LA SAGRA DEL PESCE E PATATE

by Glenys Casci 

In the small medieval hilltop town of Barga, set in a mountainous region of Tuscany, they celebrate a special food festival in August of every year.  It is La Sagra del Pesce e Patate, or the Festival of Fish and Chips.  How did it come to pass that an iconic British dish is celebrated in a stronghold of Italian regional cuisine?  This is not the ubiquitous seafood Fritto Misto of coastal Italy.  Barga is an inland town set in the Serchio valley north-east of Lucca, and therefore has never developed a seafood cuisine.  It has also been designated a ‘CittaSlow’ by the Slow Food movement, which makes it even more noteworthy that a festival celebrating a quintessentially British fast food dish is not only tolerated, but is growing in size every year.  The story of La Sagra del Pesce e Patate is one of poverty and emigration, toil and tragedy, discrimination and injustice.  It is also one of hopes and dreams, success and rewards, and pride in a triumphant return home.  

Barga is a medieval hill town built around the Duomo, a cathedral constructed in the tenth century.  The walled centre of town, Barga Vecchia features narrow twisted cobbled streets and grand palazzi.  Historically Barga had been a prosperous trade centre under the protection of the Florentine empire until the unification of Italy in 1861.  Financial support from Florence dried up after unification however, and the Barghigiani, or citizens of Barga, fell on hard times.  By the 1880’s, grinding hunger, poverty and social injustice offered no hope for the future.  These factors combined with the oppressive mezzadria system of sharecropping which favoured the landowner, resulted in a mass exodus of Barghigiani.  Barga was left desolate and almost uninhabited by the 1920’s as families dispersed all over the world.[i]  The main destinations of the emigrating Barghigiani were America and Scotland.  America had particular appeal as it was perceived to be a land where work and food were readily available, vital considerations considering the poverty in their home town.  Scotland however had no travel and work restrictions during the main emigration period of 1880 to 1920, so Scotland became the main destination of choice for emigrants from Barga.

The ancient Romans were the first people from Italy to land in Scotland in approx 79AD, and over the next 400 years they tried and failed to subdue the natives.  The popular tourist attraction Hadrians Wall stands as a monument to the fact that the Romans were not able to conquer the Scottish tribes, as they had done with the inhabitants of every other land they had chosen to invade and make a part of their great empire. This occupation ended with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.[ii]  The next major influx of Italians came in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  These Italians came from all over Italy, from Veneto and Lombardy in the North, to Calabria and Sicily in the South, but most however came from Barga and its surrounding countryside.[iii]  Scotland was a shock to the system of the new immigrants.  They traded the clean air and beautiful countryside of rural Italy for the dark soot blackened tenements of Glasgow and Edinburgh.  Industrial pollution was a fact of everyday life and a constant haze smog hung over the cities.

The language and customs of the new Italian immigrants were totally alien to the Scots, which made close contact with the locals impossible in the early years.  Few of the immigrants had a trade, most had rudimentary education and none spoke English.  As the communities established themselves the phenomenon of ‘chain migration’ started to appear, as they sent for their families and relatives to join them and work in the businesses they had set up.[iv]  These friends and relatives were seen as more trustworthy and were easier to work with, having the same cultural background and language.  They were not necessarily more honest, but were unlikely to risk the shame of being back to their village for stealing from their benefactor.  The Padrones, or benefactors would also send agents back to their towns and villages to recruit new workers for their enterprises.  The most successful and high profile of the padrones in Scotland were Carlo Giuliani from south of Rome, who laid the foundations of the ice cream café industry in Scotland, Primo Marchi of Barga, who owned a chain of fish and chip shops.[v]

Fish and chip shops and cafes specialising in ice cream were the main two businesses the new immigrants focused on.  A new worker in a café could expect to be funded into their own mobile ice cream barrow by their Padrone after a suitable length of service.  Thrift and increasing familiarity with the language of their new home usually resulted in the employee breaking away from their Padrone and opening their own café.  In the early part of the twentieth century, 99% of the ice cream cafes and fish and chip shops in Britain were started and operated by Italians, despite these shops being uncommon in their homeland.  One theory for this phenomenon is that the locals were simply not prepared to work the long and anti-social hours demanded in these trades.[vi]  The Scots were also unhappy about the impact of ice cream cafes upon the morals of the younger generation.  These cafes were subjected to a great deal of criticism many attempts were made to have them closed and banned from the cities.  Glasgow in particular was strictly Presbytarian and objected to Sunday trading.  The cafes were described as ‘dens of iniquity which corrupted the morals of the young’.[vii]  It was the fish and chip shops however that the majority of Barghigiani focused on, and it is here that La Sagra del Pesce e Patate of modern day Barga has its roots.

Fish and chips wrestle for supremacy with roast beef as the National Dish of Britain.   Fish and chip shops are a legacy of the Industrial Revolution that came to England in the 18^th century, a time when factory workers needed cheap, quick and nourishing food.  The development of the deep-sea trawler, improvements in refrigeration and the expansion of the railways meant that fresh fish could be shipped to inland cities and towns.  These factors, combined with the ready availability of potatoes throughout Britain, resulted in a popular hot and nourishing fast food that could be eaten in the shop or taken home to consume.[viii]  The earliest fish and chip shops had been opened in the East End of London in the 1860’s by Sephardim, the descendants of Iberian Jews’.[ix]  East End Jews, Italians, Chinese and Greek Cypriots were all important in the establishment of the fish and chip trade in Britain, and by the eve of the World War 2, there were estimated to be at least 30,000 of these operations in Britain.[x]

It cost very little to set up a fish and chip shop in Scotland in the first half of the twentieth century, particularly in the poorer districts.  Town planning was not a major issue, so all that was required was a counter to serve and a workspace behind.[xi]  Operating a fish and chip shop however, was harder, dirtier and smellier than running an ice cream café.  Handling hundredweight sacks of potatoes and large boxes of fish packed in ice required great physical stamina.  Washing potatoes, gutting fish and handling the coal that fired the cooking stoves were particularly grimy operations, which were capped off when the actual frying began, resulting in the pervasive odour of beef dripping. Extraction systems were not available in these early days, and the smell of the fish and chip shop would lie like a blanket over the immediate area.  Fish frying was classified as a noxious trade in the 1890’s, due to the noxious aroma emitted.  This classification was not lifted until the 1940’s.[xii]  Another disadvantage of operating a fish and chip shop was that they were usually situated in the rougher or poorer parts of the city.  The shop workers commonly suffered verbal and physical abuse from their customers, particularly after the pubs closed and inebriated patrons would go in search of the nearest ‘Chippie’.[xiii]

Fish and chip shops had an advantage over ice cream cafes however, as they could be set up with very little capital investment.  A counter, a coal range, some frying pans and enough cash for the first days ingredients of fish, potatoes, flour and dripping were all that was needed to start trading.  The frying was a hazardous business though, as there were no thermostats to control the heat in the large fryers.  These fryers needed constantly needed to be shifted over the stove top to maintain the required temperature.  Expertise in the operation resulted in the workers being designated ‘a good fryer’ by their peers.[xiv]  Another advantage of fish and chip shops was that after the food had been prepared in the morning, the workers could take the rest of the day off until 4 o’clock, when the teatime rush started to build.  The sheer hard work poured into these shops by their Italian owners, slowly resulted in an improvement in their affluence and status in the community.

Most of the fish and chip operations were family enterprises, which resulted in a stable workforce in the industry, and by the 1920’s there was usually a second Scottish born generation serving behind the counters.  This was fortunate as it coincided with the 1920 Aliens Order passed by the British Parliament, which resulted in the requirement to gain a work permits before entering Britain.  At the same time the Italian government passed severe anti-emmigration laws to stem the outflow of its citizens.[xv]  The flow of Italian immigrants into Scotland dried up after this legislation was passed, and there followed a time of increasing stability in the Scottish Italian community.  Their status improved and they became more accepted in the wider Scottish community.  Semi literate parents took advantage of the greater opportunities to advance the education of their children, and became less demanding that these children should work in the family business.  There followed two decades of prosperity for the Scottish Italian community, which abruptly ended in 1940 when world events overwhelmed them.

On 10 June 1940, disaster befell all of the Italian community in the UK.  Mussolini declared war on Britain, and the roughly 4,000 Italians in Scotland immediately became enemy aliens.  The 3,000 women and children were not perceived to be a threat, but the remaining 1,000 men of military age were.[xvi].  An order by Winston Churchill after a War Cabinet meeting to “collar the lot” resulted in instructions going out to all British police stations to arrest all male Italians between the ages of 16 & 70.  Within a few hours of Mussolinis declaration almost all male Italians in this age group found themselves in jail, which resulted in many injustices.  Men who had fought for Britain in WW1, Italian Americans visiting relatives in Britain and men banned from Italy because they opposed Facism were all interned.  Also caught up in the arrests were Italian fathers with sons in the British army.  Some of these sons found themselves standing guard over their fathers with rifles.[xvii]  On the same night of Mussolinis declaration, gangs of hooligans in Scotland vented their rage on Italians and their property.  Overnight the Italian community went from accepted members of the community to enemies. 

Within a month of Churchills order, the first of the Italian prisoners were loaded onto ships to be sent to internment camps in Canada.  The first of these prison ships to depart was the Arrandora Star, which was sent into submarine infested waters, armed with cannons and with no Red Cross markings.  The Arandora Star was torpedoed by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland on 2 July 1940.  A total of 446 men were lost to the Scottish Italian community.  There were very few families that were unaffected by the tragedy and this disaster was the biggest loss of life suffered by Italian civilians in a single incident outside their own homeland.[xviii]  In the Scottish Italian community, the Arrandora Star tragedy is a scar on the heart, just as Pearl Harbour is to Americans and Gallipoli is to Australians and New Zealanders.  The alliance of Mussolini with Hitler was a disaster for the Scottish Italian community, and even today its psychological impact can still be felt.[xix]  After the war, the gratitude of Scottish returned servicemen who had fought in Italy and been assisted by the population there, brought about a change of attitude towards the Italians in their midst.  The community as a whole started to treat Scottish Italians with particular respect, as if to make up for the wrongs suffered by them during the war years.[xx] 

Memories of harsh treatment and personal heartbreak receded as lives were resumed, and the decades that have passed since WW2 have seen many changes in the Scottish Italian community.  Marriage between Scots and Italians is no longer frowned upon, so the community is more integrated.  The ‘Tallies’ as they are called, are no longer only associated with fish and chips and ice cream cafes.  Many of these businesses have extended their menus, or evolved into restaurants and tratorrias.  Some of the added menu items such as battered and deep fried Pizzas, Mars Bars and Haggis have not been met with acclaim by health professionals.[xxi]   The Haggis Ravioli recently featured on the menu of a high profile restaurant may not be a lasting contribution to the gastronomy of Scotland, but it is certainly a unique one.  Another unique contribution has come in the form of a recently approved Italian tartan, featuring the green, red and white of the Italian flag, against the blue worn by the Italian football team.[xxii]  Prominent Scottish Italians are also celebrated, and documentaries have been produced detailing the Italian experience during WW2.  A movie called American Cousins was released in 2004, in which the plot revolves around two members of the American Mafia on the run, who go to Glasgow to hide out in the Glasgow fish and chip shop of their cousin.

The success of the Barghigiani community in Scotland has not resulted in the breaking of ties to their families in Barga.  “For most of the original immigrants, the most important thing was to achieve some kind of economic independence and be able to go back to Barga as soon as possible.  The ownership of a small shop could in turn lead to the ownership of a small piece of land in one of the villages around Barga”.[xxiii]  This ambition was achieved by many of the original immigrants and their descendants, and now Barga is considered to be an outpost of Scotland.  A sign on the road approaching the town reads “Barga.  The most Scottish place in Italy”.  The population has now reached over 11,000, and a large percentage of the locals speak English, albeit with a Scottish accent.  Barga itself has changed also as the grinding poverty no longer exists.  Wealthy Scottish Italians have returned to build magnificent villas, and the town has become a highly desirable holiday destination for the wider European community.  Many of the Barghigiani diaspora all over the world regularly return to the birthplace of their ancestors.  It is a tradition to announce your arrival at the office of the local newspaper, the Giornale di Barga, Visitors names are printed in the next edition of the newspaper, along with a brief history of their family connection to Barga.  Most of the returnees visit during the months of July and August, when there is a wide range of cultural events offered.

One of the most popular of these events is the two week Sagra del Pesce e Patate, held every year in early August.  This celebration also coincides with the annual Scottish week, resulting in a plethora of tartan kilts, bagpipes and the tantalising aroma of fish and chips.  The Pesce e Patate festival was started in 1982, as a celebration of emigration and homecoming.  It was created as a fundraiser for the Sporting Association of Barga, and is held at the local football club.  About 500 people per day over the two week period participate in the Sagra.  Haddock and whiting were flown in from Scotland when the Sagra was first created, but now merluza, or cod from the Mediterranean is most often used.  One and a half tons of fish and over one ton of chips are fried in vats over a fire with no thermostat – just like the old days in Scotland.  Naturally there are always plenty of people who understand the fryers art available to cook the product.  Plastic plates and cutlery are the order of the day, and each meal is accompanied by sachets of ketchup, a wedge of lemon and slices of bread.  There is also a very un-Scottish tomato salad available for those who want some acid to cut through the fat, and naturally all this of course is washed down with local wine.[xxiv]

La Sagra del Pesce e Patate offers more than just an opportunity to indulge in a favourite dish.  ‘All food carries meaning, whether through symbolic association or through the way in which it is used to deliver a message’.[xxv]  A simple plate of fish and chips offers the Barghigiani an opportunity to reflect on their heritage and to remember the sacrifices of previous generations.  It has a symbolic association with the Scottish Italian community that is unlikely to fade over the years, or be forgotten by future generations.  To participate in the Sagra is to show respect for the hard work, discrimination and injustice suffered by the Scottish Italian community.  Eminent French gastronomer Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin once wrote “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are”.[xxvi]  When the Barghigiani hold their annual festival of fish and chips they are a united community, proud of both their ancestors and their unique heritage.