Cheese, Pears, and History in a Proverb

The birth of our proverb occurred within a cultural and economic context of aversion to the peasant world to which the ruling classes, primarily in urban Italy, denied any claim to social advancement.

At this point, all possible conditions for the birth of our proverb are present. The economic and social premises are more than evident, as are the cultural and ideological ones. The only thing missing is a formal, rhetorical invention: an archetype that in some way provides the literary model, the rhythm, the music of the proverb.

The archetype may be a burlesque poem by Francesco Berni, composed before August 1522, which sings the praises of cardoons—a much appreciated vegetable in Italy at the time—and expresses the hope that such pleasures remain forever unknown to the peasant.

Non ti faccia, villano, Iddio sapere,
ciò è che tu non possa gustare
cardi, carciofi, pesche, anguille e pere

May God not let you know, peasant,
that which you cannot enjoy:
cardoons, artichokes, peaches, eels, and pears

In these three lines of the Capitolo dei cardi (the chapter on cardoons) is everything we have been seeking: loathing of the villano, the peasant; the wish that God exclude him from “knowing” (sapere), which would grant him the ability to savor (gustare) certain foods identified as a privilege of class. There is even the rhyme, sapere/pere. The proverb is now ripe. Its first formulation appeared at the end of the sixteenth century in the anthology by Francesco Serdonati:

Non possa tu mai villano sapere
Cio ch’è mangiar pane, cacio e pere

May you never know, peasant,
what it is to eat bread, cheese and pears

Aside from the cheese and pears, protagonists of the proverb that later took root and is still used today, Serdonati’s version also includes bread. But, it should be noticed, in the same syntactic succession (bread + cheese as the starting pair with the addition of pears) as in the other proverb, documented earlier in the century, these three are identified as upper-class foods.

Serdonati’s commentary on this proverb is not focused on philosophical questions of understanding or on the sensitive subject of social identity, but it raises the more concrete problem of the relation between ownership and production. Peasants should not know how good this combination is “because if it were known to peasants, they would consume even more and would cause a shortage, leaving not enough for knights.” If the peasants knew, they would devour everything, and knights would suffer scarcity and want.

The economic dimension of the proverb, which had previously remained in the background, has now made a ponderous appearance on the scene. The context is by now clear.

From all evidence, the proverb of cheese and pears constitutes a gastronomic variation on the “satire of the rustic,” a literary genre fairly common in the Italy of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, which can be defined not merely as a simple rhetorical exercise, but as an ideological instrument of the class struggle—a struggle, obviously, of landowners against peasants, geared to restraining any attempt at emancipation or social ascendance on the part of the peasants. Beyond the generic hostility toward the peasantry, the real polemical target is the newly rich peasant, the one who would presume to imitate the manners of the masters and go so far as to share their interests. The “very rich peasant” in the novella by Tomasso Costo (1596) is not up to understanding that the quality of the pear is a kind of emblem, an epigone, of the “rural elite,” as Pinto calls it, which in effect was formed in the late Middle Ages and occupied economic space characteristic of the urban middle class, above all the commercial activities and in some cases the professional as well. Already then, the literature of the period had inveighed against the truculence of the parvenu.

The verses of an anonymous Genoese writer of the thirteenth century, dedicated to “the peasant ascended to prosperity,” declared that there is nothing worse than “the peasant of low estate/who rises to great affluence,” denaturing himself and filling himself with pride and sinfulness. It was primarily this class of the peasant world, culturally more sophisticated, that was the object of ridicule and hostility on the part of the proprietary class. Perhaps it is to this group that a variation of our proverb alludes, which, probably for reasons of rhyme, endows the peasant with the attribute “wise,” knowing. The variant is in Calabrese dialect: “Non ci diri o viddanu saggio quant’è bella la pira c’u formaggiu (Don’t tell us, o wise peasant, how good a pear is with cheese).”

Between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, rural society once again flattened out, the ambitions of very rich peasants were truncated, and the growing social immobility was accompanied by increasingly constricting ideological representations, which to some degree justified and supported the narrowing of privileged space. This context can explain the appearance of our proverb—a true “window on the world,” as we have chosen to understand it, in the words of the great Erasmus.

Now let us ask ourselves: is it possible to be more precise about the social identity of the counterparts who until now—following indications from sources—have been generically labeled “lords,” “gentlemen,” and “knights”? Let us return to the proverb of Serdonati and look for the answer there: “Al cittadino la cortesia, al villano la villania (To the city dweller, courtesy, to the country knave, knavery).” In Italy, the true counterpart of the rustic was the urbanite.

The “satire of the rustic,” which appears in the literature of various European countries, acquired in Italy—and above all, but not only, in Tuscany—an importance unknown elsewhere. The “lord” who is contrasted with the peasant is not only, or not so much, the exemplar of traditional nobility, more interested in power than in profit from his lands, concerned with defining his way of life in terms of refinement, courtesy, otium/leisure. The “lord’ in this case is rather the urban landowner, noble but also bourgeois, always (unlike the traditional noblemen) attentive to calculating his income, to maximizing his profit, and to exploiting most efficiently—in purely economic terms—his lands and the work of his peasants. From this perspective a previously unknown definition of villano/rustic emerges, no longer merely coarse, ignorant, bestial (it is above all this image that persists in the polemics on the other side of the Alps), but also a thief: the peasant who steals, the peasant as enemy of the owner’s interests, hiding grain, wine, fruit. “Do you think that in harvesting fruit . . . that master has received his share?” is the rhetorical question of Bernardino Carolli in his Instructions to Well-born Youth. And in the catalogue of “Abuses and vices of peasants,” compiled in 1580 by the church of Bologna on the instigation of Cardinal Paleotti, in first place is the allegation that “many feel no compunction about not giving the fair share of the harvests to the masters, under the pretext that they are too burdened by the terms [of their indenture].” Croce ironically remarks that “peasants will become accomplished thieves because by nature they are so inclined.”

An allegory of extraordinarily powerful symbolism appears in a story by Sabadino degli Aretini, a Bolognese writer of the fifteenth century. It concerns a quarrel between a landowner, Lippo Ghisilieri, and a peasant, Zuco Padella,⁸ an all-out war over a peach tree. What has happened is that “almost every night” the peasant sneaks into the master’s orchard to steal the fruit from the tree. Lippo tries to catch him by leaving traps and spreading nails on the ground, but the peasant, though injured, does not give up. Instead, he pokes fun at the master by counterfeiting hoofprints with a horseshoe attached to his stilts to make him believe that a donkey stole the peaches. But the master does not give up, either. He has all the fruit picked except for one tree around which he orders a deep ditch to be dug “like the trap made to catch wolves.” For three nights he personally mounts guard over it. The peasant returns with his stilts, goes right to the tree, and falls into the ditch, “almost breaking his neck.” Alerted by the tumult, Lippo has a bucket of boiling water flung at the hapless donkey/wolf/peasant, who, at that point, reveals himself to be Zuco Padella. It will take three months before he recovers from his burns, and having lost his hair, he acquires the nickname Zuco Pellato (peeled or bald). The lesson is accompanied by words of arrogant contempt: “Thieving knave that you are! You thought to fool Lippo, but he has won out over you! A thousand bloodsuckers upon you! Next time leave the fruit of my peers alone and eat your own, which are turnips, garlic, leeks, onions, and shallots with sorghum bread.”⁹

The message allows no ambiguity. Tree fruits are reserved for lords (“my peers”); the peasant has no right to eat them. Foods for peasants do not grow on high branches but on the ground, or even below the ground. They are the basest of vegetables (in the order of the food chain) eaten with coarse dark bread. These and no others are the fruits intended for him.

In Sabadino degli Arienti’s story the protagonist is a peach tree, but its value is the same as the pear tree. More than once have we seen how these two fruits equal one another on a symbolic level and are interchangeable for narrative purposes.

Attention should be paid to the systematic, premeditated nature of Zuco Padella’s challenge to his master: often and almost every night he crept into the orchard to steal the fruit. The theft is not described as a sudden act of daring but a deliberate provocation of the knight by the peasant, almost as though to demand a withheld right. Even if we should avoid overloading the story with too much meaning, we cannot disregard the impression that this represents, and at the same time exorcises, an early form of the class struggle in which the peasant is not only a victim but also an active protagonist, albeit beaten and defeated. The stereotype of the peasant-thief (colonus ergo fur), extremely common in Italian culture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, is not the obsession of the ruling class alone; from the vantage point of the peasant as well, theft constitutes the simplest manifestation—and the only one possible at the time—of the struggle against social privilege. This was noted by Giorgio Giorgetti with particular reference to the tensions between landowners and peasants in regions where sharecropping was the practice. This was confirmed by Monique Rouch, who observed how often the figure of the peasant-thief reappears in the works of Giulio Cesare Croce, whether in Italian, representing reality from the owner’s viewpoint, or in Bolognese dialect directed to popular audiences. In the latter case, the peasants’ “boast” is precisely to rob the masters while pulling their leg (as, for example, in The Boast of Two Peasants, Namely the Clever Ploys of Sandron and Burtin).

The theft of food, as noted by Florent Quellier with regard to France in the seventeenth century, came to be at times a simple “strategy for survival.” But when there are fruit trees in the picture, the meaning is primarily symbolic. The gardens of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie are besieged because to rob in that “space of good taste” that “marks the social distinction of the proprietor” is to “strike him in what is most singular about him”—a place that peasants regard with particular poignancy as the symbol of proprietary power and of their own social inferiority. Zuco Padella is a literary figure who lived, virtually, two centuries earlier, but that is already the message.

The extraordinary importance acquired in Italy by the economic parameters of the social contract emerges in yet another proverb in which cheese and pears are the leading actors:

Il villano venderà il podere
per magiare cacio, pane e pere

The peasant will sell the farm
to eat cheese, pears, and bread

Documented between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the anthologies of proverbs by Francesco Serdonati and Orlando Pescetti, it had already appeared in a slightly different version in La Formaggiata by Giulio Landi, who in 1542 described it as an “ancient and true proverb” current in Milan and Bergamo:

Se sapesse il villano
Mangiare pomi, pere, formaggio e pane
Empegnaria’l gabano
Per mangiar pomi, pere, formaggio e pane

The meaning is all too clear. The peasant would ruin himself, going so far as to pawn his clothes (gabano) or even lose the farm, if he had knowledge of such delights. If he were to neglect his duties as a responsible farmer in order to run after the pleasures of gastronomy, it would be to his own detriment as well as, it is understood, that of his master, who would suffer a diminution of his profit. The reason being that the peasant does not know how to control himself. He is, by definition, hungry, voracious, insatiable. He is “the peasant who is never sated,” of other proverbial sayings. Importuna rusticorum voracitas, in the words of the agronomist Piero de’ Crescenzi: the voracity of the peasant is importunate.