From mondine to machines: history of the farmstead where 'Riso Amaro' was filmed
On the estate that once belonged to the Agnellis and Ligresti families, female labour has been replaced by weedkillers. And today it is threatened by climate change
When the master of neorealism Giuseppe De Santis shot 'Bitter Rice', Fulvio Bertoldo was not even born. It was 1948, and the worldly Silvana Mangano was inciting her companions to social struggle among the Vercelli rice fields. Almost eighty years later, the Cascina Veneria in Lignana, which was the set of the film, is still in place. Only now, it is Fulvio Bertoldo himself who harvests the rice: 'We bought the estate about fifteen years ago,' he says, 'me, my father Ermenegildo and his brother, my uncle Antonio.
With its 750 hectares, Veneria is the largest rice farm in Europe and its history is long, very long. It began in the 12th century, when it was a hunting outpost included in the landed estate of the abbey of Santa Maria di Lucedio, then over the decades it passed to the Savoys. At the time of 'Riso Amaro' it belonged to the Agnelli family: 'Riccardo Gualino of Lux, the film's production company, was a personal friend of the Avvocato,' says Marco Grossi, who teaches History of Cinema at the Academy of Fine Arts in Frosinone and is the secretary of the Giuseppe De Santis Association, dedicated to the director's works. Thus, it is the standard bearer of Italian capitalism who lends his estate to the most communist of directors.
On the set of the film
.And Gianni Agnelli often went to the set. And so did Robert Capa, who eventually published a report in 'Life' on Italian rice weeders that went down in the history of photography. As did Renato Guttuso, who designed the film's brochure. And so did Cesere Pavese, who fell in love - and unrequitedly - with the sister of the film's co-star, the American actress Doris Dowling. Constance - the sister, in fact - was at the Veneria because she had a small part in the film, as a mere extra: "Death will come and it will have your eyes" are apparently verses that Pavese wrote thinking of her.
After the Agnellis, the Lignana estate passes to the Ligresti, and it is from Fondiaria Sai that the Bertoldo family buys the farmstead and land: 'We were in the newspapers at the time for that acquisition,' Fulvio recounts, 'a company of historical and territorial importance ended up in the hands of a little-known family. The Bertoldo family are self-made people; Fulvio's grandfather left from the deepest part of Veneto, in the province of Vicenza, in the 1950s with a wife, eight children and no money in his pocket. He started by renting a piece of land and finished by putting together 2,000 hectares of his own land and 3,000 head of cattle.
The work of the Mondine
.When he looks at 'Riso Amaro', Fulvio Bertoldo recognises some glimpses of his Veneria: 'Part of the farmstead is still as you see it in the film,' he says, 'but the landscape around it has changed profoundly. Above all, work in the rice fields has changed: 'Since I've been making rice, I've never seen a mondina,' he admits. In the post-war period, on the other hand, everything was exactly as De Santis recounts: the workers and peasant women from Veneto and Emilia would come to the Vercellese for forty days to plant rice and pull up weeds, their bare feet in the water and their trousers rolled up above the knee. A kilo of rice was a day's pay. Talking was forbidden, so they sang, and each verse was a message to their companions. Silvana Mangano, in the role of Francesca, led the protest against the "mondine" who were hired illegally, because then, as now, in the Italian fields, caporalato was at home. De Santis, after all, was a true neo-realist and had done his homework in order to tell his story: 'He had asked a friend of his, the editor-in-chief of the Turin newspaper L'Unità, for help,' says Marco Grosso, 'who had put a young journalist from the Culture editorial office at his disposal for the inspections in the Vercelli rice fields: charming, graduated, ex-partisan, former Turin football player, theatre actor in his spare time. That journalist's name was Raf Vallone: it was the part of the sergeant he got in 'Riso Amaro' that made him change his profession for good and launched him into the star system.
