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Rome and Its Gardens

Green spaces were an important feature of the Roman cityscape until the founding of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861 (Rome became its capital only in 1870). Most such spaces were parks, but some were kitchen gardens and vineyards. There was plenty of water: in addition to the Tiber, Rome was traversed by numerous marrane, or streams, which were canalized and used for irrigation. The largest marrana, known as the Marrana, began in the Castelli (the hill towns south of Rome), ran outside the city walls at the Via Appia, and emptied into the Tiber, after passing under the Via Ostiense at the Basilica of Saint Paul’s Outside the Walls. Another one, the Aqua Crabra, ran along the walls outside the Porta San Giovanni, entered the city under the Caelian Hill, ran along the Circus Maximus, and emptied into the Tiber at the Temple of Hercules Olivarius (formerly believed to be of Vesta), where it fed a spring.

Water deviated for irrigation often wound up invading the streets, which thus became bogs. But by the end of the sixteenth century, a law attempted to impose order on the deviation of water by prohibiting drawing water without the authorization of the consuls, on penalty of a fine of fifty gold scudi and three lashes. Drinking water was sold in the street and was delivered to homes by water carriers. To quench their thirst during the summer, in addition to the fontanelle, or small street fountains, still a feature of the city today, passersby could, for a few coins, buy a glass of water flavored with a couple of drops of lemon juice from the acquafrescaio (the cold-water man), who kept it cool in special ice-filled containers.

During the Renaissance, “gardens” also came to mean green spaces owned by literary figures or artists, which became the headquarters for learned gatherings. Far from the pomp of the courts, humanists met in a serene green setting to dine and discuss arts and letters. Among the most celebrated gardens was that of Messer Coricio, near the Piazza della Cancelleria, frequented by the most illustrious humanists and men of letters of the sixteenth century, such as Cardinal Bembo, Paolo Giovio, and Pomponio Leto. The famous garden of Jacopo Sadoleto, cardinal and man of letters, was on the Quirinal Hill near the Church of Santa Susanna. In the Renaissance, Rome began to build palazzi with large internal courtyards, in the Florentine style, with the idea of having open spaces for parties and banquets, and also for growing vegetables.

The secret of the Roman gardens’ luxuriance was abundant water and a particular microclimate. For centuries the gardens supplied the city. The sector was regulated by the powerful and wealthy University of the Vegetable Gardeners, one of the most important in the city’s hierarchy of guilds. The members of the university and the confraternity met at the Church of Santa Maria dell’Orto (of the Vegetable Garden) in Trastevere (to this day headquarters of their spiritual descendants). By the end of the nineteenth century, this guild possessed one of the largest real-estate holdings in the city.

The produce of the gardens constituted a basic part of the people’s diet. On the Colle degli Orti (Hill of the Gardens), the present-day Pincio, the best artichokes and celery in town, as well as famous cabbages, were grown. Famous too were the artichokes and celery picked in the gardens around the Trevi Fountain. Celery, rare on the table until the sixteenth century, was brought to Rome by Cardinal Cornaro, who grew it in his gardens at the Trevi Fountain and was so proud of his crop that, says one historian, as soon as the plants ripened, he would send “a pair as a gift for the pope, one to the cardinals, and one to the princes.” These ingredients are still basic in Roman cooking, along with tender sweet peas and green lettuces, chards, and many different kinds of cabbage.

A feature of Latian popular cooking is the combination of vegetables with other ingredients. They can be added to fish (cuttlefish with peas or artichokes) or meat (oxtail with lots of celery), or served in tasty combinations with other vegetables and flavored with one of the many wild herbs that grow in abundance in the Roman countryside. The masterpiece of expertly mixed flavors is the sublime salad known as misticanza, which consists of greens collected on the banks of streams or, better yet, in the middle of vineyards, and then dressed with olive oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper. Today it is difficult to put together all the traditional greens, but some can occasionally be found in the city’s markets. Among the most common were arugula (rocket), wild chicory, rampions, salad burnet, wood sorrel, cariota, monk’s beard, borage, bucalossi, caccialepre, crespigno, wild endive, lamb’s lettuce, oiosa, poppy greens, piè di gallo, and purslane (many with no equivalent term in other languages). To make the misticanza sweeter, large peeled grapes could be added.

Vegetables and legumes were widely used in the ancient Roman diet, their preparation becoming more elaborate as the citizenry developed more luxurious tastes. Practically every poet and writer has left a record in his writings of fresh salads or flavorful purées of vegetables or legumes. In antiquity, the most common vegetables seem to have been the squashes, the chards, peas, mushrooms (porcini were already greatly appreciated in ancient Rome, along with chanterelle and fly agaric mushrooms), wild asparagus, turnips, and rampions. Turnips and onions were an essential part of the diet, since they were considered therapeutic as well as nutritious. If we believe the satirist Martial, the legendary Romulus himself ate turnips, even in the afterlife. Turnips embodied republican probity when the consul Curius Dentatus, in the early third century B.C., was eating roasted turnips as he received a delegation of Samnites expecting to bribe him with expensive gifts. The humble turnips told them their man was incorruptible. The best turnips came from the Sabine country.

The ancient Romans did not have artichokes, but did eat cardoons, their relative, and their flowers. The earliest mention of artichokes is not until the Renaissance, in a fifteenth-century document on agriculture.

In antiquity, fava beans and wheat appeared on the everyday tables of the poor. Fava beans, usually boiled or grilled, were valued for their high caloric content. They were especially enjoyed by farmers, gladiators, and blacksmiths—in other words, by anybody who did heavy physical labor. Everyone loved them, except the Pythagoreans, for whom the beans were taboo: they were believed to house reincarnated souls.

Conservation of fresh vegetables was a problem then just as it is now. Apicius advised cutting off the tops and covering the stems with wormwood. To keep the brilliant green of vegetables, he suggested adding a pinch of soda to the cooking water. He has a famous recipe for leeks cooked in embers, well washed, salted, and wrapped in cabbage leaves. Pepper and a little olive oil were the only condiments needed.

Many kinds of vegetables were found on the wealthy tables of the empire. The emperor Tiberius had greenhouses that could be moved to follow the sun and produce zucchini year-round. Cooked greens were generally served at the beginning of the meal; for the poor, however, there was often nothing else.

Throughout the Middle Ages, greens were widely used, not just in the kitchen but also as medication.⁵³ And in this double role they remained on the tables of the poorest until after World War II.

Beginning in the Renaissance, to read the classic texts, vegetables were served mostly in the form of a sort of torta rustica, and not, as in modern times, as a side dish. They were mixed with cheese, especially parmigiano and ricotta, and with eggs and honey. Soups—always purées—were made in practically the same way and served between courses.

In Rome, vegetable sellers were divided into fogliari, or “leaf men,” and ortolani, or “vegetable gardeners.” The former dealt only with leafy vegetables, which were also used for wrapping fresh cheeses and took the place of paper for wrapping small items. The fogliari were allowed to sell their products only in their own gardens, while the insalatari, or “salad men,” a subgroup of the ortolani, with permission of the consuls, could sell their salad greens throughout the streets. Legal holidays had to be respected. It was prohibited to pick vegetables on holidays with six exceptions: “fava beans, peas, fennel, melon, pumpkin, and cucumbers.”⁵⁴ Eggplants were not common. They were believed to be slightly toxic and even Artusi himself thought so.⁵⁵ In Rome, they went by the curious name marignani, which was still in use in the 1800s. The same term was used (especially in the nineteenth century) to describe the prelates extra urbem (that is, those sent on missions outside the city), who could be seen walking through the city wrapped in flowing eggplant-colored cloaks.

Mushrooms that are highly prized today—such as porcini and ovoli—often appear in popular Roman recipes. The woods all over Lazio were full of mushrooms, and as early as the sixteenth century, wild mushrooms, both dried and fresh, were sold in the streets.

It is difficult to date the arrival of permanent markets, but they may go back to the eighteenth century. The city’s oldest market, the picturesque Campo de’ Fiori, was still being used as the site of executions as late as the 1600s. The statue of Giordano Bruno that dominates the piazza memorializes his death at the stake there on February 2, 1600. The piazza’s name—“field of flowers”—scarcely befits the use made of it.

Much has been written on the agriculture of Lazio’s rivers, and the sources have not always been objective and in agreement: the absolute desolation described by the travelers on the Grand Tour has been counterbalanced by more in-depth and serious studies. It is not that the situation was not grave, but the absolute absence of cultivation on the plain and the Castelli Romani has been contradicted by many scholars and writers, including ancient ones. Something must have survived in the ager desertus if Procopius of Caesarea in his Gothic War⁵⁶ tells how, when the Ostrogoths arrived in 537, the fields of wheat almost reached beneath the walls of Rome.

As late as the nineteenth century, in the agricultural lands of the campagna romana, the question of the latifundium remains absolutely open. Agricultural work was done by hired hands, who did different jobs depending on the season. In the late spring, for example, in the area of the Castelli Romani, there was the strawberry harvest, done mainly by women; then, in October, after the first autumn rains, it was time to gather mushrooms, which were copious in the woods. Large baskets were filled with ovoli, porcini, chanterelles, famigliole, and morels, loaded onto mules, and sent along the tracks of beaten earth to the Roman market. In June, the workers left the woods, dropping everything to go cut the hay in the fields. 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.