Netro

Netru

The village of Netro remaind us of one of those characteristic villages of Central Italy perched on a hill. At present the inhabitantsof Netro are little more then 1000, but at the first ufficial census, in 1799 under Napoleonic occupation, the village counted more then 2000. This is a village with a tradition for iron works, this nobil and ancient art of forging and hammering white-hot iron bars to make hammers and scythes, or white arms and armours, at one time, and still today, armonious gratings or railings. The origins of the name of the village could be Celtic and the parish priest Don Giovanni Battista Giardino, in an resumè published in 1949, support the thesis that the iron works art dates back from the Salassi’s Celts period, when they battled against the Roman legions from 225 to 25 a.c..

What is for sure is that in Medioaevol time from these artisan forges (not industrial) came out helmets, armours and swords for the fighters, and in more recent times, scythes, sickles and bill-hooks for farmers, hammers and trowels for the bricklayers.
In various documents, especially in the church archives, appear the names of the masters in iron work. From 1100 to 1700 we find “li nobili” Martinetto, Bonino, Serra and then Serramoglia, Perino, Perinetto and many others, family names familiar still today.

  
Ernesto Rubino (1869-1927) founded in 1906 the “S.A. Officine di Netro già Giovanni Battista Rubino”, added to the old buildings used for the making of artisan instruments a vast production of mechanical pieces and components for the construction of engines and machines and transformed the traditional iron works in industry. In 1926 the factory had 565 workers. With the difficul years of World War II, the activities went through difficult times, there were reshufling and changes up to the final closure in 1960. The culture and ability were not lost, many of the qualified ex-workers became important and well known technical men in Olivetti and Fiat factories. Today a building houses an ecomuseum of iron works in the grounds of the workshop.

The second activity forever present, still today, was cows and sheep rearing and the production of milk by-products, carried out according to traditional methods, in the valley during the winter and in the mountain pastures in summer. We have to mention a third economic and traditional activity, building works, the one that the Netresi emigrants exported to France, Savoy, Auxerre and Provence, where many expert bricklayers became well known contractors.

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At a first look this appears as an almost self-sufficient economy, but resources were not equally distributed among the population. The work, not organised  nor protected, the large number of children, the difficulties created by famines or epidemics reduced to almost nothing the already scarce resources: this is the same in all of our villages. The more enterprising Netresi looked at emigration as a mean to to free themselves from daily necessities. From 1800 to the first years of the twentieth century, thousand of Netresi scattered around the world.

The biographies of the Netresi are 603, 24.8% of the inhabitants in 1911. More then 83.6% emigrated to France, 6.7% to Switzerland, 4.2% to Africa (more then half of those went to Algeria, then a French colony), 2.1% to the United States, 0.9% to Asia, 0.6% to South America and 0.5% to Australia. The remaining 1.9% emigrated to other European countries. The most common family names are Bonino, Martinetto, Fiorina, Bertinaria, Perino, Pellerey and Pellerei, Perinetto, Gastaldi, Chiaverina, Samica e Marco, Vercellone, Verna and Avignone. The oldest emigrant is a woman, Isabella Gastaldi, born in 1837 and emigrated to France as a “reutière”