Piero Camporesi, The Land of Hunger, Polity Press, 1996. Originally published in Italian as Il Paese della fame, 1978.
The Land of Hunger is the English translation of Piero Camporesi’s book Il paese della fame (1978). The late Camporesi (1926-1997) was an Italian historian, gastronomic anthropologist and literary scholar. In the Land of Hunger, Camporesi explores the two worlds of feast and famine in early modern Europe showing how the starvation of the pre-industrial underclasses influenced popular culture in early-modern Italy. Hunger forced a large percentage of the population to live as vagabonds, thieves, buskers, and brigands. In the competitive marketplace of hunger the most successful beggars were those who had the most extreme stratagems for winning the sympathy of the rich. At the same time, the pervasiveness of hunger bred an exaggerated respect for greed and gluttony.
The Land of Hunger brings together a mosaic of images from Italian folklore: phantasmagoric processions of giants, pigs, vagabonds, down-trodden rogues, charlatans and beggars in rags. He reconstructs a world inhabited by the strange forces of peasant culture, and describes the various rituals — carnivals, festivities, competitions and funerals – in which food played a central role. Camporesi’s description alternates between the lives of the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’. He moves from the starving underworld of ‘criminalized poverty’, where people were forced to develop the art of living at the expense of others simply in order to survive, to the gastronomic culture of the well-fed, with their excessive eating habits, oily foods and colourful table manners. (Blurb taken from Google books review, The Land of Hunger )