La Villa. Bartolomeo Taegio
groundwork for an aesthetic evaluation of agricultural landscape. In book 1 of his treatise, Tanaglia retold the story of the Persian king Cyrus, whom Lysander called “blessed” because of the beauty of his garden in Sardis, to support his argument for the nobility of gardening, just as Taegio would do more than a century and a half later in La Villa.79 In La Villa (p. 48) Taegio applied to farms the same standard of beauty he used to judge gardens, saying “that there can be nothing more usefully productive or more beautifully ordered than well-cultivated land.” The priority Taegio gave to geometry and order in the landscape echoes the value placed on similar qualities in the poem by Tanaglia, who advised that the planning of agricultural estates should conform to a rectilinear system: “Agli orti come a’ prati squadra e lista” (Square up and edge the orchards as well as the meadows).80 Tanaglia argued that trees should be planted in rows because,
Se per tramite retto e pari sesti
Fien compartiti, più grati saranno,
E par che me’ la terra omor vi presti.
(If in a straight line and with even intervals
they are distributed, they will be more graceful,
and it seems that you do more honor to the earth.)81
More than half a century after Tanaglia wrote his verses, and only thirteen years before La Villa appeared, Alamanni’s poem La Coltivazione was published. While the agricultural landscape he knew was more elaborated than Tanaglia’s, Alamanni spoke of the same forms and addressed some of the same issues as his predecessors. In the middle of the sixteenth century, soil erosion and shortage of pasture land were still unsolved problems. Echoing Crescenzi’s advice on soil conservation, Alamanni recommended plowing hillsides parallel to the contours rather than up and down the slopes, saying,
… ponga cura
Ch’ ei non rovini in giù rapido e dritto;
Ma traversando il dorso umile e piano
Con soave dolcezza in basso scenda.
( … take care
that [the furrows] do not crash down, rapid and straight;
but cross over the back [of the slope], humble and slow,
with peaceful sweetness in their downward course.)82
Alamanni called even more urgently than Tanaglia for permanent enclosure of pastures, with these words:
Indi volga il pensier coll’opra insieme
Intorno ai prati ch’ il passato verno
Aperti, in abbandon, negletti furo,
Agli armenti, ad ogni uom pastura e preda.
Quei con fossi talor, talor circondi
Con pali e siepi: o se n’ avesse il loco,
Può di sassi compor muraglie e schermi;
Talchè il rozzo pastor, la greggia ingorda
E col morso e col piè non taglie e prema
La novella virtù ch’ all’ erbe infonde
Con soave liquor la terra e ’l cielo.
(Then turn your thoughts and actions
to the meadows, which last spring
were open and abandoned to the herds:
any man’s for pasturage or taking.
These ditches now, now surround
with palisades and hedges, and with enough space,
you can make walls and barriers of stone,
which the rustic shepherd’s greedy flock
will not cut with mouth or foot, or crush
the new life that the grass receives
as sweet liquor from the earth and sky.)83
The soave liquor of which Alamanni sang is the rain, which for most parts of Italy in the sixteenth century did not fall with sufficient regularity during the growing season “to assure a luxuriance of forage in the meadows.”84 In the Po River valley, however, the construction of elaborate and widespread works of irrigation had the dual effect of making possible the expansion of needed pasture land and imposing new forms on the landscape.
The planning and execution of great irrigation projects in the Po River valley, particularly in Lombardy, during the second half of the fifteenth century were based on uninterrupted experience and tradition dating from at least the eleventh century. Thirteenth-century Lombard documents mention a method of irrigation called marcita, which involved letting a sheet of water run over the meadows in winter. Beginning in the middle of the fifteenth century, the system of canals for irrigation and transportation around Milan was developed rapidly, generally through the initiative of the new signorie. In 1457 Francesco Sforza ordered the excavation of the Binasco canal to carry the waters of the Naviglio Grande from Milan to Pavia, and in 1464 he had the Martesana canal built to bring the waters of the Adda River from Trezzo to Milan. Twenty years later, under Lodovico Sforza, the irrigation of the countryside around Vigevano and Novara was extended with the construction of the Roggia Mora and the Sforzesco canals.85
Owing in part to the fact that in the fifteenth century the “centralized territorial unit” of the duchy of Milan “realized the powerful concentration of force and [economic] means that was necessary to carry out great public works,” an artificially irrigated and intensively cultivated agricultural landscape extended throughout the plain of the Po River valley in Taegio’s lifetime.86 This landscape was characterized by canals, meadows, and fields planted primarily with either wheat or rice, a recent introduction that had already become an important export of the neighboring region of Piedmont by the sixteenth century.87 The boundaries of the fields in Lombardy were typically marked by embankments and irrigation ditches, along which rows of trees were planted. These plantations consisted of either hardwood species, such as elms, or mulberry trees, which had been introduced into the region with the silk industry in the first half of the sixteenth century. By the second half of the century, with the expansion of meadows and the regular practice of crop rotation based on recently founded modern theory, the old system of fallowing finally came to an end. The arrangement of fields in porche yielded to systematization a prese or a prace, with three or four times greater distance between drainage ditches. The greater length and width of the fields, and the permanent and extensive hydraulic arrangements, distinguished the piantata of Lombardy from the landscape of other parts of Italy. With these improvements the Po valley moved to the forefront of agricultural progress in Italy in the first decades of the sixteenth century.88
By the middle of the century, leadership in agricultural theory and technology had shifted from Tuscany and southern Italy to Milan and other northern cities, such as Padua and Venice, which took the place of Florence as the most important centers of publication of agronomic literature. This shift is apparent from the fact that, while earlier the science of agronomy had been dominated by Florentines such as Tanaglia and Alamanni, after 1550 we find at the forefront a Paduan (Clemente) and two Brescians (Falcone and Gallo).89
Gallo’s Le dieci giornate is especially illuminating in connection with La Villa because it reflects the landscape of the same region and the same time period as Taegio’s. The salient features of this landscape are the network of canals and ditches for irrigation, the systematization of the plain into a checkerboard of fields, and the cultivation of trees in rows along the boundaries of the fields. That Gallo approved of the works of systematization and irrigation is evident from the great pleasure he took
quando egli fa drizzare vie, quadrare campi, scavezzar tor nature, carettare cavedagne, ugualare prati, fare ponti, argini, canali, e chiaviche per adacquare.
(when someone straightens roads, squares fields, digs out ditches, hauls up embankments, levels meadows, builds bridges, banks,