On the occasion of the WORKS FESTIVAL (April 30 - May 10, 2026), "The Art of Survival of Our Grandparents, Rebel Farmers".
With Livio Vanzetto Historian (Istresco)
The farmers: heterodirected, subordinated, subdued; “an object class” (Bourdieu), in short. This is how workers of the land have been described by most contemporary historians. And yet no. As in many other parts of the world, even in deep Veneto, over the centuries, poor farmers have managed to invent a refined art of survival entirely on their own that allowed them to curb the overwhelming power of the elites, prompting them to moderate exploitation: an effective action of conditioning, which we could call “pedagogy of revolt,” practiced from the bottom up.
The meeting features Livio Vanzetto, historian, co-founder and first director of Istresco, author of the book “Village Revolts. A New History for the Farmers of Deep Veneto” (Cierre Edizioni). Through his research, Vanzetto distances himself from that elitist and elite historiography that continues to propose partial and distorting representations of Italians' past, where the role of popular classes appears completely marginal and submissive.
info: www.worksfestival.it
