Private interest and public policy: land reclamation in the Tuscan Maremma (1860s–1950s)

Abstract This paper analyses the precarious balance between the economic demands of landowners and the defence of public interest in the Tuscan Maremma in a significant time frame for Italian land reclamation (from the 1860s to the 1950s). Increasing productivity in marginal lands was the primary reason for reclamation work, but the considerable investment involved did not always ensure significant gain in land value. Landowners exerted powerful pressure on the state to contribute to the implementation of more complex projects, but the state also needed their co-operation for its territory-wide plans. This new land acquisition fitted into a complex socio-economic context in which poverty, social tensions, health, and sanitation challenges as well as migration demanded incisive political policies which could not always be fully implemented. This essay shows that certain economic factors outweighed others and that, more often than not, the public social policies adopted played into the hands of private economic interests, and the large-scale reclamation work implemented in the Maremma led to the almost total disappearance of a deeply rooted farming tradition, the silvo-pastoral economy.