Laurento and Massa Fonteiana were on the Via Laurentina; Campomorto was established on the Via Nettunense; Antius was on the Via Severiana; and Casale di Galeria was on the Via Claudia.
The economy of the domuscultae must have been truly flourishing: the revenues from their products could finance part of the works for the construction of the Leonine wall.13 Triticum (wheat), barley, wine, oil, and legumes were produced, and pigs were raised in the surrounding forests. Some of the domuscultae were huge. Sacrofanum covered an area of some thirty-nine square miles (one hundred square kilometers) and fed five fortified citadels: Formello, Campagnano, Mazzano, Calcata, and Faleria.14 The liber pontificalis documents how every year the domusculta of Capracorum supplied the Lateran stores with wheat, barley, wine, vegetables, and some one hundred hogs, which the Church kept in warehouses adjacent to the Basilica of St. John Lateran. Each day, under the loggia of the basilica, it was the custom to distribute to the poor fifty loaves of bread, two amphorae of wine, some bowls of soup, and some rations of pork.
The domuscultae survived between 750 and 850; most of them were destroyed by the raids of the Saracens,15 by internal struggles, and by the spreading malaria that made the lands unlivable for much of the year. Some of them survived beyond the ninth century, perhaps because they were built on the more salubrious and defendable hilly areas.
With the disappearance of the domuscultae begins the metamorphosis of the campagna romana: the people who took refuge in more defendable positions built fortified villages, as at Mazzano and Calcata, both also true castra, as at Castelgandolfo, Castel Malnome, Castel Romano, and Castel Fusano, which preserve their history in their name.16
At the dawn of the second millennium, the campagna romana was fairly well populated. There were castles, but there were also churches with farmhouses next door, with both placed near the castles in more easily defended positions. These arrangements allowed significant improvement of the vineyards, olive orchards, and especially the vegetable gardens, which were usually located next to the walls of the built-up areas, giving the peasants greater security.17 The foundation of the Confraternity18 of the Vegetable Men and that of the Oil Men, which, in addition to helping the working members of the organizations, also provided assistance for the sick and for burial of the dead, date to those years.
Meanwhile, the numerous Roman monasteries, which had extended their holdings outside the walls with the intent of boosting their production of grapes and vegetables, proceeded to cut down large expanses of forest, replacing them with canes useful for supporting the vines. They abandoned the ancient drainages to create wells of irrigation water, thus inevitably encouraging the recrudescence of malaria. The numerous watercourses that ran down the hills were often deviated to carry water to the gardens within the city’s walls, with the old aqueducts demolished in the process. Such was the case when Pope Callixtus II (1119–24) redirected water to the Porta Lateranense (Lateran Gate), where a watering trough was to be built. Altering the routes of the watercourses also allowed for more work at the numerous mills that operated in the city and the hinterland.
It was at this point that the lands used for pasture began to predominate over the ever-less-profitable agriculture fields. And thus the animal rearers, the boattari, began to pull ahead of the farmers. The Ars bobacteriorum urbis19 was already active in 1088.
The numerous towers that still punctuate the campagna romana were built during the sixteenth century, together with casali, or large farmhouses, almost all fortified, of which every trace has generally been lost. They include the casali of Olgiata on the Via Cassia, of Lunghezza on the Via Tiburtina, of Crescenza on the Via Flaminia, and, south of Rome, of Torre Astura and the fort of Nettuno. Michelangelo designed Tor San Michele at the mouth of the Tiber. The list continues with the towers of Olevola and Vittoria, the Torre Flavia, Tor Vaianica, and the tower of Maccarese.20 Little by little, something in the agro was moving, slowed by the marshification of the lands, in turn aggravated by the neglect of the owners and the floods of the Tiber, which left stagnant water everywhere.
The roads, almost nonexistent and especially unsafe, did not permit the regular supply of food to the city. For this reason, over the centuries, the popes tried to help agriculture any way they could. For example, Julius II (1503–13) prohibited both the passage of armies over cultivated or sown fields and the buying up of foodstuffs by farm owners, and imposed severe penalties on anyone who impeded the passage of goods across their property.21 Between the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, the situation was grave. To make it even worse, the plague arrived, accompanied in the summer of 1581 by a heavy new outbreak of malaria. It sent almost one-third of the farm population to the cemetery, leaving the countryside without manpower. The situation, which worsened further over the next two years, convinced the few survivors to leave the fields and withdraw into the less pestilential high hilly areas. At the end of the 1600s, these debilitating circumstances, along with the slow but unstoppable spread of the latifundium (large farming estate), meant that only one-tenth of the lands would be cultivated. Pasturage gave good revenue and few worries to the land owners, and therefore the trading of farmland for pastureland continued until the end of the 1800s. The situation began to improve only after World War II.
Alarmed by the situation, many newly elected popes enacted provisions, but their solutions soon fell into the void. Their measures were tediously replicated and the content of the dispositions monotonously repeated, which shows how widely they were ignored. Much of this failure was due to the excessive power of the barons, who could do much as they liked, with well-armed militias in their employ. Deaf to any imposition of law and impervious to any change that might improve the situation of the countryside, the large landowners were, in the centuries to follow, those truly responsible for the crisis of the agro. A land register from the end of the seventeenth century records that the more than 500,000 acres (205,000 hectares) of the campagna romana were divided among 362 estates, 234 of which, for a total of nearly 311,000 acres (126,000 hectares), were owned by 113 nobles. The remaining 195 acres (79 hectares), more or less, were in the hands of religious institutes, monasteries, churches, and the like. Small farmers owned practically nothing. Of all of these farmlands, fewer than 60,000 acres (24,000 hectares) were in agriculture at the end of the eighteenth century.
Meanwhile, corn arrived. From the middle of the eighteenth century, its market prices were competitive, and as a result it was also used to make bread: a gabella (tax) on flour meant wheat cost eight giuli22 per rubbio,23 while a rubbio of corn cost only two giuli. In this situation, it is obvious that the gardens and the vineyards just outside the city were intensely cultivated to satisfy the demand, as were the lands on the banks of the Tiber. Curiously, to stress the fertility of the unexploited lands, the quality of what was actually produced was celebrated in Europe: from the famous romaine lettuce, celery, artichokes, and cabbages to the excellent fava beans grown on the lands of the Caffarella estate24 and that already were eaten with pecorino. There were also the fruits, of course: peaches, cherries, apples, pears, almost all from cultivars that today have disappeared and that amazed travelers and painters almost up to the dawn of the twentieth century.
The produce that arrives daily at Roman markets today is of exceptional quality, thanks especially to the variety and fertility of the terrain, much of it of volcanic origin. That soil makes possible the particular biodiversity that ensures that the products of the campagna romana are truly unique.
The Tiber and Fish in Popular Cooking
Of all of Rome’s honorary citizens, Father Tiber merits a particularly special place. For centuries the river took an active part in city life, for good and ill, often destroying lives and homes with the devastating floods that periodically invaded the low-lying neighborhoods.25 That is why, when Rome became the capital of Italy and the whole city underwent a major makeover to make it look like a great European capital, the Tiber was enclosed in heavy embankments.26
The
