On 20 February 1890, a ship called the Citta di Roma left Genoa for Rio de Janeiro carrying an Italian agronomist named Giovanni Rossi and a handful of companions. Rossi was thirty-four, trained as a veterinarian, versed in the natural and political sciences, and had spent his adult life writing about how an anarchist society might be organised. He was not going to Brazil to escape persecution, to find land, or to make money. He was going to run a test. His intention, stated plainly in his own writing and repeated by every serious historian since, was to take anarchism out of the realm of argument and subject it to trial: to build a community without authority, hierarchy, or private property, observe what happened, and report the results.
They arrived in April and, after one of the party fell ill en route to their intended destination further south, settled instead on a tract of about two hundred and seventy-eight hectares between Santa Barbara and Palmeira in the state of Parana. Rossi named the place Cecilia, after the heroine of his own first novel. Over the next four years the population rose to something approaching three hundred, mostly Italian, mostly male, mostly urban working people, and they held the land in common, worked without wages, kept a communal fund, made their decisions without officers, and sanctioned free unions between men and women without marriage. In 1894 it ended. Rossi wrote it up, remained in Brazil for another thirteen years working as an agronomist, went home to Italy, and died in Pisa in 1943. Almost every entry in the record of intentional communities is founded by people looking for a home, and the ones that go wrong in Brazil, like Ford’s plantation on the Amazon, go wrong for reasons of arrogance or ignorance. Cecilia went wrong for a subtler reason, and the reason is contained in the word Rossi himself used for it.
The Man Who Published The Experiment
Rossi’s biography is the argument in miniature. Born in Pisa in 1856, he trained in agronomy and veterinary medicine, which is to say he was educated in the observational sciences at a moment when their prestige was overwhelming, and his intellectual formation was in method as much as in politics. At twenty-two he published a novel, Un comune socialista, which set out his theory of how a communal society should be organised, and which was successful enough to run through five editions and to become the best-known title in its publisher’s socialist library.
It is worth being clear about what kind of anarchist Rossi was, because the label covers a great deal of ground and he sat at one specific point on it. He was not an insurrectionist and had no interest in propaganda by deed, the bombings and assassinations that dominated the public image of anarchism in the 1890s and that were being carried out by other Italians in exactly those years. His position was constructive and demonstrative: that the way to establish anarchism was to build a functioning example and let it persuade by existing. That commitment to demonstration over agitation is what makes Colonia Cecilia interesting, and it is also what made the colony’s survival a matter of intellectual rather than merely practical importance to him.
Then he did something unusual for a political theorist: he tried it. Working with the socialist leader Andrea Costa, he founded and published a periodical titled Lo Sperimentale, which translates as The Experiment. In November 1887 he established an agricultural cooperative called Colonia Cittadella near Cremona, on land offered by a sympathetic landowner, running for about two years as a working trial of cooperative agriculture. Only after that did he go to Brazil. The sequence is theory, pilot study, full trial, publication, which is precisely the sequence of a research programme rather than of a search for a place to live, and it reflects a nineteenth-century confidence that social questions would yield to the same methods that were transforming the study of the living world and every other field then being systematised, a confidence that runs through the whole catalogue of ambitious undertakings. He published a journal called The Experiment, and then, at thirty-four, he went to South America and performed one.
The Naming of Colonia Cecilia
The name repays attention. Cecilia was the heroine of Rossi’s first novel, the fictional demonstration of his theory, and the colony was named after her, which means that the settlement in Parana was consciously and explicitly an instantiation of a text he had written twelve years earlier. He was not founding a place and then describing it; he was taking a description and attempting to make a place out of it.
There is a further oddity in the naming worth pausing on, since the accounts differ slightly and both versions point the same way. Some sources hold that Cecilia was the heroine of the novel; others that she was a young woman Rossi had known at university, blonde and long-braided, who inspired the character and later married him. Either way the settlement in Parana carried a name imported from Rossi’s own imaginative life rather than from anything in Brazil, from the land, the river, the region, or the people who would live there. Communities that name themselves after a local feature are describing where they are. Colonia Cecilia was named after where its founder had been.
That order of operations has consequences that are easy to miss. A community founded by people who want to live differently begins with the people and negotiates the arrangements around them, which is untidy and produces institutions nobody would have designed. A community founded to instantiate a specification begins with the arrangements and recruits people to fill them, which produces something much closer to what the founder intended and much less robust, because the specification was written without reference to the particular human beings who would have to inhabit it. Rossi had thought about the theory with enormous care and about the individuals not at all, which is not a criticism of his character but a description of what a general theory is for. The gap between an elegant plan and the ground it has to sit on is the standing difficulty of every serious construction effort, as the history of what actually gets built repeatedly shows. He named the colony after a character. She had been easier to accommodate.
The Accidental Site
How the group ended up in Parana at all is a small story with large implications. The plan had been for somewhere else, with Uruguay and Rio Grande do Sul both appearing in the accounts, and one of the party fell ill during the journey south, so they stopped partway and established themselves where circumstances permitted. The land was neither surveyed for their purposes nor selected for its qualities. It was where they happened to be when they had to stop.
The accidental siting mattered more than it might appear, because subsistence agriculture is the one enterprise in which the specific piece of ground determines almost everything. Soil, drainage, aspect, frost dates, rainfall distribution, and access to a market are not details to be worked around but the fundamental parameters of whether a group of people will eat, and an agronomist of all people would ordinarily insist on assessing them before committing. Rossi took the land that was available when circumstances stopped him, and the colony’s entire food supply thereafter depended on a decision made by an illness, in a region whose agricultural potential the group had no means of evaluating and whose water and seasonal conditions were unknown to every one of them.
There is also a persistent and attractive story that the colony was made possible by a grant of land from Emperor Pedro II, arranged through the composer Carlos Gomes, a friend of Rossi’s musician uncle. Recent scholarship treats this with considerable scepticism, and the objection is chronological and hard to answer: the Brazilian Republic was proclaimed in November 1889, some months before the anarchists sailed, and by Rossi’s own report there had been no negotiation with the Emperor, who was by then deposed and in exile. What is not in doubt is that the group arrived into the middle of a regime change and a national immigration drive, which shaped everything about their reception, and that the shifting legal position of their land became a real problem later, of the kind that documentary title exists to prevent, as the great investigations into who holds what demonstrate, and that arrives whenever a change of government scrambles existing arrangements. They chose the theory carefully. They chose the site by accident.
What They Built
The physical record is modest and honest. The first arrivals put up a communal shed to house the families temporarily, with each household then expected to build its own dwelling, and by the end of 1891 the settlement consisted of about twenty wooden houses and that one shared building. Into this they packed a population that had grown to nearly three hundred, which is a serious mismatch, and the accounts are frank that the structure available never caught up with the number of people arriving.
The housing arithmetic deserves to be stated because it is the clearest single measure of the mismatch between plan and reality. Twenty wooden houses and one communal shed, for a population approaching three hundred. Even allowing for households rather than individuals and for the temporary nature of the arrangement, that is a settlement in which a substantial share of the members were living in shared emergency accommodation years after arrival, in a climate that is mild by Italian standards but wet, and where privacy was effectively unavailable. Almost every account of internal friction at Colonia Cecilia has to be read against that background, since a great many disputes that get attributed to ideology are more economically explained by too many people in one building.
The economy showed real ingenuity within its limits. They farmed and kept livestock, and in the colony’s best period, around 1892, when new colonists arrived and morale recovered, they began viticulture and set up the manufacture of shoes and barrels, which are exactly the sort of skilled trades that a group of Italian artisans could actually perform and sell. The land itself was decent enough and the region was filling with immigrant settlement of every description, Russian-Germans, Poles, and later Mennonites, so there were markets within reach for anyone with a product, of the kind that has always determined whether a remote settlement can trade its way to viability, as the history of moving goods to distant buyers makes clear. They managed to build twenty houses in all. The population needed a great many more than that.
Farmers Who Were Not Farmers
The composition of the population is where the experimental frame does its most quiet damage, and the sources are consistent about it. The colonists were largely of working-class urban origin, drawn from the Italian labour movement, and a great many of them had no agricultural knowledge whatsoever. They had been recruited on the basis of their politics, because their politics was the variable under investigation, and the community was intended to demonstrate that people committed to anarchist principles could live by them.
The recruitment method compounded this. Colonists came in waves, drawn by Rossi’s published appeals and by word of mouth through the Italian labour movement, which meant the selection filter was enthusiasm for the idea plus the ability to afford a passage, and nothing else. Nobody was asked what they could do. Nobody was assessed for the skills the settlement actually required, which were clearing, ploughing, animal husbandry, and the judgement of seasons in an unfamiliar hemisphere. A recruitment process that screens for belief will reliably deliver believers, and a farm needs farmers, and those two sets overlap only by accident.
But the trial required them to feed themselves by subsistence farming on unimproved land in a subtropical climate none of them had worked, and commitment to a principle does not teach anyone to judge a planting season. The farming and livestock did not produce enough to sustain the population, and the difficulty compounded, because a group short of food is a group short of the time and energy required to learn anything, and agricultural competence in any region is a body of local knowledge that ordinarily takes a generation to accumulate and is transmitted person to person, as the study of how practical knowledge passes between people describes. Rossi himself was a trained agronomist, which is the sharpest irony available here, and one agronomist cannot substitute for two hundred people who know what they are doing. He had selected for the hypothesis. He had not selected for the harvest.
The Running Report
Throughout, Rossi wrote. He produced letters, reports, and polemical articles about the colony and sent them to the European anarchist and socialist press continuously, and these were gathered and published in a substantial volume in Zurich in 1897 by the Swiss libertarian Alfred Sanftleben, under a title that translates as Utopia and Experiment. His personal papers survive in an archive in Brazil and have been catalogued by Brazilian historians, with the holdings described in the proceedings of the Brazilian national association of history, and they constitute a remarkably complete record for a community of this size and duration.
The audience for those reports is the detail that matters most. Rossi was not writing for the colonists, who were present and did not need to be told what was happening; he was writing for readers in Italy, Switzerland, and France, for the European movement, for the record. The colony’s most articulate member was therefore continuously oriented outward, toward a distant public whose judgement of the experiment mattered to him more than the daily management of the settlement could. That is a defensible allocation of a scarce person’s attention if the point of the enterprise is to produce a finding. It is a strange one if the point is to get through the winter.
That documentation is why we know anything about Cecilia, and it is also the tell. A man who keeps a running account of his community’s internal difficulties and posts them to an international readership is not simply a diarist; he is filing progress reports. The writing was not incidental to the project but constitutive of it, since an experiment that produces no publishable account has not been performed at all, and the discipline of recording what happens including the failures is genuinely admirable and genuinely scientific, of the sort that separates a real result from a claim in any contested field, as the long argument over replicating exotic laboratory findings illustrates. He documented everything, which is why we can see what happened. It is also why we can see what he thought he was doing.
The Investigator and the Subjects
Here is the mechanism. When a community is framed as an experiment, the founder occupies the position of investigator and the members occupy the position of subjects, and those two positions have profoundly different relationships to the outcome. An experiment produces knowledge whether it succeeds or fails; a negative result is a result, and the investigator’s purposes are served either way. The participants’ purposes are served only if it succeeds, because what they have staked is not a hypothesis but their labour, their savings, their years, and in many cases their emigration.
It is worth saying clearly that Rossi was not cynical and did not exploit anyone in any straightforward sense. He went to Brazil himself, lived in the conditions he had designed, worked, and stayed to the end, which is more than a great many founders manage, and he never appears to have enriched himself or held himself apart. The problem is structural rather than moral. A person can be entirely sincere, entirely present, and entirely honest, and still be occupying a role whose relationship to failure differs fundamentally from that of everyone around him, and the difference does not require bad faith to operate. It only requires that one participant is keeping score in a currency the others are not.
This asymmetry is invisible at the founding, when everybody’s interests appear aligned, and it becomes decisive at the point of collapse. It also has a subtler effect throughout, because an investigator’s commitment to the trial is contingent on its informativeness rather than on its survival, which means the founder has no particular reason to make the compromises that would keep the thing alive at the cost of contaminating the result. Admitting an authority to settle disputes, or a wage to reward effort, or a screening process at the gate, would each have improved Cecilia’s chances and each would have destroyed the purity of the test, and Rossi consistently declined them, which was correct experimental practice and fatal community management. Anarchist arrangements have been attempted many times since with more pragmatism and more success, as the record of governance experiments and enduring self-governing settlements like the free town of Christiania show. The founder was running a trial. Everyone else was living in it.
Free Love as a Variable
The colony’s sexual arrangements are the part most often sensationalised and they deserve a sober account, because they illustrate the mechanism more clearly than anything else. Rossi was a genuine and early advocate of the emancipation of women and of free unions, holding that relationships should rest on affection alone rather than on property, law, or clerical sanction, and that a woman’s dependence on marriage was a form of ownership. In 1890 those were radical and, by most modern lights, admirable positions, and the colony sanctioned unions formed and dissolved without ceremony or legal standing.
The gender composition made the arrangement considerably more fraught than the theory allowed. The colony was, by every account, predominantly male, which means that free unions were being practised in a population where the numbers were badly unbalanced, and a doctrine of unconstrained affection operates very differently in a community of roughly equal numbers than in one where most members have no realistic prospect of a partner at all. This was foreseeable and does not seem to have been foreseen, which is characteristic of a plan derived from principle rather than from observation of the particular people involved, and it is the sort of misreading of a social situation that the study of signalling and misdirection in social species suggests is very easy to make and very expensive to correct.
What is striking is not the practice but Rossi’s treatment of it. He published an analytical account of a particular emotional episode within the colony, examining the conduct and feelings of the people involved as material for general conclusions about how such arrangements function under strain. Read as advocacy it is bold; read as a document of a founder’s relationship to his community it is something else, because the members’ private lives had become case material, appearing in the European press as evidence. That is the investigator position carried to its natural end, and it raises exactly the questions about consent and observation that any study of subjects who cannot fully weigh the terms must confront, which is why the study of intentional communities sits so close to the ethical problems examined in the science of experience and its limits and in the social dynamics traced in the study of group behaviour. The colonists lived through it. Their founder wrote it up for publication.
The End
It is worth noting how quickly it went, relative to what was invested. Four years is very short by the standards of this literature, and the people who dispersed in 1894 had crossed an ocean, given up whatever they had in Italy, and put four years of labour into land they did not individually own and could not take with them. When Colonia Cecilia ended there was no division of assets, no settlement, and no compensation of the kind that the Zoarites arranged for themselves; there was simply a community that stopped functioning and a group of poor immigrants who had to find work elsewhere in a country most of them had reached only a few years earlier.
The dissolution was gradual and had several causes, and the honest historiography does not agree on their weighting. Material poverty was chronic and the food supply never became secure. Hostility from sections of the local elite was real, and the colony’s politics, its foreignness, and its sexual arrangements made it an easy target in a region absorbing large numbers of immigrants under official encouragement. The change of regime altered the colony’s legal and fiscal position, and taxation became a burden a marginal agricultural enterprise could not carry.
The external pressures deserve a fair hearing too, because it would be wrong to treat Colonia Cecilia as purely self-destroying. A community of foreign anarchists practising unconsecrated unions and holding land in common, in a rural Catholic province during a period of political instability, was never going to be left alone, and local hostility was persistent and sometimes organised. The colonists were also immigrants with limited Portuguese, no local networks, and no political standing whatsoever in a country that had changed its form of government a few months before they landed. Any settlement facing that combination would have struggled, and attributing the whole outcome to internal arrangements would be unjust to the people who lived there.
And there was a theft. The communal fund, to which every member had access by design, was robbed by a colonist, which is precisely the failure mode that shared-access arrangements invite and precisely the one that anarchist principle made hardest to guard against, since preventing it requires either locks or an authority, and the point of the colony was to have neither. Some accounts treat the theft as the trigger of the collapse and others as a symptom of a disorganisation already well advanced, which is the standard difficulty in reconstructing losses inside trusted institutions, as the forensic literature on internal theft and the anatomies of institutions that could not account for themselves both illustrate. Departures accelerated. By 1894 the colony was finished, and its members dispersed into Parana, Sao Paulo, and Rio Grande do Sul, where some later turned up in the Brazilian labour movement and some simply became farmers.
Colonia Cecilia in 2026
The afterlife is disproportionate to the four years, and it is almost entirely literary. Rossi kept writing: in 1895 he produced another utopian novel, Il Parana nel XX secolo, imagining the state as one of the great world powers of the twentieth century, narrated by his own pen name, Cardias, which means that after the experiment failed he returned to the genre in which it had begun. The Brazilian anarchist writer Afonso Schmidt published a novel about the colony in 1942. Jean-Louis Comolli made a feature film, La Cecilia, in 1976. Renata Pallottini wrote a play at the commission of the governor of Parana. There have been miniseries, academic theses in three languages, and a Parana state press edition of Rossi’s own writings.
It is worth registering what did not survive, since the contrast with the other great communal experiments is stark. There are no Colonia Cecilia buildings, no preserved village, no museum on the site, no descendant community holding the land in common, and no institution carrying the name forward. Four years of intense effort by three hundred people left, in physical terms, effectively nothing, and the settlement has the peculiar status of a place that is thoroughly documented and no longer locatable. What Rossi produced instead was a literature, which is precisely what an experiment is supposed to produce, and precisely what a home is not.
The scholarly record is now genuinely good, and the University of Sao Paulo’s Brasiliana library has published an accessible account of the colony and its surviving documents, drawing on the testimony of former colonists and their children alongside Rossi’s own essays. Descendants remain in the region, and Palmeira acknowledges the episode in its municipal history alongside its Russian-German, Polish, and Mennonite settlements. There is no site to visit in any meaningful sense, no preserved buildings, and nothing that would be recognisable from the air even with the survey tools, including autonomous aerial mapping, that would find the foundations of most vanished settlements. What survives of Colonia Cecilia is a bibliography.
The Control Condition
Strip Colonia Cecilia to its structure and the lesson is not that anarchism cannot work, which four years in Parana with untrained farmers on accidental land does not establish, and Rossi would have been the first to insist on the point. The lesson concerns what happens when a community is constituted as a test. The framing determined the recruitment, since Rossi selected for ideological commitment because commitment was the variable, and thereby assembled a population with no idea how to farm. It determined the refusal of every remedy, since admitting authority or wages or screening would have preserved the colony and ruined the result. It determined the documentation, which is why we know the story. And it determined the ending, because a trial concludes and a home does not.
The test this suggests applies to any project that describes itself as a pilot, a trial, or a proof of concept, which in the present era is a great many of them. Ask who is bearing the downside if the result is negative, and whether that is the same person collecting the finding. Ask what the completion condition is, and whether the people living inside the project know what it is. Ask whether the remedies that would keep the thing alive have been ruled out because they would compromise the result, which is the specific signature of the investigator relationship. And ask what the founder plans to do afterwards, because the answer usually reveals what the project was for.
There is a final detail that closes the argument better than any analysis. After the colony dissolved, Rossi stayed in Brazil for thirteen years teaching agricultural subjects in Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul, and in 1907 he returned to Italy, where he remained involved with cooperative ventures until his death. He went home having formed a lasting and monogamous relationship with a woman who had been a member of the colony. The most prominent advocate of free love in nineteenth-century anarchism, having tested the proposition on several hundred people and published the findings, concluded his own life in the arrangement he had spent his career arguing against, which is either a very human ending or a very honest one and is probably both. That is what secures the case its place among the genuinely instructive entries in the catalogue of utopian societies. He ran the experiment on everyone else. At the end, he selected the control condition for himself.