Society and Professions in Italy: 1860-1914.

Edited by Maria Malatesta (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. viii plus 340pp. $59.95).

The summary and the positive evaluation of this book published in the American Historical Review (February, 1997) are eminently sensible and in no need of further confirmation by me. Since Cambridge set the book's price high enough to discourage individual purchases, would-be readers might take that review to their library's acquisitions office if such persuasion is necessary. The nine essays concerning lawyers, doctors, engineers, and notaries are filled with important details and occasionally offer provocative generalizations, although not much here made me rush to revise my undergraduate lecture notes. I've been telling students for years that there are too many lawyers in Italy, especially in the South, and that politics means clientele networks; these truisms need not be abandoned. Nevertheless, at the more careful level of a scholarly footnote or an exact comparison between Milan and Naples or between Italy and Germany at equal stages in their political unification, these essays should be at hand.

In this review I want to unravel a few little items in ways I trust will illuminate some strengths and weaknesses of the collection as a whole. Luigi Musella's essay on "Professionals in Politics" tells us (pp. 318-19) that "in northern Italy and also in Naples marriages frequently took place between members of the liberal professions and women from the propertied class. In Florence, it was usually the son of the property-owner who married the daughter of the professional." Wow! There's no footnote to document these findings, nor any statistical definition of "frequently," nor any chronological anchor, nor any analysis beyond the safe assertion that "matrimonial strategy was therefore of considerable importance." If you have a graduate student in search of a thesis topic, here it is just waiting for a diligent comber of Italian marriage registers, although I am baffled about why the Florentine pattern inverts the norm and perplexed about what dowries the daughters of professionals brought to their marriages with landowners.

Alberto Banti's essay on "Markets, Incomes, Estates and Identities" is filled with interesting numbers, including a few that are amazing. We learn on p. 242 that 81 percent of all professionals who died in Naples in the 1870's "were in dire economic straits" and bequeathed either nothing at all or else less in land, home, and possessions than the 10,000 lire watershed separating affluence from poverty. Even figures for indigent lawyers, doctors, engineers, and notaries in Milan (one-third) and Piacenza (nearly one-half) call for explanation. How could so many of them have earned so little or else spent everything on perishables and to support themselves in retirement ? From several essays in this collection we learn that the university degrees requisite for their professional titles had been expensive, so nearly all of them had come from well-to-do families. Such downward mobility is surprising in a rapidly industrializing nation. Then again, Italy was one nation in name only. There were 12 lawyers per 10,000 people in the South but only 5 in the North.

Elsewhere (p. 229) Banti notes that while Italy led the way in producing lawyers, its ratio of doctors to total population (6.8/10,000) at the turn-of-the-century was about the same as for England (6.7/10,000), both being considerably higher than in France (5.2/10,000) and Germany (4.7/10,000). Upon further reflection, however, the author introduces per-capita wealth as a factor. Since Italians enjoyed only one-third (or less) of the per capita wealth of British, French, and German people, their client-spending-power was hopelessly inadequate to support their professional classes. Wow, again! Maybe honest poor people are just as well off with fewer lawyers but where does this supply/demand model take us on medical care? The logic says that Italy's problem was not too many doctors but too few sick people who could afford to call in a physician.

Paolo Frascani's "Physicians in Liberal Italy" complicates matters in wonderful ways, inviting more dissertations from those with a penchant for cultural analysis. Old habits lingered on as senior physicians advised aspiring young colleagues to expect no payments for their services. Like the minister to the soul who accepts donations but sets no fees, the good doctor heals the body as a calling for which the reward may be a chicken, a gold watch, a thank you, or nothing at all. The Italian medical profession counted nearly as many municipal health officers as private practitioners, far more than anywhere else in Europe; women served in substantially greater numbers than in other professions; both men and women came from the middle and lower-middle classes, more burgher than patrician; they competed for patients with only marginal success against charlatans, psychics, magicians, priests, and midwives; their training at the university, mostly listening to abstract disquisitions mumbled in Latin, ill-prepared them to treat endemic malaria, typhoid, pellagra, and epidemic cholera; many of them were socialists. Along with schoolteachers and priests, they were the peoples' friends and caretakers. In the early twentieth century, however, things changed as disillusioned doctors became positivist, professional, and fascist.

Finally, a word on notaries. The main story in Marco Santoro's essay on "Notaries, the State and the Market Principle" tells how notaries were reduced in the early years of Unification to mere "stamp-lickers," only to be rescued by the state with a reform package in 1913 that imposed elitist educational requirements for entry, set higher fees, required more use of their services, restricted competition from municipal officers, and allowed absenteeism. But the tidbit I like best is this one. Men (women being barred until 1928) passed the entry exam in their youth and then practiced a more lucrative profession for years; upon becoming candidates for official notarial positions in their declining years they claimed the "exam seniority" points allowed by law to win appointment over younger and probably more qualified applicants; some, however, offered instead to sell withdrawal of their candidacy to the highest bidder among the remaining aspirants. How Italian.

This is a book that repays the effort of close reading.

Rudolph M. Bell Rutgers University