Abandoned children and their transitions to adulthood in nineteenth-century Italy

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 auth ors focus on what happened to the foundlings of Bologna, Italy, over the co urse of the nineteenth century, at the point in their lives when foster fam ilies were no longer paid to care for them. The evidence from Bologna does not support previous assumptions that their ties to their foster families w ere weak and that their fate was thus a bleak one.