The peasant civilization in the Marche Region

The history of the “Festa del Covo” has distant origins which date back to the 1930s, when the economy, customs and traditions were all entirely of peasant and popular derivation. Marche was the region in Italy where sharecropping was most widely practiced. The long populating process of the countryside lasted hundreds of years and ended in the mid-1960s with the escape from the rural areas and the consequent increase in urban population. The agricultural landscape of the region is not a gift or a natural fact, but rather the result of centuries of clever and cautious human intervention.

The Marche region, in fact, has a great rural history, which in time has become a real civilization: the peasant civilization of the Marche region.

This ancient agricultural civilization was essentially based on the relationship established through the institution of sharecropping, that is, a pact, an agricultural contract by which a landowner, the grantor, and a farmer, the sharecropper, made an agreement for the cultivation of a piece of land with the aim to equally share its produce, profits and expenses. The contractual conditions of sharecropping, which, in actual fact, when it came to sharing produce, profits and expenses, started to become less and less fair, were very hard for sharecroppers.

Farmers and their families led a simple life of struggle and sacrifice in which everything revolved around the work in the fields marked by the rhythm of the seasons, particularly that linked with wheat harvest. At the time, harvesting and threshing wheat represented the most important moment of the whole agricultural year, a real ritual lived by the entire community with wholehearted participation. It was those harvests, in fact, that ensured the livelihood of the farmers and their whole family.

People used to gather together in the fields and, bent over in the scorching sun from sunrise to sunset, they would work hard but cheerfully, exchanging jokes or singing merrily. The uniformity of their hard work would be broken by the feasts they used to wait for with excitement and fervent preparations as the opportunity to wear their good clothes and participate in the events that were usually organized by the parish priest.

Campocavallo, its territory and its people, too, were among the anonymous and silent protagonists of this peasant life in the Marche region of the twentieth century. A civilization which has now completely disappeared and the memory of which has often been lost, where people and animals, gestures and customs used to be the expression of a religiousness that had a choral and collective dimension which is still today attested by the “Festa del Covo” and the authentic and generous people that revolve around this feast and make Campocavallo, a small town in the Osimo area, such an important place of faith and memory.