In A Concise History of Italy by Christopher Duggan, chapter 1, "The geographical determinants of disunity", there appears the paragraph beginning
One reason why so many subversives believed in the revolutionary potential of the Italian peasants was that they knew very little about them. Most of the leading republicans, anarchists, socialists, and communists came from urban middle-class families, and their knowledge of the countryside was rarely direct. The fact that in Italy a large cultural and to some extent economic divide existed between towns and countryside (many peasant families consumed what they grew and did not sell their produce at market) reinforced this ignorance. In such circumstances, it was easy for a romantic notion of 'the people' as an army of downtrodden soldiers waiting for generals to lead them to the promised land to flourish; and this idea survived many indications that a majority of peasants where in fact deeply conservative, if not reactionary.
