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...