Popes, Peasants, and Shepherds. Oretta Zanini De Vita
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 river now lives, alone and imprisoned, between the stout walls that isolate it from the city’s life, and the time when it was home to boats, mills, and fishermen is long gone.
In earliest antiquity, the catch was plentiful and constituted an important element of the popular diet, though fish, freshwater and saltwater alike, was considered unworthy to serve to company. Gentlemen who liked to go fishing were regarded with suspicion. Later, however, Antony and Cleopatra, as well as the emperors Augustus and, later still, Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, were passionate anglers.
Contact with the refined civilization of Greece taught the Romans to appreciate the delicate flesh of fish and the masterly preparations cooks could make from it. Demand for fresh fish, especially rare varieties, reached the point that aquaculture was introduced. Some installations were veritable masterpieces of hydraulic engineering, accommodating both fresh water fish and those requiring seawater. The fourth and fifth levels of the Markets of Trajan, in the center of Rome, contained aquariums filled with freshwater and with seawater brought from Ostia, the port of Rome. The demanding gourmet could order salmon trout from the Moselle or Danube, or fish from the Black Sea, or sturgeon imported from Greece27 to be caught live by specialized slaves. The markets of Ancona and Ravenna supplied large quantities of pesce azzurro, while from Sicily arrived the greatest delicacy of all: the moray eel, muraena in Latin, murena in Italian.
The fashion for private fish farms exploded, and the nouveaux riches outdid themselves to see who could stock the rarest fish. The largest fish farms were built in Campania, where Licinius Murena launched the fashion in about 90 B.C., to be followed by the consul Sergius Orata, the first to raise oysters (at Baiae).28 He was followed in turn by such famous jet-setters as L. Licinius Lucullus, who had a hole cut through a mountain near Baiae to bring the water from the sea to his fish farm. Against these characters stood the moralists—notably Cicero—who called them disparagingly “an aristocracy of fishermen” who cared more about their fish farms than about affairs of state.29
In addition to the moray eel, the Romans’ favorite fish included tuna (especially the belly), red mullet, gray mullet, eel, sole, and mackerel. No pike could equal those pulled from the Tiber where the sewers emptied. Large fish were much sought after and were often given as gifts to the emperor. A satire by the poet Juvenal tells of an enormous turbot given to the emperor Domitian, who supposedly consulted the Senate as to the best way to cook it.30 A true gourmet treat were the mollusks: oysters, date shells, mussels, clams, warty Venus, scallops, and razor clams. Particularly prized were the oysters of Lake Lucrinus, in Campania, and, later, those imported from northern Gaul.
The invasions of the migrating tribes, who swarmed down from the east onto the fertile Italian plains, wiped away all memory of the gourmet life. Wars, famines, and plagues left the lands abandoned for centuries, and so they ceased to produce. The road back to civilization