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Fumo
Italy's Love Affair with the Cigarette
By Carl Ipsen STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9839-6
CHAPTER 1
Toscano
Smoking in Italy before World War I
MOST OF THE STATES that made up the Italian peninsula unified, more or less willingly, in 1860–1861 under King Victor Emanuel II. Venice, an Austrian territory since 1796, was added in 1866 and Rome, together with the remains of the Papal State, in 1870. One of the first acts of the new kingdom was to establish a tobacco monopoly, and tobacco would provide an important source of income to the often cash-strapped Italian state. Like much else about the Italian economy, that income was fairly stagnant for the first decades after unification: tobacco production, and so we can infer consumption, was stable throughout the nineteenth century and well below 1 kilogram per person per year. The typical smoker was urban, male, and reasonably well off. It was only in the decade or so after 1900 that consumption increased and smoking became more frequent among the working classes and even some women. That development is consistent with Italian economic development: flat throughout the first forty years of unification followed by growth in the era of industrial development after 1900, an era dominated politically by Giovanni Giolitti who served as prime minister for much of the period from 1903 to 1914. The popularization of smoking, moreover, was made possible by development of the relatively inexpensive cigarette in the 1890s. That tobacco inserted itself into Italy's developing consumer culture can be traced in advertising, literature, and film. We can even detect concern about the negative health effects of smoking in this early period.
The Monopolio
Taxation of tobacco sales has constituted an important source of state revenue throughout the world and for several centuries. In Italy, as in a number of other countries, not only the sale of tobacco but also its production and distribution were until recent decades controlled by a state monopoly, the Monopolio dello Stato. Created in 1861 and bringing together similar initiatives that had existed in the various preunification states, it controlled not only tobacco but also salt and quinine. When Rome became the nation's capital in 1870, the recently constructed and aptly named Palazzo del Monopolio dei Tabacchi that presided over Piazza Mastai (in Trastevere, the traditionally working-class neighborhood south of the Vatican) became the headquarters of the Italian Monopolio, as it had been for the papal tobacco monopoly before it. From that seat and for over a century the Monopolio, under the authority of the Ministry of Finance, regulated tobacco cultivation, ran the factories that produced all Italian tobacco products, and controlled the distribution and sale of both domestic and imported tobacco through licensed tobacconists.
Initially the Monopolio produced snuff, pipe tobacco, and cigars, and those products dominated the Italian market for its first half-century. Reportedly cigarettes were also available in Italy, possibly as early as the 1860s, though these were all imported and accounted for a tiny percentage of tobacco sales. Starting in the 1890s, one could also get Italian cigarettes made with imported tobacco, including the brand Macedonia (tobacco from the Balkans was especially prized). They signaled the start of Italy's "cigarette century."
The Monopolio employed about 15,000 workers at the time of unification (1860s), a figure that increased to over 25,000 by the 1950s before beginning an inexorable decline. Most of these workers were women who made cigars. For while cigarette production was mechanized in the nineteenth century, cigars continued to be made exclusively by hand until after World War II. Notable among these cigars was the Toscano. Developed predictably in Tuscany, the Toscano was made with specially fermented tobacco and gained a certain international fame. A skilled sigaraia (female cigar worker) could roll a thousand Toscani in an eight-hour shift. Following the rise of the cigarette, the Toscano took on specific social and eventually political connotations, and it is still produced today.
Cigarettes still accounted for only 0.03 percent of Italian domestic tobacco production in 1900, though that changed dramatically in the decade or so around World War I: annual cigarette consumption in Italy grew to over 4.6 billion by 1913 (just over 100 cigarettes per person per year) and nearly quadrupled between then and 1928 (to 17.6 billion). In the United States, the Great War was the catalyst that turned the cigarette into an item of mass consumption (106 billion in 1928 or six times Italian consumption for a population three times as large); in Italy too, the cigarette became the leading tobacco product at that time, if still confined to a relatively elite clientele.
The number of Monopolio workers cited does not include the tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of Italians, many of them also women, who were engaged in cultivating tobacco. Italy has long been an important grower of tobacco and is still today Europe's largest producer of it and a major exporter. When tobacco ruled in Puglia, Italy's heel and once upon a time the country's most important tobacco region, close to half the population worked in some phase of the process.
Thanks to the fiscal importance of tobacco, statistics on cultivation and manufacture are available dating back to 1871; collected by the Monopolio, these figures were published in the statistical yearbooks of the National Statistics Institute (ISTAT after 1926). Figure 1.1 compares Italian tobacco cultivation and manufacture between 1871 and 1940 (during World War II, the statistics were unavailable or incomplete and Italian economic activity was severely disrupted).
The graph compares kilograms grown to kilograms manufactured of cigarettes, cigars, and other tobacco products, and while it is not necessarily the case that 1 kilogram of leaf translates into 1 kilogram of cigarettes or cigars, the whole leaf is used and tobacco is a relatively valuable agricultural product. So there is reason to believe that waste was minimal, allowing us to compare the two curves. The graph suggests that in the late nineteenth century, Italy depended heavily on tobacco imports (as indeed it did). After World War I, Italian production of tobacco shot up so that Italian growers produced more than enough leaf for the Monopolio's needs, and tobacco became an important domestic crop.
Statistics from the Monopolio also tell us something about the sorts of tobacco products it manufactured — and so the sorts Italians consumed. Those statistics show that cigarettes accounted for just under 50 percent of domestic tobacco production by the late 1920s (up from almost zero in 1900), so World War I indeed marked in Italy, as elsewhere, the triumph of the relatively new cigarette. That figure rose to nearly 70 percent by 1940, and after World War II, cigarettes continued their climb: from 80 percent of all production in the 1950s to 90 percent in the 1960s to nearly 100 percent by the 1990s.
Just as imported tobacco came to constitute a small percentage of the tobacco used for Italian cigarettes — cigarette consumption increased more or less in tandem with Italian tobacco cultivation — so imported cigarettes captured only a small percentage of the Italian market until the late twentieth century. As recently as the 1950s, for example, imports accounted for less than 1 percent of legal tobacco sales (though smuggling alters that picture some). Nonetheless, imported cigarettes always played an important role in the Italian smoking imagination: they were generally more expensive and appealed to strains of Anglophilia, fascination with America, and even Orientalism. But only in recent decades have foreign cigarettes come to dominate the Italian scene in terms of market share.
Zeno
A book on Italian smoking must inevitably consider Italo Svevo's masterpiece, La coscienza di Zeno (Zeno's conscience or The confessions of Zeno), fairly early on. Klein, whose focus is more French than Italian, devotes a whole chapter to the work. La coscienza di Zeno is an intensely ironic and psychological novel — often described as the first of its genre — written as the autobiography of Zeno Cosini, a wealthy businessman of Trieste, though really an absentee businessman as most of the time he leaves the running of the family firm to others, the better to cope with his obsessions. Published in 1923, the novel takes place in Trieste in the decades prior to World War I. We can imagine that Zeno is about the same age as Svevo, who was born in 1861.
One of Zeno's obsessions is smoking, and indeed the novel's first chapter, il fumo (smoking), is devoted to that topic. Zeno's smoking experience is in some ways typical. He begins as a boy foraging his father's partially smoked cigars and stealing money from home to buy packs of cigarettes (we can imagine in the 1870s or 1880s, perhaps before the introduction of machine rolling). He starts smoking not because he likes it — no new smoker ever does — but because the fact of its being forbidden sparks his desire (perhaps a lesson to present-day prohibitionists). Similarly, when he is forbidden by his doctor to smoke during an illness, he continues out of defiance even though it causes him great pain.
The book is written, at the advice of his psychoanalyst, in the hopes of ameliorating Zeno's psychological illness (always left imprecise). Zeno wonders if quitting smoking might cure his illness and allow him to become the man he dreams he might otherwise be — good and strong — but also considers that he loves smoking precisely because he can blame his illness on the practice, which is to say more or less that smoking is the illness. He tries repeatedly to quit smoking, including by means of an electric treatment (seventy sessions!) and by entering a private clinic (whence he promptly escapes). Every time Zeno resolves to quit smoking, he finds he has to revolt against the tyranny of that proposition, which seems to deprive him of his freedom (and also in the latter case, because Zeno imagines that his doctor is making love to Augusta, Zeno's wife, while Zeno is locked up in the doctor's clinic).
As Svevo shows us, smoking addiction is about much more than the physical dependence on nicotine and can involve, for Zeno anyway, a complex interplay of psychological factors. La coscienza di Zeno also provides insight into the economics of early twentieth-century smoking. As we would expect, Zeno is a representative of the male elite; most smokers at the time were. We never learn exactly how much he smokes, but he does once refer to innumerable cigarettes. In the clinic, he quickly smokes eleven cheap Hungarian cigarettes before escaping and buying some better-quality ones. On that occasion, by the way, he resolves to quit the next day, as he certainly could not end his smoking career with poor-quality cigarettes. Cigarettes may not have been terribly expensive in the decades around 1900, but the sort of consumption Zeno describes was certainly beyond working-class Italians at the time, most of whom still worked in agriculture. One can easily imagine sixty, eighty or one hundred cigarettes per day at a minimum of 1 cent each, though Zeno's better-quality ones likely cost ten times that; so we might estimate 5 lire per day or even twice that, well in excess of average wages at the time.
Ironically, Zeno, arguably Italy's most famous smoker, was in some sense not an Italian at all, for it was not until after World War I (and so after the action of the novel) that Svevo's city of Trieste was annexed to the Kingdom of Italy. Prior to 1918, Trieste was the principal Adriatic port of Austria- Hungary, and Zeno would have been spending crowns, not lire, for his cigarettes. Italo Svevo (the Italo Swabian), moreover, is the Italianized pseudonym of Hector Schmitz, son of a German Jewish father and an Italian mother. Finally, the psychological nature of the work ties it more to Vienna than to Milan or Rome, and Zeno may resemble the dandies of Paris and Vienna described by Klein more than smokers in other parts of the Italian peninsula, few of whom preferred cigarettes at the time.
Be that as it may, Svevo did choose to write in Italian, and so positioned his work in the Italian cultural sphere, though one that was notoriously slow to embrace it. And with time, Zeno's smoking obsession would take on iconic status in Italy. Indeed smoking may be the one thing that many Italians know or remember about the novel. Interesting to note, then, justly famous as Zeno's smoking is, the smoking chapter occupies only about 6 percent of the text, and smoking is almost completely absent from the rest of the novel. Smoking was the first of Zeno's obsessions, encountered at a young age, but it was certainly not his last or only one.
Cigars and Cigarettes
In the thirty years leading up to World War I, and more or less the chronological setting of La coscienza di Zeno, the tobacco situation in Italy showed signs of both change and stability. Production of tobacco products by the Monopolio had increased by about 50 percent (to a bit under 30 million kilograms), but over 70 percent of that tobacco continued to be imported, mostly from the United States. Consumption of loose tobacco for pipes or hand-rolled cigarettes was about constant at 40 percent, and cigars held steady at a bit over 30 percent, again by weight. Cigarettes instead had grown from zero in the 1880s to 17 percent in 1916 as consumption of snuff declined by a similar amount and was on its way to insignificance. In addition, acreage devoted to tobacco had increased dramatically in the years before and during the war, from 5,000 hectares in 1904 to 13,000 in 1918, the first step in Italy's move to self-sufficiency in tobacco.
Zeno's preference for cigarettes, as opposed to the cigars that most Italian men of his class doubtless smoked, was not a casual one. Cigarettes were modern, if mildly effeminate, and doubtless appealed to forward-thinking men (and women) — men who like Zeno and Svevo followed the intellectual and cultural trends of the day (e.g., psychoanalysis). These were still the years dominated by the Toscani, Napolitani, Cavour, and other cigars, products that required more patience and dedication, appropriate to an after-lunch smoke in the garden. The cigarette, a briefer smoke, better accompanied movement and the accelerating pace of modern urban life. As a cultural symbol, it is thus more revealing of contemporary thinking.
We get a broader understanding of Italian smoking, if an unfailingly optimistic one, from the journal Il Tabacco (see figure 1.2). Destined to enjoy a long life, this monthly Italian trade journal came into existence in February 1897 (and continued publication until 1973). Although not formally tied to the Monopolio, Il Tabacco promoted Italian policies, products, cultivation, exports, and so on. By its second issue, it already heralded the advent of the cigarette century in Italy, announcing that thanks to "steady and continual growth, the cigarette today occupies, if not the first place, one of the first places in tobacco consumption in our country, just as it does in all of the civilized world." The journal struck a similar note again a couple of years later in relation to the annual tobacco report: "The report also notes an increase in the consumption of cigarettes ... and finds the explanation in that aura of modernity that attaches itself to their use; not only in Italy but in all the states of Europe cigarettes have come in for special favor, and not only among the well-to-do but also the lower classes, including workers and even peasants, many of whom have begun to smoke them." Italy in the waning years of the nineteenth century was taking its place among the other countries of the "civilized world." Interesting to note, both of the above passages refer to spagnolette (reflecting their Spanish origin) rather than sigarette, though the latter French version would eventually win out.
In response to the growing demand for cigarettes, the Monopolio introduced its first spagnoletta, the Macedonia, in 1890–1891 and added Giubek cigarettes in 1897, by which time they were likely rolled using the newly imported American cigarette-making machines. While Italian cigars carried names evoking their place of manufacture — Toscani, Napolitani — or important historical figures — Cavour or the Toscano Garibaldi of 1982 (Garibaldi was a devoted smoker of Toscani) — these early cigarette brands evoked something more exotic. Tobacco from Macedonia/Bulgaria and more generally the Balkans was considered among the best in the world. Whether Macedonia cigarettes actually contained Balkan tobacco, the association was a positive one. Giubek cigarettes instead certainly alluded to the Giuba (Jubba) River and islands in southern Somalia. As part of its fledgling colonial enterprise, Italy had declared a protectorate in Somalia in 1889. The addition of a hard ending to the brand name is curious; there is no k in the Italian alphabet so it might have evoked a Slavic or Ottoman association. Both cigarettes then appealed to fascination with the Orient, if not precisely the one identified in Said's famous study, and Giubek also reinforced Italy's imperial ambitions.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Fumo by Carl Ipsen. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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