Walker - 1967 - A geography of Italy

PART i: SOME GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORY
decline o f the Empire and is now sixteen miles inland. Ravenna, Ostia and
Aquileia have suffered a similar fate. As inland waterways the rivers o f Italy have
never played the significant rôle o f those o f France, Germany, Russia, or even
England; the conditions which contributed to the importance o f Paris, K iev or
Rouen were absent in Italy. The best system, namely the Po, was only o f modest
importance because o f seasonal fluctuations and silting. The rivers o f peninsular
Italy, with one or two exceptions, are short and swift, with silted mouths, and
are dominated by regimes which fluctuate wildly from raging floods in winter to
a mere trickle in summer. In the South even the route provided by the river was
often o f doubtful value, sometimes leading into marsh on the plain course and
into difficult gorges with unstable sides in the mountains. This fact, and the lack
o f navigation facilities, emphasized the need for roads and may well have
stimulated the road-building art in ancient Italy. Tow n sites too reflect the
character o f the rivers. There are very few sizeable towns on the middle and
lower Po, and the important cities along the Via Aemilia are all near the
Apennine tributaries, but few are on them.
Most important for the human geography have been the effects o f the relationship
between rock, climate, vegetation, soil and Man. The vital soil covering is
maintained only when the loss by erosion is made good by the disintegration of
the sub-soil and the accumulation o f hiunus. On the steep slopes o f peninsular
Italy the parent rock is often easily erodible, and this together with the seasonal
and torrential natme o f the rainfall accelerates the destructive process. On the
other hand the climate is not conducive to the replenishment o f the topsoil from
the subsoil, nor to the accumulation o f the humus so essential for plant food and
water storage; the Mediterranean vegetation is often woody and resinous and
the rich surface layer, which in more northerly countries results from deciduous
trees and a matting of grassy turf, is rarely found. When once the precarious
stabihty o f the soil has been disturbed by the action o f M an in removing the
natural vegetation, the all too frequent consequence has been a disastrous chain
reaction - soil erosion, desiccation, flooding, silting and malarial marshes.
S E T T L E M E N T AND C O L O N IZ A T IO N
The geological story o f Italy is a short one but its human story is long. A t the
time o f Augustus, when England can scarcely have had a population o f a million,
Italy was probably supporting 15 milhons. The period roughly comparable to
the Anglo-Saxon in England, when the broad pattern o f agricultmral settlement
was being outlined, occurred 2000 years earlier in Italy, and in no country in
Europe has the imprint o f Man on the landscape, with its good and evil consequences,
been so marked.
The Neohthic invaders o f Italy found a landscape o f forest, thicket and marsh,
a vegetation grown up in response to the warmer and damper conditions following
the Ice Age. The Northern Plain was a wilderness o f forest laced with marshes,
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