vaccinari (literally, “cow men”) and as compensation they received the hide, with the tail and cheeks. Here undoubtedly lies the origin of the famous dish coda alla vaccinara, one of the most typical dishes of popular Roman cooking.
A document from the end of the sixteenth century describes how the vaccinari had their own quarter, near the city’s main slaughterhouse in Testaccio. The neighborhood, called scortichiaria (skinnery), was centered around a street that connected the Ponte dei Quattro Capi with the “site, popularly called ‘of the cow tanners.’” They tanned the hides in the quarter itself and hung them to dry in the sun from the walls of the houses.
But people ate less beef than lamb, poultry, and pork, which most people raised in the city. Both sheep and pigs were driven through the city streets to graze on the banks of the Tiber or on undeveloped urban land, thus making the city’s already precarious sanitary conditions even worse. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, Enrico Caetani, the camerlengo (the cardinal in charge of the city administration), issued a widely disregarded edict prohibiting sheep grazing within the city walls.
Of all meats, lamb (abbacchio) occupied the place of honor. The name probably derives from the bacchio, or “stick,” with which the animals were struck on the head and killed. Dictionaries of Roman dialect define abbacchio as a baby lamb just weaned whose season lasts all spring, roughly from Easter to the feast of Saint John (June 24). For the next three centuries, consumption was so high that the papal government halted slaughtering between October and the end of April each year.
Every part of the lamb was eaten: head, innards, and flavorful flesh. All are still represented in the rich heritage of classic recipes of genuine Roman and Latian cooking, often in conjunction with the wonderful vegetables of the Roman gardens.
The considerable diffusion of lamb consumption was due to the enormous expansion of the pastures on which sheep raising was concentrated. Sheep husbandry was already widespread in the pre-Roman and Roman periods and continued uninterruptedly during the subsequent centuries, making it the most important food-related activity in the agro romano. The pastoral life of tenth-century Farfa is found in registers66 that document the norms regulating the sheepfolds and shelters and the working of the milk. The first town statues of Rieti, Guarcino, and Aspra67 established rigid norms for pastoral activities, with precise times set for pasturage. The statutes of Tivoli, which had always been on one of the routes the flocks traveled from and to Abruzzo, dictated precise rules on when the flocks could stop, on the obligation to pay taxes, on the use of the pens, and so forth.
Starting in the twelfth century, improved security in the countryside heightened the rivalry between the farmer and the shepherd, and from exactly then dates the Roman Dogana dei pascoli, or “customs office for pasture,” whose duty was to check the number of head in transit at the Mammolo, Nomentano, and Salario bridges.68 The livestock must then have set off on the Via Tiburtina, toward Sant’Antimo and thence toward the mountain pastures. From there the supervisors of Tivoli and Carsoli had charge of the passage of the sheep and the organization of the pens. From all this complicated legislation, we infer that the flocks must have been numerous. One of the first documents written about pasturage, dated 1402, during the pontificate of Boniface IX (1389–1404), describes the comings and goings of the livestock in the agro and refers to the transit permit for the flocks and the grant of a safe conduct to the shepherds. The tax on sheep and the working of the milk were a precious contribution of money to the always exhausted coffers of the Camera Apostolica.
Between the end of the 1300s and the beginning of the 1400s, the agro romano was practically entirely devoted to pasture and cheese making. At mid-century, the registers of the Dogana dei pascoli record about 250,000 head of sheep in the Dominion of St. Peter. In 1629, the agro romano was home to 115,500 souls and 165,797 lambs! And, later, according to the evaluation of the agrarian condition of the campagna romana drafted by the French prefect De Tournon69 between 1810 and 1815, for every three humans in the agro there lived four sheep. This explains why Rome had the highest consumption of fresh meat of all the great European cities. The most common types were lamb and castrato, pork, poultry, and water buffalo. Having become an important branch of the food business, the shepherds, in 1622, formed a universitas,70 with headquarters in Rome at the Church of Santa Maria della Consolazione, in Piazza Campitelli, and in the city, next to the Annona dei grani, was formed the Grascia for the meat trade.71
The protagonist of all this enormous business was the shepherd, the figure with the solitary life, who spent his day leaning on his stick, watching the sheep, and contemplating the sky and the mountains, indifferent to rain or summer heat, dressed in a leather garment he himself had sewn. During the long solitary hours, he learned to read and read the adventure books of the moment, which, in the sixteenth century, might be epic poems, such as Ariosto’s Orlando furioso or Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. Many shepherds knew entire passages by heart and named their sheep for the main characters. The sheep dog, with his ruffly white coat, might thus bear a grandiose name such as Argante or Tancredi.
Many passed the time playing the zampogna, shepherds’ bagpipes made of wood and sheepskin, and in the evening, after a supper of bread and ricotta, slept on straw mattresses made of wild fennel72 inside small conical huts, much like those of their Neolithic ancestors around the Mediterranean. This type of accommodation survived in the agro romano until after World War II, when health regulations prohibited them.
Even in the 1800s, the incredible spectacle of hundreds of thousands of sheep leaving for the transhumance could be seen: They paraded in a great cloud of dust, and in their midst, riding a mule, the vergaro used his verga (staff) to set the pace of the flock, speeding them up or slowing them down as needed. Amid that sea of moving wool walked the shepherds, skin leathery from the sun despite their broad felt hats tied under the chin. After the flock came the so-called vignarole, a large cart where sick or lame sheep could ride, and, finally, the long string of laden mules, some with their loads balanced with cheese-making utensils.
Their march took place along tratturi, or “tracks,” which are the oldest roads in the world. For centuries, the flocks always traveled the same route, across Tuscany, Abruzzo, Puglia, Lucania (Basilicata), and Campania. A census of tratturi conducted at the beginning of the 1900s counted a total of 3,050 kilometers (1,895 miles).
The flocks traveled at night, to avoid the heat of the day, but in the darkness it was necessary to keep the eyes wide open, because the brigand, who could already taste the roast lamb, hid behind the hedges, grabbed the legs of the last sheep in the line, and gagged its mouth to keep it from crying out. During the day, the shepherds hunted terragni,73 or they gathered field greens. The shepherd had a trained eye and was able to fill his bag quickly with lattughella di maggese, chicories, radishes, and rampions, which ended up in a good soup in the evening. No clocks were needed to tell the time: when Venus—which they called gallinella—appeared in the sky, it was midnight.
Roads and Taverns
The great roads that radiated from the Urbs like the spokes of a wheel had once been one of the strengths of the Roman expansion. But over the centuries they deteriorated into small lanes, some wiped out by scrub, some reconstructed with a different route of greater local interest. Even the Via Francigena74 was shifted to different routes, of which the only certain one is the end of the Via Cassia, roughly from the Baccano valley75 to the entrance to Rome.
The ancient roads measured their distances from the gates in the Servian walls76 and were named either for the city toward which they led or the political authority who had had them built. Thus the Via Nomentana led to Nomentum, today Mentana; the Via Tiburtina to Tibur, present-day Tivoli; while the Via Flaminia was called by the name of the censor Gaius Flaminius and went to Ariminum (Rimini), start of the Via Aemilia, built in the consulate of Marcus Aemilius Lepidus.
The most beautiful and important road was the Via Appia, built,
