Church of Santa Susanna. In the Renaissance, Rome began to build palazzi with large internal courtyards, in the Florentine style, with the idea of having open spaces for parties and banquets, and also for growing vegetables.
The secret of the Roman gardens’ luxuriance was abundant water and a particular microclimate. For centuries the gardens supplied the city. The sector was regulated by the powerful and wealthy University of the Vegetable Gardeners, one of the most important in the city’s hierarchy of guilds. The members of the university and the confraternity met at the Church of Santa Maria dell’Orto (of the Vegetable Garden) in Trastevere (to this day headquarters of their spiritual descendants). By the end of the nineteenth century, this guild possessed one of the largest real-estate holdings in the city.
The produce of the gardens constituted a basic part of the people’s diet. On the Colle degli Orti (Hill of the Gardens), the present-day Pincio, the best artichokes and celery in town, as well as famous cabbages, were grown. Famous too were the artichokes and celery picked in the gardens around the Trevi Fountain. Celery, rare on the table until the sixteenth century, was brought to Rome by Cardinal Cornaro, who grew it in his gardens at the Trevi Fountain and was so proud of his crop that, says one historian, as soon as the plants ripened, he would send “a pair as a gift for the pope, one to the cardinals, and one to the princes.” These ingredients are still basic in Roman cooking, along with tender sweet peas and green lettuces, chards, and many different kinds of cabbage.
A feature of Latian popular cooking is the combination of vegetables with other ingredients. They can be added to fish (cuttlefish with peas or artichokes) or meat (oxtail with lots of celery), or served in tasty combinations with other vegetables and flavored with one of the many wild herbs that grow in abundance in the Roman countryside. The masterpiece of expertly mixed flavors is the sublime salad known as misticanza, which consists of greens collected on the banks of streams or, better yet, in the middle of vineyards, and then dressed with olive oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper. Today it is difficult to put together all the traditional greens, but some can occasionally be found in the city’s markets. Among the most common were arugula (rocket), wild chicory, rampions, salad burnet, wood sorrel, cariota, monk’s beard, borage, bucalossi, caccialepre, crespigno, wild endive, lamb’s lettuce, oiosa, poppy greens, piè di gallo, and purslane (many with no equivalent term in other languages). To make the misticanza sweeter, large peeled grapes could be added.
Vegetables and legumes were widely used in the ancient Roman diet, their preparation becoming more elaborate as the citizenry developed more luxurious tastes. Practically every poet and writer has left a record in his writings of fresh salads or flavorful purées of vegetables or legumes. In antiquity, the most common vegetables seem to have been the squashes, the chards, peas, mushrooms (porcini were already greatly appreciated in ancient Rome, along with chanterelle and fly agaric mushrooms), wild asparagus, turnips, and rampions. Turnips and onions were an essential part of the diet, since they were considered therapeutic as well as nutritious. If we believe the satirist Martial, the legendary Romulus himself ate turnips, even in the afterlife. Turnips embodied republican probity when the consul Curius Dentatus, in the early third century B.C., was eating roasted turnips as he received a delegation of Samnites expecting to bribe him with expensive gifts. The humble turnips told them their man was incorruptible. The best turnips came from the Sabine country.
The ancient Romans did not have artichokes, but did eat cardoons, their relative, and their flowers. The earliest mention of artichokes is not until the Renaissance, in a fifteenth-century document on agriculture.
In antiquity, fava beans and wheat appeared on the everyday tables of the poor. Fava beans, usually boiled or grilled, were valued for their high caloric content. They were especially enjoyed by farmers, gladiators, and blacksmiths—in other words, by anybody who did heavy physical labor. Everyone loved them, except the Pythagoreans, for whom the beans were taboo: they were believed to house reincarnated souls.
Conservation of fresh vegetables was a problem then just as it is now. Apicius advised cutting off the tops and covering the stems with wormwood. To keep the brilliant green of vegetables, he suggested adding a pinch of soda to the cooking water. He has a famous recipe for leeks cooked in embers, well washed, salted, and wrapped in cabbage leaves. Pepper and a little olive oil were the only condiments needed.
Many kinds of vegetables were found on the wealthy tables of the empire. The emperor Tiberius had greenhouses that could be moved to follow the sun and 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
