. Child labourunder nine years of age was banned in 1886. The age limit was raised to twelve in 1902, but itwas still largely neglected. School-leaving age was set at ten in 1900, rising to eleven in 1904.Only in 1962 did it reach fourteen. See Il Calendario del Popolo: Suonatori, girovaghi e lavavetri,ed. Bruno Bianchi, Matteo Ermacora and Nicoletta Giove, June 2003, p. 676.

48 Marco Ascari, L’emigrazione girovaga, p. 147, citing report in Parma Archive, FondoDipartimento Affari Esteri, busta 53, 1853.

49 The full text, in Orsanti Museum, Compiano, reads:

L’anno 1869, Chiavari, 22 marzo / G. Battista Raffo di Reppia, comune di Ne /prometto di prendere al mio servizio per mesi 30 il qui nominato Antonio Zenone diGiacomo nativo di Sopralacroce comune Borzonasca – condurlo meco ed a mie spesein Prussica come musico ambulante, cola provvederlo di un buon strumento musicale,di vitto e vestito, ed anche infermo per soli gg. 15 in caso di una sola malatia e dopo 1mese di nostra partenza di casa corrispondergli un salario mensile di L italiane 14centesimi 40.Ed io pure sottocroce segnato Antonio Zenone prometto di stare al servizio del sud-detto Raffo per il pattuito tempo di mesi 30 servirlo da buono e morigerato garzone,rapportando allo stesso tutto il guadagno che verra da me raccolto suonando nedisertate dal suo servizio senza giusti motivi sottopena di perdere ogni suo dirittoverso dello stesso Raffo. (. . .)Segno di X Antonio Zenone / In fede, G.B. Raffo.

50 Tallone, ‘Il fondo Belli-Taddei. Una famiglia migrante’, University of Genova disser-tation, 2006/2007, two vols, vol. 2, p. 189: letter from Antonino Taddei to Vittore Belli 15 Aug.1909, Ansbach: ‘Sempre allegro mai passion’. Taddei is here speaking of his free relationshipwith women: ‘before our thoughts were in our pants but now they’ve gone to our head’ (‘e dintanto in tanto anche qualche donna per i coglion . . .prima i pensieri erano nelle braghe a orasuno andatti nella testa’). A year earlier (14 May 1908, cit. Tallone, vol. 2, p. 189) Taddei wrotefrom Lindau: ‘we don’t make money but we laugh . . . a lot with your niece she is always fun.’(‘Denari non sene fa ma sifa del . . . ridere con tua nipote ella e sempre allegra’).

51 Tallone, ‘Il fondo Belli-Taddei. Una famiglia migrante’, vol. 2, p. 189: Antonio Taddeito Vittore Belli, 14 May 1909, ‘Tumi farai sapere le novitae di Masanti lo sai bene anche chequando se all’estro [estero] si brama di avvere e . . . sapere le novitae dell cara paese in dove senati in questi paesi non si sa mai niente sisa soltanto di andare a bevere la birra in dove emeglio’.

52 A 1900 letter from Trebisonda (Turkey) from Lazzaro Raggi asked for ‘our cheese’(‘formagetto nostro’) to soothe his nostalgia: ‘an old [cheese] to grate and a half-old one to eat’(‘una formetta di vecchio per grattare e ed uno per mangiare mezza vecchia’): cited in Mortaliand Truffelli, ‘Per procacciarsi il vitto’, p. 212.

53 Abdemalek Sayad, La double absence: des illusions de l’emigre aux souffrances del’immigre, Paris, 1999.

54 Tallone, ‘Il fondo Belli-Taddei. Una famiglia migrante’, vol. 2, p. 190: Domenico toVittore Belli, Frankfurt, 1 Aug. 1908, ‘Una volta che si trova in lestero non viene piu nemenovolonta di scrivere a nessuno’. As in all types of migration, through letters the father maintainsauthority over domestic business: from home activities (‘don’t kill all those poor hares that canunfortunately be found on our land’; ‘if you see my sons doing something wrong scold them’) tofamily relations, like the anger against the spoiled nephews who ‘sleep on a bed of feathersbecause the bed of straw pricks their ass’: Vittore’s letters in Belli Taddei collection, ALPS.

55 Arturo Cura, Orsanti, Parma, 1998, p. 132.



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56 ‘The chest as self is seen whenever a speaker wants to emphasize the concept of ‘I’ or‘me’. . . . Puffing out the chest or beating it with hands or fists is a masculine display common tomany cultures’: Desmond Morris, The Study of the Male Body, New York, 2009, p. 164.

57 ‘Sto bene unito ala mia compagnia’. Giuseppe Belli a Vittore Belli, letter from Ansbach,5 August 1904 (Tallone p. 188).

58 Italian libraries preserve numerous family notebooks. Their use developed in the lateMiddle Ages and spread from Florentine merchants to smaller landowners. They commonlyjuxtaposed calculations, financial records and family history. The three Dallara ‘quaderni difamiglia’ (family notebooks) or ‘libri dei conti’ (account books) were kept for private use in thefamily. They cover a number of years (the first one starts in 1862; the third is used from 1889 to1935), and serve different purposes simultaneously. Carlo Stiaccini sees these documents as‘unexpected and unsuitable sites of conservation’ (‘Orsanti: I quaderni di famiglia dei girova-ghi’, p. 99). Various hands wrote in them; some pages have been torn out. All sorts of infor-mation was juxtaposed (sometimes criss-crossed on the page): the calculation of a debt that hasnot been paid (in the first notebook, a real puzzle of reversed writing); payments to the doctorand the pharmacist, and the purchase of a calf for ten liras in 1882 (in the second notebook).See also Francesca Goglino and Carlo Stiaccini, ‘Affentheater: Italian Migration aroundEurope between Nineteenth and Twentieth Century [sic]’, AEMI Journal (Association ofEuropean Migration Institutions) 8, 2010.

59 Dallara notebook 2, (unpaginated) 7 pages from end: ‘Scontando la calcina dalle sumasudetta che a ricevuto mi resta da dare a me Dallara Bernardo sula sudata suma L. 284,70 c.mi(. . .) e sodisfato di tuto avazo me ancora L.100’.

60 Goglino and Stiaccini, ‘Affentheater’, p. 88.61 Stiaccini, ‘Orsanti: I quaderni di famiglia dei girovaghi’, p. 104.62 Stiaccini, ‘Orsanti: I quaderni di famiglia dei girovaghi’, p. 107.63 Dallara notebook 2 (unpaginated), ‘In riguardo al presio della bestia non poso pre-

cisarlo . . .desidero sapere se le tue bestie suno tute in salute tanto le mie come le tue quantesimie abiamo uno e l’altro la qualita e come suno . . .me lo farai sapere.’

64 ‘[I]n ultre ai miei uomini li aveva acordatto di mandarli a casa uno dopo qualche pochotempo uno dopo laltro quando si puo e poi di ritornare alla compagnia dunque anche questobisogna seguirlo . . . bisognia fare in modo di tenerli tutti se ci vogliono stare piu anche se sonodi streto bisognio . . . e mantenere la parola per i salari e le parte che va alli uomini tanto ai mieicome ai tuoi si pageranno della bursa di compagnia . . . e averemo tanto te come me i medesimideriti i medesimi obblighi coi medesimi coli uomini.’

65 ‘Al giorno 2 aprile 87 e natto la Palmira // al giorno 28 febbraio 92 e nato il Giovanni //al giorno 18 magio 1899 e nato il Luigi.’

66 ‘Baffi Laura morta 2 marzo 1910 // figlio Giovanni morto 6 Febbraio 1921 // figlioLuigi morto 8 Novembre 1933 // padre Dallara Bernardo morto 14 Luglio 1935.’

67 Vittore Belli passport, first page: ‘Cominciato [begun] il 23 Maggio 1922’, Bedonia-Santo Stefano Collection, ALSP.

68 Letter, Antonio Belli to Vittore Belli, 8 May 1903: ‘[C]on le lacrime alli occhi mi ha fattosapere . . . che ai lasiato tuo fratello a Parigi che ai preso la volta per la germania cosi tutto ad untrato a fare capovolta epare inposibile fare scrivere per altri ancora abbi totalmente disperso illegame e scrivere . . .Caro figlio devi sapere che le pietre sono dure da tutte le parti e chi fa di suatesta paga di sua saccocia’, cited Tallone, ‘Il fondo Belli-Taddei’, vol. 2, p. 134.

69 Porcella, Con arte e con inganno, p. 116.70 Gabriele D’Autilia, L’ indizio e la prova, p. 128.71 Luca Crescenti and Gabriele d’Autilia, Autobiografia di una nazione: storia fotografica

della societa italiana, Roma, 1999, p. 63.72 D’Autilia adds that Southern peasants then disappeared from the formal pictures of

united Italy, reappearing only occasionally in concurrence with earthquakes or natural catas-trophes. He interprets it as a symbol of the disappearance of the subaltern, colonized Southfrom Italian official history: Crescenti and d’Autilia, Autobiografia di una nazione, p. 66.

73 Johanna Cohan Scherer, ‘Ethnographic Photography in Anthropological Research’, inPrinciples of Visual Anthropology, ed. Paul Hockings, Berlin, 2003, pp. 201–16

74 The significance of the direct or averted gaze in portraits is examined by PatriciaSimons, who maintains that the numerous Renaissance portraits of women in profile, withaverted eyes and a face available to scrutiny, were best suited to represent them as decorouspieces of property: Patricia Simons, ‘Women in Frames: the Eye, the Gaze, the Profile inRenaissance Portraiture’, History Workshop Journal 25, spring 1988.

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75 The passport of a certain Celestina Rossi, born in 1881 in Bardi, is in the ALSP(Genova). Issued in 1912 and valid for three years, it permitted her to travel to Austria-Hungary as a day labourer. At least two wives fromMasanti joined their husbands temporarily:Maria Belli and the wife of Fermo Taddei (name not known). Families rarely travelled alltogether, though there are some cases of children born far from home, like the two daughtersof Giuseppe Dallara and Caterina Angelotti, from Castagnola di Bedonia: Giovanna, born inPalaggiano (Naples) in 1848, and Luigia, born in Reus (Spain) in 1852. See Ascari,L’emigrazione girovaga, p. 117, citing Fondo Dip. Affari Esteri, busta 55, 1854, Parma Archive.

76 We know that they kept these snapshots and used them, as in a letter where the orsanteasks to be sent ‘i retratti . . . su quello scansello della banca’ (the portraits . . . on the shelf of thetable). See Tallone, ‘Il fondo Belli-Taddei’, vol. 2, p. 50.

77 L’Italia del cognomi (www.gens.labo.net/it/cognomi), a website dedicated to a mappingof Italian family names, shows a large presence of Orsi in this area (as in other mountainousareas).

78 John Zucchi, The Little Slaves of the Harp: Italian Child Street Musicians in Nineteenth-century Paris, London and New York, Toronto, 1992, p. 28.

79 This is hypothesized by Pierre Milza (Voyage en Italie, Paris, 1993), quoted in Mortaliand Truffelli, ‘Per procacciarsi il vitto’, p. 136.

80 Michel Pastoureau, Black: the History of a Color (Paris, 2008), transl. Jody Gladding,Princeton, 2009, p. 33.

81 Pastoureau, Black, p. 56.82 Michel Pastoureau, L’ours: Histoire d’un roi dechu, Paris, 2007, p. 71 (The Bear: History

of a Fallen King, transl. George Holoch, Cambridge MA, 2011).83 Pastoureau, L’ours, p. 206.84 Pastoureau, L’ours, p. 71.85 Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, transl. William Stewart Rose, London, 1910, canto

11, verse 49.86 Pastoureau, The Bear, p. 298.87 ‘Misentiva pieno di forsa come un orso’: Gregorio Scaia, ‘Un pezo di pane dale sete

cruste. Diario di Gregorio Scaia (1881–1971)’, Judicaria 17, 1991, p. 17.88 ‘Ti tocca lavorar come uno orso’: letter from Masanti, 22–23 Maggio 1912, cit. Tallone.89 Pastoureau reaches the conclusion that by killing the bear, man’s own relative,

brother and first god, man has killed his own memory, and now ‘it is too late to hope to goback’ (p. 290).

90 It seems that methods for training bears were cruel – forcing them to associate musicand performance with reward. From when they were cubs, they were put on hot coals to makethem ‘dance’, always accompanied by the same music. To play that music was then enough toawaken the pavlovian reaction of dance.

91 In Simone Tallone’s Master’s thesis on the letters belonging to the Belli-Taddei family,‘Il fondo Belli-Taddei. Una famiglia migrante’, he draws an interesting comparison between theletters in the same family from American immigrants and from circus migrants in Switzerland.The American letters are more numerous (twenty-four letters versus eight). They are also richerin details. Tallone acounts for the difference by arguing that different self-perceptions prevailedamong the migrants, who did not see themselves as immigrants to a new country but just asworkers; perhaps too they did not need to give details on activities familiar already to therecipient of the letter. Italian historian Carlo Stiaccini, curator of the Genova archive, proposesalso that since their activity bordered on illegality, they would be reticent about its specifics.These interpretations are acceptable.

92 These pages may have been torn because they became useless. Carlo Stiaccini imaginesthese books were left for their wives in the house and became obsolete once the husbands hadcome back. Entries may have been crossed out because the contracts had expired or the debthad been paid.

93 Mortali and Truffelli, ‘Per procacciarsi il vitto’, p. 202.94 Banca Monte Parma, Banca Popolare dell’Emilia, Cassa di Risparmio di Parma e

Piacenza, Credito Emiliano, and three offices of Poste Italiane. Mortali and Truffelli try toquantify the monetary gain derived from this local migration, and notice the large availabilityof savings since the end of the 1800s (‘Per procacciarsi il vitto’, pp. 342–51).

95 The Museum website is: http://www.museogliorsanti.it. Maria Teresa Alpi died on 12February 2012.



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