‘When I was eleven years old I was already a servant (vaché), it was the same for everyone’, Dalmazzo Giraudo (born 1893), a peasant from Piedmont reported in 1970. My parents ‘sent me out to serve. I stayed for two years’, Ferruccio Preti wrote in 1950 in one of the autobiographies of militants preserved in the archive of the Communist Party in Bologna, where the experience as farm servants (garzoni) was one of the most common themes. Almost all boys from agricultural labourers’ (braccianti) families became servants as soon as they had attended primary school, Franco wrote in a blog referring to the interwar period in countryside around Ravenna. For peasants, having a servant was as common as having a dog, Francesco Salvatici (1933–2006) maintained in 2005, remembering his childhood in Tuscany. There were hundreds of prospective masters who tried to find rural servants and vice versa, Crescenzo Iadanza (born 1921), reported in 2005, referring to the square in Benevento, in southern Italy, where he too, aged thirteen or fourteen, had tried (unsuccessfully) to find a job as a servant (valano).

These testimonies suggest that rural service was very common in Italy. Yet – broadly speaking – according to influential scholars this was not the case. Who is right? Historians or former servants? In this chapter I will try to assess the spread of rural service in Italy between pre-industrial times and the twentieth century. I will focus especially on life-cycle service, which since the 1960s has increasingly been considered a phenomenon with far-reaching consequences. Indeed, it has been suggested that it was a crucial component of the different European family-formation systems and marriage patterns, which in turn have been regarded as decisive in leading to low/high-population-pressure societies; in allowing for larger/smaller saving and accumulation; and, ultimately, in creating more/fewer opportunities for economic development. Moreover, the high/low presence of life-cycle servants has been deemed critical in fashioning weak/strong family ties and in stimulating the development of public or private/familial welfare systems.