What were the living conditions of land workers in the Italian countryside in the 19th century? Pierre Bourdieu coined for peasants the definition of "object class," which inevitably comes up in this book. It expresses their subalternity in the European history of the past centuries.

«”Those who prefer to see a corny picture of peasants, go another way. I am convinced that in the long run it gives better results to paint them in their roughness rather than with conventional looseness. A painting of peasants does not have to be perfumed.” It was April 30, 1885. Vincent Van Gogh had just finished The Potato Eaters, a painting that marked a turning point in his life and in the way he painted. "You have to paint the peasants as if you were one of them, as if you had their same feelings and thoughts." Reading Adriano Prosperi's new book, I was reminded of these pages... Prosperi plunges us into a lost and remote world that we have completely repressed, but which concerns us. He helps us cast a glance at the "peasants we have been." And he does so by starting with some questions that may seem trivial in their simplicity. How people lived and what they ate in the Italian countryside in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, what were the living conditions of the workers of the land, that is, the men, women and children who were forced to work for much of the year ten or twelve hours a day. How they lived in filthy, dilapidated houses, full of damp, with walls made of scrap and shards, with roofs made of reeds or thatch, often consisting of only two rooms, one for the family and the other for the animals. ...

Gramsci is referred to several times in these pages. Certain passages from the Quaderni become a visible, concrete and firm point on which Prosperi makes his reflections rest: "That class was erased from the dominant culture partly because it lacked the means to make itself known to its time and posterity. Its members had neither the tools nor the opportunity to speak about themselves." The peasants of nineteenth-century Italy are the voiceless, the invisible, the submerged, the ‘dispersed vulgo’, precisely, which, however, takes on a far more tragic meaning than Manzoni's. ...

'Un volgo disperso' is a necessary book. Which opens with a glimpse of the countryside of today's Italy, where more and more frequently you meet among vineyards and olive groves, citrus orchards and tomato fields Romanians, Senegalese, Nigerians, and Pakistanis, and in which only a few traces of that remote world remain. And it closes, hanging on a word dense with meaning: remorse. "A remorse that cannot be erased."» Massimo Bucciantini, Domenica - Il Sole 24 Ore