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 on excessive spending for edible delicacies and other luxuries. For example, a law enacted in 161 B.C. specified that no more than one chicken per day could be served, and it could not be artificially fattened.63
Bovine meat was still uncommon, and that of the cow was considered more tender than that of the bull. Game was by far the favorite source of meat, however. The Romans built leporaria, sophisticated enclosures for raising hares. By 37 B.C., when M. Terentius Varro wrote his treatise on agriculture, these had become capacious enough to hold deer, wild boar, and other large animals.
The leporarium of the great first century B.C. orator Q. Hortensius Hortalus, on the Via Laurentina just outside Rome, occupied thirty acres (twelve hectares) and was surrounded by a high wall. That of Q. Fulvius Lippinius, built in Tarquinia around 50 B.C., extended over twenty-five acres (ten hectares) and was also used to raise wild sheep captured on the islands of Corsica and Sardinia.
The less wealthy made do by raising dormice (glires) in gliraria, feeding them acorns and chestnuts. Or they raised snails (cocleae) in coclearia set up near ponds, and fed them on grasses and leaves: the most sought-after specimens came from Sabina, as well as from Africa and Illyria (an area on the Adriatic coast of the Balkan Peninsula extending from Slovenia down to northern Greece).
Anyone who had even a small farm could easily raise geese, ducks, and peacocks, as well as chickens, whose tender and flavorful meat (obtained by feeding the animals food soaked in milk) the Romans liked.
Large and small aviaries housed pigeons, doves, beccaficos (fig peckers), thrushes, francolins, peacocks, gray partridges from the Alps, guinea fowl from Numidia (roughly today’s Tunisia), pheasants imported from Colchis (a part of today’s western Caucasus), and the prized alpine wood grouse.
Pork was widely used, as much for its ease of preservation as for its tasty meats. The documents available to us acknowledge the great skill of Roman cooks in transforming pork into salamis, sausages, and pâtés and in salting and drying. Even during the so-called barbarian invasions of the Middle Ages, when consumption of meat was necessarily limited, swine and sheep were still seen on the Latian landscape.
By the Middle Ages, the meat trade was regulated by strict contracts directly between the Camera Apostolica and the boattari (small-scale raisers), whose guild was one of the most powerful in the city. Heavy taxes were levied on the animals, which had to enter town on the hoof with proper documents; these were verified at the entrance by the “custodians of the city gates.”
From the beginning, taxes on food products, which were especially important because they provided the most reliable revenues, were allocated by law to fund public works, health facilities, works of beneficence, and other critical needs.
A 1566 motu proprio of Pope Pius V set a tax on meat (one quattrino64 per libbra) and on table wine65 (five giuli per barrel), provided that the revenues were used for the repair of two bridges, the Ponte dei Quattro Capi (Fabricio), leading to the Tiber Island, and the Ponte Sisto.
Meat was butchered in the Forum Boarium and sold in the
