«La boje, la boje e de boto la va de fora»: it's boiling, it's boiling, and any moment now it will boil over. It is a Venetan saying about a pot on the fire. In 1884 it became the cry of thousands of farmhands in the Polesine, and then around Mantua: the name of one of the first great peasant movements of unified Italy.
The pot had been on the fire for some time. In September 1882 the Adige burst its banks and flooded almost half the province. In the same years the international collapse of wheat prices plunged agriculture into crisis, and landowners responded by cutting wages. Pellagra, the disease of hunger, malaria and illiteracy were widespread in the countryside.
In June 1884, at the height of the harvest, the province of Rovigo was swept by strikes involving thousands of workers. At Polesella the reapers downed tools for thirty days. The authorities sent in the carabinieri, and soldiers to replace the workers in the fields. The protest spread to the Mantua area, where it was organised by Eugenio Sartori's mutual aid society and the association led by Francesco Siliprandi.
The response came on the night of 26-27 March 1885: more than a hundred and fifty arrests among peasants and leaders. Twenty-two defendants were brought before the Corte d'Assise in Venice, charged with conspiring against the security of the State. The trial, which began in February 1886, was followed throughout Italy: the defence lawyers included Enrico Ferri and Ettore Sacchi, and Andrea Costa reported on it for Il Messaggero. On 27 March 1886 the verdict came: all acquitted.
The farmhands' conditions, however, changed little. For many the only way out was to leave: between 1887 and 1900 some 63,000 people emigrated from the Polesine, many to Brazil. The cry of the boje lived on as a symbol, taken up in the following years by socialist and Catholic leagues. A few months after the arrests, on 22 May 1885, Giacomo Matteotti was born in Fratta Polesine: the virtual museum of his Casa Museo today devotes a room to that season.
