Putignano from the early 1900s, a territory in revolt

Flour as the subject of clashes and riots. It was 1902 when, due to the duties on flour which had become heavy and unsustainable for the people, a revolt broke out in Putignano whose purpose was the elimination of exploitation and the abolition of the customs belt. In the early hours of May 14, the betting halls and barracks were burned and subsequently groups of rioters found themselves protesting under the town hall. Consequence of the riot was the death of Margherita Pusteria, a woman present during the riots and several injured.



The popular revolt was provoked by the conditions of extreme misery and exploitation in which the poor population, putignanese and not, poured into it in the last decades of the 19th century. It was made up of land workers, mostly peasants, "peasant" fathers, grandfathers and great-grandparents. .



At the trial that followed, the same judges of the Court of Bari, who certainly did not side with the Apulian laborers, wrote verbatim the reasons for the revolt "of squalid desolating poverty and pauperism ... In which today the class of dispossessed of Putignano, because of the "enormous inefficient imbalance between work and wages". to their indignation and anger against the small class of big landowners and rich bourgeois who got fat with the hard work and misery of the land workers. The protest was also directed against the tariff, an inequitable and exorbitant indirect taxation system that weighed especially on poor popular consumption.

Only for food was there a duty on the importation of wheat, the food base of the popular classes, to keep the price of the local product high; there was the duty on food products that came from the countryside to the city for trade or for family self-consumption and also the scarce food that many peasant families were able to produce for their own livelihoods had to pay the duty.

This was also the case, for example, for the fruit of "gleaning", when the women and children of the poorest families, after having asked the owners for permission, gathered, under the scorching sun, the few ears of wheat or barley that it had fallen to the ground and abandoned during the harvest leaving a part of the poor harvest to the landowner at the end of the work. Then, when the wheat was used to go to the mill to transform it into flour, the duty on the land, the hunger tax, had to be paid.

A few months after the aforementioned dramatic events, during the City Council of December 27 with the agenda "Abolition of the consumer duty and abolition of the duty belt", the Marquis Giovanni Romanazzi Carducci, declaring himself in favor of the abolition, had to admit that duty "concerns only the poor". He certainly could not add that this was done in order to avoid imposing a fair taxation on landed property and on the goods and incomes of the wealthy classes, even if he implicitly admitted it "accepting on my behalf any tax that could be imposed only on catkins." abolished towards the end of the year 1902. Except to restore it at the first opportunity, so much so that it remained in force until the years following the second postwar period.

Interesting is the point of view on the life situation in which those concerned, expressed a few years earlier, by an impartial observer, the French father Alessandro Dumas: "While the gentleman feeds his dogs white bread, people live on roots and herbs, with the addition of an inefficient amount of black bread.The lord shelters his horses in well-paved stables and sheltered from the wind and rain.His peasants live in damp and unhealthy hovels, open to all winds , without windows, without roof.The whole family sleeps on a single straw mat, in the same room with the mule, the pig and the chickens.