Page 204 - Mediterranea-ricerche storiche, n. 48, aprile 2020flip

204 Beatrice Zucca Micheletto

suffering from disease could also be hospitalized, if necessary (while
the rest of the family received external aid), but their stay in the
institution was temporary. Relief could be granted for many years and
varied according to necessity and the family configuration. In this
sense, a new birth in the family, illness or the death, emigration or
imprisonment of one of the parents could determine supplementary
relief, while, on the other hand, the return of a parent in the
household, or the children’s access to the labour market (starting at
14 years of age) entailed a reduction or cancellation of relief.
According to Sandra Cavallo, in the eighteenth century the
traditional policy of poor relief, until then based on the idea of
assistance, shifted toward a new ideology that emphasized the
importance of work for poor people, with the purpose ‘to attack the
roots of the material and moral conditions that created the poverty,
and not merely to mitigate some of poverty’s consequences’ . This
12
shift concerned the majority of the charity institutions, the former -
the Albergo di Virtù, the Ospedale di Carità – and other new
institutions established during the second half of the eighteenth
century. The Casa di Correzione (1757), the Ritiro del Martinetto (1776),
and the Ritiro degli Oziosi e Vagabondi (1786) were set up with the aim
of repressing unruly and idle youths; the already cited Casa delle
Forzate (1750), the Ritiro di San Gio di Dio (1755) were workhouses for
poor girls and the Istituto delle Figlie dei Militari (1774) helped the
daughters of the military. Especially these new institutions ‘directed
their energies towards young people and able-bodied adults’, with the
aim ‘to counter the devastating effects of unemployment and
proletarisation which was affecting both urban and rural workers in
the last decades of the eighteenth century’ . In this perspective, old
13
and new Piedmontese charity institutions explicitly started to promote
their own economic activities, to provide work for their inmates and
training for young people. These activities developed within a specific
ideological context in which work had a crucial place. The welfare
policy set up by the duke was imbued with a mixture of paternalistic
and coercive attitudes: the inmates’ work was aimed to establish order
and discipline, based on the premise that idleness endangered society
and that the deserving poor should be able to earn their livelihood by
working. On the one hand, according to a well-known modern-age
cultural model, the ‘deserving poor’ were people who worked to sustain
themselves and their family but who fell into poverty or worse, to
mendicancy and vagrancy, because of the absence of opportunities.

12 S. Cavallo, Charity and power cit., p. 227.
13 Ead., Charity and power cit., p. 226.

Mediterranea - ricerche storiche - Anno XVII - Aprile 2020
ISSN 1824-3010 (stampa) ISSN 1828-230X (online)