Uomini e caporali

The South, and in particular Capitanata, has for several years become a destination for tens of thousands of immigrants who flock there for the tomato picking season. Harvesting the “red gold” is extremely hard work that breaks their backs and arms, but they are paid very little. They are workers framed in even pre-capitalist living and working situations: housed in dilapidated ruins, they are also subjected to the often sadistic harassment of “corporals,” who offer their labor to a corporate world that uses them to squeeze costs. Sometimes, these new “boors,” so different from the “boors” of yesterday, also find it difficult to get paid what little was agreed upon. And protests not infrequently result in death. A barbaric situation that scourges like a social cancer vast areas of Italy, where the rule of law seems to be totally absent, and where the only law of the exercise of brute violence applies. This novel-investigation, a true journey to the underworld, reveals the lives, personal destinies and deepest dynamics of the “blackest” face of our country.