Abandoned Children and Their Transitions to Adulthood in Nineteenth-Century Italy

Abstract

Recent work on the large-scale abandonment of European infants has focused on abandonment itself, how the infants were treated, and how many survived infancy. Little is known about what happened to those who survived. The authors focus on what happened to the foundlings of Bologna, Italy, over the course of the nineteenth century, at the point in their lives when foster families were no longer paid to care for them. The evidence from Bologna does not support previous assumptions that their ties to their foster families were weak and that their fate was thus a bleak one.