Insectopedia (39 page)

For some people, the
festa del grillo
has a precise moment of origin: July 8, 1582, in San Martino a Strada, in the parish of Santa Maria all’Impruneta, not far from Florence. According to Agostino Lapini’s
Diario fiorentino
(a detailed eighteenth-century history of the city), on that day the parish organized a force of 1,000 men to save the crops from devastation by field crickets. Lapini describes a state of emergency. For ten
days a crowd in the most resolute mood swarms over the fields, hunting down every cricket it can find. It
fare la festa
—“makes merry,” we might say—with the animals killing all it can in a feast of killing, a festival of killing, a carnival of killing. Yet no matter the many ways of killing—even mass live burial and death by drowning—“the smallest ones remained rather well,” recounts Lapini, “and because of the great heat went below ground and there made their eggs.”
⁸

Two more crickets. The bad cricket: insect of plague and retribution, feared by the farmer. The good cricket: symbol of spring and good fortune, loved by the children. How do we get from the mob scene of 1582 to the family outing described by Frances Toor in her
Festivals and Folkways of Italy
, the same event that Dorothy Spicer would write about five years later? Crowds pack the Cascine; there are balloons, an abundance of food and drink, cages in all shapes and sizes; the songs of crickets fill the air; it is a day that children remember their entire lives, “the whole
festa
is an authentic one of color … everything is bright.” The cricket is a “harbinger of spring as it used to be for the races before them,” writes Toor, meaning for the Etruscans, the Greeks, and the Romans.

Freeing brings luck? I can’t find a convincing narrative that ties these two scenes together. Instead, there is Lapini’s blood fest of 1582 and then nothing for an entire century, no record of anything cricket related. (Were there no more plagues of crickets in the Tuscan countryside? Did those eggs never hatch? Was there no local commemoration of the mass expedition?) When crickets do reappear, it is the late seventeenth century, they are in the Cascine, and, like so much else in Florence during this period, they are firmly within the orbit of the Medicis.
¹⁰

In the 1560s, Cosimo I, first Grand Duke of Tuscany, undertook the initial landscaping that created the Parco delle Cascine. He added groves
of oak, maple, elm, and other shade-giving trees. The long, narrow park beside the Arno was subsequently used by the nobility as a promenade, hunting ground, and venue for outdoor entertainment—including, according to some accounts, cricket catching. Following the decline of the Medicis and the accession of the house of Habsburg-Lorraine in 1737, the park became state property. At what point the public gained full access is not clear, but open events—including perhaps the
festa del grillo—
were commonplace during the late-eighteenth-century rule of Pietro Leopoldo, the “enlightened” grand duke who was also the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II (and the brother of Marie-Antoinette) whose modernizing enthusiasm is evident in his sponsorship of Florence’s science museums and in the superb collections of scientific intruments that they house, collections that include both the bony middle finger of Galileo’s right hand (“This is the finger, belonging to the illustrious hand / that ran through the skies, / pointing at the immense spaces, and singling out new stars,” runs Tommaso Perelli’s inscription) and his telescope, perhaps the very one he used to sketch those washes of the moon’s phases that so inspired Cornelia Hesse-Honegger.

There is little doubt that by the end of the nineteenth century a
festa del grillo
was securely fixed in the spring calendar. It was a popular event, open to all and packed with picnicking families. The aristocratic tradition of the parade of the notables continued, although now led by municipal officials and culminating in the formal blessing of the city. Already it appears that rather than collecting the insects in the park, people were acquiring their crickets by buying them (along with the painted cages) from vendors who hunted up on Monte Cantagrilli (Singing Cricket Mountain) and the other surrounding hills. This shift fully into consumption sounds urban. And so does the festival’s unambiguous celebratory tone (spring renewal, good fortune, long life, and so on), a tone that also continues the aristocratic tradition of the
festa
as treasure hunt. Where is the uncertainty of peasant life? Where is nature, wild and dangerous? The
grillo parlante
has arrived. Jiminy’s on his way. The locusts are no more. Crickets are our friends.

I first learned about Garibaldi’s feelings for birds and other creatures in a short book published in Rome in 1938 by the National Fascist Organization for the Protection of Animals. The architect of the Risorgimento appears in a trinity of animal lovers along with Saint Francis of Assisi and Benito Mussolini, who is quoted as urging a congress of veterinarians—apparently without irony—to “treat animals with kindness, because they are often more interesting than human beings.” Feliciano Philipp, the book’s author, explains that the new Italian state has a rational attitude toward animals, neither sentimental nor cruel. “It has instilled into every child the idea of duty towards those who are younger or weaker,” he writes. Its aim is to foster “that indulgence which is due to inferior beings.”
¹¹

Given that the Nazis’ enthusiasm for animal welfare and environmental conservation is well known, it wasn’t surprising to discover that their Axis allies also professed compassion for animals. But it was still startling to think of twentieth-century European fascists indulging, rather than exterminating, those they considered inferior. This seems like a paradox, but perhaps it results from a particular clarity about the distinction between humans and other animals. It was, after all, an area in which that giant of Western thought, Martin Heidegger, was able to offer his Nazi sponsors valuable philosophical support. Humans and others, he wrote, are separated not merely by capacity but by an “abyss of essence.”
¹²
The difference is fundamentally hierarchical: “The stone is
worldless;
the animal is
poor in world;
man is
world-forming.
”
¹³

Heidegger talks only in terms of
the
animal, but the encounters of everyday life are with animals in the plural and in their many guises. A greater difficulty for the fascist policy makers lay with the subhumans, those beings whose inferiority was of a different order from that of the compassion-eliciting nonhuman animals. The special problem of the
Jews, the Roma, the disabled, and the rest, lay in their capacity to confuse categories, to be unnervingly proximate despite their enormous distance, to be both corrupting from within (parasitic) and threatening from without (invasive). These are beings for whom, as we know, neither of the fascist states legislated protection or indulgence. These are beings who take their place among the outcast animals as the lives not worthy of life, the vermin of both kinds.

There are other histories of animal protection. One that has always seemed significant is the convergence between the animal-welfare movement that emerged in Europe in the early nineteenth century and the abolitionist movement that campaigned in the same period to free enslaved people in the United States. The two often combined organizational resources and individual activists, and—along with the twentieth-century fascists—they shared the belief that certain forms of superiority demanded paternalist responsibility. To many members of the two campaigns, there was little distinction between transplanted Africans and domestic animals. Both elicited liberal sympathy and action. Both needed care and, perhaps, indulgence. Neither had the capacity to speak for or represent themselves. Both deserved the opportunity to labor with dignity.
¹⁴

None of this is to suggest that animal-welfare advocates are still hostage to these pasts. But genealogies haunt, and unresolved dilemmas persist, and at the least, they imply caution in assuming that a caring attitude toward other beings brings with it access to moral high ground. Maybe it’s the condescension inherent in the notions of care, protection, and welfare that needs reviewing. There is much to the argument made by Isaac Bashevis Singer and many others that cruelty to animals is morally corrosive and leads readily to similar brutality toward people. Obviously, though, there is no reason to assume that kindness to animals leads equally to compassion toward people. It can just as directly cultivate the ability to discriminate between lives worth protecting and lives not worth living.

Mussolini’s state put in place an array of legislation to guarantee the security and humane treatment of a range of animals—the standard elite of pets and native species whose legal protection had already become a mark of modernity. Among the regime’s initiatives were the Fascist Act for the protection of wild animals and Article 70 of the Public
Safety Act, which prohibited “all spectacles or public entertainments involving torture of or cruelty to animals.”
¹⁵
This last prohibition has a particular significance for our story. Public events featuring animals are widespread in Italy, and among them is the
festa del grillo.
Article 70 marked the opening of a new chapter.

During the 1990s, Florence found itself a target in the nationwide drive to stop the incorporation of live animals into religious and other festivals. “No holy spirit or expression of sincere devotion gives people the right to crucify a dove in Orvieto or sacrifice an ox in Roccavaldina or slit the throat of goats in San Luca,” said Mauro Bottigelli of the Lega anti-vivisezione, a leader of the campaign.
¹⁶

In Florence, activists attracted influential support. The famous
scoppio del carro—
the dramatic explosion of a large cart of fireworks in the Piazza del Duomo on Easter Sunday—was reworked so that the live dove bound to a flaming rocket that traditionally sparked the conflagration was replaced by a mechanical bird. Then, in 1999, the administrative district of Florence passed a law banning all commerce in wild or “autochthonous” (native) animals, a move targeting the sale of
grilli
on Ascension Sunday. (Did the deputies think of themselves as continuing the labors of Il Duce? I suspect most imagined a more benign lineage. If the thought did congeal, they might have drawn comfort from knowing that the fascists had no interest in crickets. Feliciano Philipp’s only reference to insects in his book is a rather dubious calculation of the quantity eaten by a pair of nesting swallows and their young in one day—6,720—a figure designed to show the birds’ importance to agriculture and public health rather than the insects’ importance to the health of the birds.)

The battle for the soul of the cricket festival took shape as a struggle between the
animalisti
and the traditionalists. The harm involved was perhaps less self-evident than that in the case of the
scoppio
—though not, I think, because the pain of a bird is more accessible than that of an insect. The question was more subtle because the relationship between Florentines and their
grilli
was more intimate.

All of the parties competing in this drama considered themselves pro-cricket.
¹⁷
In their eventual resolution of the problem, the district government took the most pro-cricket position of all, protecting the living animals and promoting the mythical ones. Vendors were prohibited from trading in live crickets, and anyone caught selling them was to have
his or her cages confiscated and the animals released to “roam freely through the hills of Florence.” But the sale of cages wasn’t banned, and the cages were not to be sold empty. To keep the cage makers in business and to retain the cultural and historical form (if not the precise content) of the event, the city provided the cricket vendors with two approved native species. One, especially handsome, was made of terra-cotta and based on a design by Stefano Ramunno, a local artist; the other, more noisy, was battery operated and produced a recognizable, if not quite authentic, “cri-cri.” You can see what the politicians were thinking: the livelihood of the local artisans was protected and even enhanced, the crickets—the live crickets—were free to roam all day and sing out without fear of capture and confinement, and the public, the cricket-loving people of Florence, could celebrate their affinities, their culture, and their history free from bad faith.