Agriculture in Italy

Approximate centers of origin of agriculture in the Neolithic Revolution and its spread in prehistory as understood in 2003.[12]

Several archaeological finds show that the first agricultural settlements began in Italy around the 5th millennium BC. Archaeologists have clearly identified the paths followed by the first Anatolian peasants who spread the Neolithic Revolution across the European continent, primarily on the Mediterranean coast and along the Danube. Initially they arrived in Sicily by sea, where they founded agricultural villages similar to those of the Fertile Crescent (Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates).[13]

Later, after having crossed the Alpine arc, the peasants who came from the Danube built villages with the same characteristics as those of the Neolithic in the Balkans, which, in the space of a millennium, recorded considerable developments.[14]

In the Bronze Age, the entire Po plain was colonized thanks to the so-called "terramare", dwellings similar to stilts. These inhabitants had perfected the methods of cultivation and breeding adopted in the Neolithic Period, which remained substantially the same until the Middle Ages.[15] Also in Central Italy it is the starting period to a peasant society with increasing agricultural diversity. But locations were dominantly in hilly terrain using a slash-and-burn method. Mediterranean type ploughs with convertible wooden ploughshares were used. In South Italy first evidence of olive cultivation can be observed in this time.

The remains of an ancient Roman farm in Olbia, Sardinia

The Iron Age saw the appearance of brick houses in rural areas, breeding of livestock, cultivation of fabaceae, accumulation of bronze objects, craftsmenship, trade and individualism. The time of the Roman Republic was dominated by the revolution of iron: ploughshares, pick-axes on the fields (enabling the cultivation of heavy soils), sickles and axes for deforestation as well as iron material for harvesting and pruning of grapes. It was the origin of a landscape with mixed cultures and systematic planning of the terrain around the cities. There was a great development of agricultural technology including haymaking, laying fallow of grounds and hydraulic works (cunicoli). And the commercial grape-olive-culture evolved.[16] The East had developed great empires based on the cultivation of cereals, mainly wheat and barley: Rome, which established itself at the center of the peninsula, conquered many of the great plains of the then known world, assigning each of them a specific function based on its plans of economic and military domination.[17]

Countries whose borders were not threatened by powerful enemies were exploited to feed the population of Rome, the "womb" of the Empire, where hundreds of thousands of former warrior peasants, stripped of their land by the aristocracy and the mercantile class, claimed their right to receive bread and circuses (panem et circences) as citizens of the state. Countries close to threatened borders, such as the Rhine and the Danube, were responsible for producing the grain needed to feed the legions encamped on the edge, as in the case of France.

To meet the high demand for food from the central areas of the empire, and from Rome itself, especially from the wealthier classes, the first techniques of cultivation, fruit and vegetables, breeding, pigs, sheep, poultry were developed, pre-industrial in nature. Analyzing the characteristics of this agriculture, designed to satisfy the strong demand, both in terms of quantity and quality, the Spaniard Lucio Giunio Moderato Columella, owner of the vineyards between the "Castelli Romani", wrote the first scientific treatise concerning the techniques of agriculture in the western world.[18]

Agricultural calendar, c. 1470, from a manuscript of Pietro de Crescenzi

After the end of the Empire, and for almost a thousand years, agriculture and the economy experienced a period of technological regression, closer to that of the Bronze Age both in Greece and in the regions of Roman Italy. Productivity decreased, but the rural population, living in small villages scattered in a territory of woods and swamps, still managed to derive a significant part of their livelihood from natural habitats, such as meadows and swamps: meat, fish, honey, furs, fabrics.[19]

Towards the end of the Middle Ages, when the first craft and trade companies developed in Europe, new agricultural systems appeared in Flanders, in the Po Valley and in the smaller plains of central Italy. In the Po Valley there has been the development of a new system of relations between man and natural resources and of an agriculture based on irrigation.

Of course, in the Middle East, irrigation allowed, thousands of years ago, an enormous production of wheat on land that has since become deserted for climatic reasons. Late medieval Italian agriculture was based on particularly intensive farming, and on the production of textiles, fruit and vegetables on a large scale.[20]

Favored by the abundance of food, the Italian cities became the area of greatest export of all the most sought-after products of the moment: wool, weapons, glass, cheese of an inimitable quality, and able to be preserved for long periods. Unfortunately, this extraordinary wealth of the Italian cities was not adequately protected by a political and military force proportionate to their opulence, so it stimulated the envy of the two major powers of the time, France and Spain, who sent their armies.

For two centuries, the fertile fields of the peninsula transformed one of the richest countries on the continent into a land of economic and civil misery, of which the chronicles of the seventeenth century bear witness.[21] During the Enlightenment, Lombard agriculture resumed its growth by increasing the wealth of the countryside surrounding Milan, with products such as cheese and silk, making this city one of the richest in Europe, becoming one of the great cultural capitals of this extraordinary period of European History.[22]

Cultivated field in Umbria. On background, the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi

Olive grove in Salento, Apulia

The 19th century was the period of the "Risorgimento", a movement in which the peasant classes did not take part. This movement resulted in a form of government in which landowners, the beneficiaries of backward agriculture, were the majority, so they took the opportunity to exploit the condition of the peasantry to their advantage to strengthen their privileges. At the end of the century, we can say that offloading the costs of the agrarian crisis on farmers was the only concern of the first unitary parliaments.[23]

The extraordinary period that began at the end of the century, with the governments of Giovanni Giolitti, that opened Italy to new horizons of economic and social progress, progress interrupted too soon by the Great War and followed by a long period of political stagnation. This convinced the ever powerful families of large landowners to resort to fascism, with an agricultural policy aimed at increasing the production of wheat to provide the energy necessary for the resurrection of the splendors of ancient Rome. All other aspects of agricultural progress were completely ignored.[24]

At the end of the Second World War, food production in the country could only count on a more backward agriculture, also hampered by the damage caused by the war. In that period Giuseppe Medici, a famous agronomist and statesman of international standing, became Minister of Agriculture. Also thanks to his interventions, Italy was the first country to host an international conference of agricultural researchers, a conference that allowed the creation of links between research programs capable of increasing interactions and exchanges, to increase the production efficiency in agriculture.[20]

In the thirty years that followed the war there was the birth, in the peninsula, of a generation of great agronomists, scientists engaged in the territory outside the traditional schemes. In Europe, agricultural techniques were completely renewed and the first livestock farms were created on the American model, based on the cultivation of hybrid maize, a completely new production framework was outlined in the fruit and viticulture sector, which will then be able to compete, in the following decades, with French agriculture.

This "golden age" ends abruptly in 1980: the radical changes in the agricultural policy of the European Community were the first blow. Subsequently, half of the agricultural land disappeared, abandoned due to overbuilding, the production potential of one of the most fertile plains on the continent was considerably reduced. More recently, the environmental movement, the most radical in Europe, called on the political class to end cutting edge agricultural research. Italy finds itself forced to produce on a small surface, with increasingly obsolete means. In Rome, the debate on the future of national agriculture became confused and incomprehensible.[25]