Popes, Peasants, and Shepherds. Oretta Zanini De Vita
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produce zucchini year-round. Cooked greens were generally served at the beginning of the meal; for the poor, however, there was often nothing else.
Throughout the Middle Ages, greens were widely used, not just in the kitchen but also as medication.53 And in this double role they remained on the tables of the poorest until after World War II.
Beginning in the Renaissance, to read the classic texts, vegetables were served mostly in the form of a sort of torta rustica, and not, as in modern times, as a side dish. They were mixed with cheese, especially parmigiano and ricotta, and with eggs and honey. Soups—always purées—were made in practically the same way and served between courses.
In Rome, vegetable sellers were divided into fogliari, or “leaf men,” and ortolani, or “vegetable gardeners.” The former dealt only with leafy vegetables, which were also used for wrapping fresh cheeses and took the place of paper for wrapping small items. The fogliari were allowed to sell their products only in their own gardens, while the insalatari, or “salad men,” a subgroup of the ortolani, with permission of the consuls, could sell their salad greens throughout the streets. Legal holidays had to be respected. It was prohibited to pick vegetables on holidays with six exceptions: “fava beans, peas, fennel, melon, pumpkin, and cucumbers.”54 Eggplants were not common. They were believed to be slightly toxic and even Artusi himself thought so.55 In Rome, they went by the curious name marignani, which was still in use in the 1800s. The same term was used (especially in the nineteenth century) to describe the prelates extra urbem (that is, those sent on missions outside the city), who could be seen walking through the city wrapped in flowing eggplant-colored cloaks.
Mushrooms that are highly prized today—such as porcini and ovoli—often appear in popular Roman recipes. The woods all over Lazio were full of mushrooms, and as early as the sixteenth century, wild mushrooms, both dried and fresh, were sold in the streets.
It is difficult to date the arrival of permanent markets, but they may go back to the eighteenth century. The city’s oldest market, the picturesque Campo de’ Fiori, was still being used as the site of executions as late as the 1600s. The statue of Giordano Bruno that dominates the piazza memorializes his death at the stake there on February 2, 1600. The piazza’s name—“field of flowers”—scarcely befits the use made of it.
Much has been written on the agriculture of Lazio’s rivers, and the sources have not always been objective and in agreement: the absolute desolation described by the travelers on the Grand Tour has been counterbalanced by more in-depth and serious studies. It is not that the situation was not grave, but the absolute absence of cultivation on the plain and the Castelli Romani has been contradicted by many scholars and writers, including ancient ones. Something must have survived in the ager desertus if Procopius of Caesarea in his Gothic War56 tells how, when the Ostrogoths arrived in 537, the fields of wheat almost reached beneath the walls of Rome.
As late as the nineteenth century, in the agricultural lands of the campagna romana, the question of the latifundium remains absolutely open. Agricultural work was done by hired hands, who did different jobs depending on the season. In the late spring, for example, in the area of the Castelli Romani, there was the strawberry harvest, done mainly by women; then, in October, after the first autumn rains, it was time to gather mushrooms, which were copious in the woods. Large baskets were filled with ovoli, porcini, chanterelles, famigliole, and morels, loaded onto mules, and sent along the tracks of beaten earth to the Roman market. In June, the workers left the woods, dropping everything to go cut the hay in the fields. The hay stayed dry on the ground for some days, and everyone kept an eye on the sky and prayed it would not rain. Then the women, equipped with the characteristic wooden hairpin-shaped pitchforks, tossed and piled the hay up in stacks. Finally, they used a curious hand press to form it into bales that were collected and stored for the winter.
In summer, the horse owners, who transported the wood from the forests, met in the fields to gather the sacks of wheat and deliver them to the Annona
Garlic vendor in the Campo de’ Fiori market, Rome (Fondazione Primoli, Rome)
Romana.57 This office governed the grain sector according to an extremely complicated system, made more so by a slow and unsafe transport network.58
When in 1801 the Vatican liberalized the food market, and thus the wheat trade, the price of both wheat and, especially, bread began slowly but inexorably to rise, and peasant families were hard-pressed. The situation resulted in protests that today would make us smile. The women would go as a group, singing as though it were a happy jaunt in the country, often accompanied by the parish priest and some carabinieri, with no instances of violence or disorderly conduct.
Agronomists and travelers from around the world have dedicated pages and pages to what was grown in the region, some in very fertile volcanic soil. But the transition from an agrarian society to an industrial one, the effects of which were felt in Italy from the end of the nineteenth century, in Lazio occurred within a short period of time and therefore was a dramatic and intense process. As late as the years between the two world wars, the agriculture of Lazio was stagnant: official statistics of the period indicate a grain production per hectare unchanged for centuries. At the same time, the amount of land under cultivation increased enormously, from some 180,000 hectares (444,790 acres) in the biennium 1910–11 to 300,000 hectares (741, 316 acres) and more on the eve of World War II. In the same period, the whole region registered a drop in productivity of olive trees and vines, despite the substantial increase in cultivated land. This is the explanation for the drop in gross domestic product (GDP) between 1929 and 1937. Stagnation in stock raising and the decrease in the profitability of fruit and vegetable growing also contributed to the weakened GDP, even though significant transformations had taken place in these sectors, too.
Starting between 1920 and 1940, the Italian state launched a central agricultural policy, echoing what was already occurring in other advanced-economy countries. These were the epic years of the “battle of the wheat,”59 of the constitution of the agrarian consortia, and of the big drainage projects. In the agro romano, peasant demands and the distribution of the lands by the Opera Nazionale Combattenti60 began to exploit many small parcels of farmland, which developed especially along the so-called consular roads:61 on the Via Nomentana, toward Tivoli, on the Via Appia in the direction of the Castelli Romani, and then along the Flaminia, Trionfale, and Aurelia.
In September 1944, with the Gullo decree (named for the agriculture minister in the second Badoglio government62) enacted, the assignment of un- or undercultivated lands to the peasants on the condition that they form cooperatives finally began. Owing to the usual bureaucratic hang-ups, however, the measure did not produce great results, which prompted fresh exasperation among those who worked the land. In September 1947, a large group of peasants, but also of veterans, artisans, and the unemployed, occupied the uncultivated property (2,965 acres/1,200 hectares) of the National Institute of Insurance in Genzano and Lanuvio. It was only the beginning: the number of occupations continued to grow into the 1950s, and began to die out only after the equalization of agricultural wages and the general economic conditions of the country began to improve.
The 1960s were the years of the Italian “economic miracle,” when agriculture made a fundamental contribution to development that took concrete form in the modernization of the whole country in the following decade. Thus, the growth of Latian agriculture should be seen within the framework of the improvement of Italian agriculture as a whole, which today is regulated by the agricultural policy of the European Union.
Sheep, Shepherds, and the Pastoral Kitchen
The rich grazing lands and woods that once covered all of Lazio favored the inclusion of the meats of sheep, cattle, and game in the diet. In antiquity, game was prized more highly and considered tastier than the equally common meat of domestic animals.
Wealthy Romans squandered fortunes to equip their estates for the large-scale raising of fish and wild animals—in total disregard of the sumptuary laws that every so often attempted to put limits